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Sri Lanka: The Propaganda Wars

Even though Sri Lanka seems to have made peace on the surface, below the seemingly calm veneer are many complex questions.

  • An aerial view of the last No Fire Zone adjoining the Nandikadal lagoon on Sri Lanka's northern coast. The image barely does justice to the miles of utter devastation and to the human tragedy that unfolded here.
  • Inside the No Fire Zone: the way from the tranquil Nandikadal lagoon to the beach is lined with charred remains of vehicles and broken houses. This has been a declared high security zone and we were given rare media access.
  • A young refugee girl running a small shop at Manik Farms, in the central Vavuniya district. It is the last refugee, camp home to 7000 internal refugees, down from the nearly 300,000 internal refugees after the war.
  • Dismantled houses of refugees who have left Manik Farms. The government's claims to have rehabilitated almost everyone successfully is a subject of active debate.
  • Reconstruction work is going on in full swing in most places where people have returned from camps. In this town of Mullaitivu, almost all the people have come back.
  • India has offered to build 50,000 low cost houses for the displaced Tamil community in the North and the East. Very few are ready, like this batch of 50 houses near Jaffna.
  • War Tourism: former LTTE strongholds – Prabhakaran's lair, the Jordanian ship Farah hijacked by the LTTE and beached along the No Fire Zone, and a modern Sri Lankan army memorial at the town of Kilinochichi, the former capital of the LTTE – have become popular tourist spots for Sinhala visitors from the South, raising questions of sensitivity.
  • The country's defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse is a man in a hurry – to forget the past and build the future.
  • The LTTE knitting group: where they once wielded guns, this batch of captured LTTE girls now wield knitting needles. Of the 11,000 LTTE cadre who surrendered after the war, almost all have been released. This last batch is working in a vocational center run by the government , and displayed to visitors as a sign of successful rehabilitation of former combatants.
  • A gathering of Sri Lanka's Tamil parties in Jaffna. After ten rounds of talks with the government on political autonomy to the Tamil regions, there seems to be no solution. The government blames them for being a divided house, while they claim the government is not serious about devolution.
  • Sri Lanka's army is the 7th largest in the world, swelling to almost three times its size in the past 10 years. Despite the end of the war, the large army presence in the North and East has caused considerable unease.
  • Children of a government school in Jaffna which opened after 15 years. They are always the most vulnerable in any conflict, but spoke to us quite excitedly about their future
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