Living with the Other in post-war Sri Lanka
I often have to remind myself that I live with a Tamil. My housemate, Vanessa is a Tamil, married to a Sinhalese and I have been living with her and her husband…
End of war special edition
Women are not willing to go back to pre-war status quo
By Kumi Samuel and Chulani Kodikara War is a gendered process. Post war is no different.  It may be a cliché to say that in Sri Lanka as elsewhere in the world,…
Negotiables
I wish to crack a bottle of arrack and kick my legs out on the verandah before the sea at twilight, this mix of liquor, even kisses, pleasure under whirring fans, brought…
CHALLENGES TODAY: WEEVILS IN THE MIND
Daya Somasundaram was in Jaffna town in late 1995 when the Sri Lankan army advanced south and eastwards from Palaly. As the LTTE decided upon a strategic withdrawal, they insisted that all…
What is there to celebrate? Rumblings of a Jaffna Tamil
The question that I have been repeatedly asked by people outside Jaffna is whether we Tamils are not happy that the war is over. An immediate follow up question is whether we…
Post War Sri Lanka: Thoughts of University Students
Last May Sri Lanka ended its long drawn war, fought for over three decades with the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). This month Sri Lanka is commemorating the first year after…
Articulating the Concerns of Ethnic Minorities in Relation to Constitutional Proposals
It may be useful to begin by going back over 80 years to the time when , in the mid – nineteen twenties, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, newly returned from Oxford University, vigorously promoted…
The end of war and Sri Lanka’s future: Videos from Vikalpa in Sinhala and English
Vikalpa, the sister site of with citizen journalism in Sinhala, produced this mini-documentary on Jaffna a year after the war ended. Vikalpa also produced a series of interviews in Tamil, Sinhala and…
The Thirty Year Old Boy
I would like to believe we have been forgiven, that the end justifies means, that prejudice has been copy-edited out of the nursery reader, that the black man with roving eyes and…
The untold story of a child
This war has taken the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children. Hundreds of thousands more are displaced, and the abnormality of the war and post war situation is…
FROM VICTORY TO NORMALISATION IN SRI LANKA
No war is fought sans atrocity. It destroys everything. Even when a war is fought with the best adherence to internationally accepted laws of warfare; it still breeds hatred, enmity and many…
Soldier: Hero, villain or both?
Each time I see a soldier, my mind shifts into ‘mode chaos’. When I was a kid, things were black and white. They were my heroes; the guys who were taking the…
Was I wrong to oppose the war?
I used to think non-violence would win in the end. Even with a murderous megalomaniac for an opponent (I mean Prabhakaran, not Mahinda), I believed the offer of an open hand would…
We Regret To Inform You That Your Condolences Cannot Be Accepted At This Time
We regret to inform you that your condolences cannot be accepted at this time. At present, both our pain and our hope defy that word, which has been offered and denied us,…
Madness
Colombo, Nov 2: A mentally challenged man, who jumped into the Indian ocean to escape arrest, drowned after being badly beaten up by Sri Lankan police in the water in front of…
