Sri Lanka - Voices From A War Zone

Author: Nirupama Subramanian
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 230
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670058289

Description

If we don’t tell our stories, who will?

They were ordinary people-farmers, fisherfolk, businessmen, pensioners, housewives and school children-until a relentless war machine invaded their lives. These are their stories-stories of intense suffering, but also of great courage, resilience and dignity.

Nirupama Subramanian, a journalist who spent seven years reporting the vicious face-off between Sri Lanka’s government and the separatist LTTE, criss-crossed the towns and villages of a beautiful but ravaged island to uncover these ‘little histories’ as she calls them-of children forcibly recruited into Tiger training camps; of parents waiting for mass graves to reveal their bleak secrets; of people fleeing their homes in war zones only to become prisoners in refugee camps; of the families of the missing who still wait and hope; of women in the maid-trade bonded in virtual slavery in foreign lands.

Woven into these narratives are the larger stories-of a President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, elected with a massive mandate for peace but trapped in a war so intense that she was unable to make good her promise; and of Tiger supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran, trapped too, but in a cage fashioned out of his own egoism and ruthlessness-one he never dare leave.

As Sri Lanka searches for an elusive peace, read this book to understand the price that Sri Lankans have paid for a war that has raged for over twenty years.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Certain is Death for the Born
Exodus
The Shadow Line
Victory Impossible
Maid to Measure
Like a Line Drawn on Water
The Ghosts of Chemmani
The Tiger-Trapper
The Smell of Death
The Boy Monk of Polonnaruwa
Give US Your Children
The Tiger in His Cage
Trouble in Trincomalee
Afterword
Timeline
List of Acronyms

BIBLIOGRAPHY