SRI LANKA: Will Tamils Have A Say In Reconstruction?

For people in Sri Lanka’s war-torn North, for many years life has meant virtually living out of a suitcase while moving from place to place to escape the rigours of war and bloody combat.

In the late 1980s when government troops were battling Tamil separatist rebels for control of the northern capital of Jaffna, journalists from the Tamil daily newspaper Udayan - who themselves were fleeing the fighting - printed the newspaper, virtually on the run.

"We moved an entire printing press out of Jaffna and published the paper while being among the displaced," said a veteran journalist of the Jaffna newspaper, reflecting on a common problem faced by many northerners during nearly three decades of war.

Weeks after government troops crushed Tamil rebels and their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the government is pushing ahead with a massive reconstruction and rehabilitation effort - prioritising resettling most of the nearly 300,000 civilians who are housed in internally displaced person (IDP) camps in the northern town of Vavuniya. Read more ...