The guns fell silent more than eight months ago but the brutal conclusion to Sri Lanka's civil war is still being felt by Tamils caught up in the conflict.
Anthony Pillai, his wife and four children were among thousands of civilians who fled fighting in the north-east two days before the Tamil Tiger rebels were defeated last May.
During the escape, disaster struck. Mr Pillai trod on a landmine hidden beside a lagoon. It blew off his right leg below the knee and sprayed his wife, Mary Josephine, with shrapnel. But worse was to come. When the couple's son, 26-year old Jayadevan, heard his mother's scream and turned to help he, too, trod on a mine that shredded his right foot.
''It was so terrible; we couldn't tell where the mines were,'' Mr Pillai told the Herald.
The rest of the family made bandages from their clothes and dressed the gaping wounds as best they could. Then, with the help of relatives, they carried the badly injured father and son for two hours until they found help.
''I can hardly remember that time, the pain was so unbearable,'' says Mr Pillai, who also received a deep shrapnel wound to his hand. Mr Pillai and Jayadevan were eventually assisted by the military and taken to hospital, where both had amputations below the knee.
Mr Pillai's wife, whose shrapnel wounds were not serious, and three of her children spent months separated from the injured pair in a refugee camp. Last September the family was reunited and taken in by relatives in the town of Jaffna.
''We have been left with nothing and now that I've lost my leg things can never go back to normal,'' Mr Pillai says.
Many Tamils displaced in the closing stages of the war have similar tales of tragedy and loss.
A few doors down from Mr Pillai, 14 more war refugees have crammed into a derelict house. One of them, R. Arulandan, a 38-year old father of two, also has a heartbreaking story. He lost his wife when shells rained on the family less than a month before the end of the war.
''I was holding my children and running but my wife was hit,'' he says. ''I was never able to find her body.''
More than 7000 Tamil civilians are estimated to have died in the last few months of the war.
Mr Arulandan and his children, aged 10 and 13, were among nearly 300,000 war refugees interned in Manik Farm camp following the defeat of the Tigers. After six months living in a tent behind barbed wire, the family was taken by bus to Jaffna.
''I lost my wife but there is nothing I can do to change that now,'' Mr Arulandan says. Since August almost 160,000 people like him have left the camps and returned home to try and rebuild their lives.
Nigel Robinson, the Sri Lanka program manager for the international mine clearing organisation Foundation Suisse Deminage, says emergency clearing operations that will allow people to move safely around their villages could take another 18 months to two years.
Several more years of mopping up will probably be required beyond that, he says.
The Catholic Bishop of Jaffna, Thomas Savundaranayagam, believes many displaced northern Tamils will never return to their villages but instead move to other parts of Sri Lanka.
No comments:
Post a Comment