It's just after 6 am on 29 July, and the ordinarily quiet village of Talaimannar, on the small island of Mannar just off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka, is al

You can almost taste the excitement on the boat as it nears Katchatheevu, people craning their necks out of windows, and perching on the steps to catch their first glimpse of it. For most passengers, it seems to be their first time visiting the island—abandoned, uninhabited, and closed to civilians for all but two days each year for its annual church festival. Standing on some bags to gain height, I catch flashes of the island—a statue of the Virgin Mary encased in glass peeping out from some fo

Some of the world’s leading tea manufacturers, including Tetley and Lipton, are examining working conditions on the plantations of its Sri Lankan suppliers, following a Guardian investigation. Two global trade-certification schemes, Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance, are also conducting inquiries after it was revealed that some workers on 10 certified estates could not afford to eat and were living in squalid conditions. Tea pickers claim that estate owners failed to support them during th

Ramanthan Vijayalakshmi can reel off the date of her brother’s death by memory — Oct. 17, 1995. A 47-year-old resident of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Vijayalakshmi had lost contact with him five years before he died, when he had been recruited as a fighter by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, a militant group that had been waging a civil war against the Sri Lankan government to create a separate Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam. Her brother, Ramalingam Punniyamoorthy, was only in the eighth grad

The smugglers promised that a cruise liner would take them to Canada in comfort. But the MV Lady 3 did not meet such lofty expectations. Rusting and decrepit, the Myanmar-flagged fishing vessel was barely seaworthy, with no sleeping quarters and just two toilets for the 303 largely Tamil men, women and children packed on board. The food was scant — thin porridge or rice, infested with bugs. And the drinking water was the same orange colour as the flaking hull. In 30 days at sea last fall, the

When 13-year old Nishanthini puts on her uniform in the morning and sets off for school, it's not always certain she will make it to class. Some days, her parents don't have enough money for bus fares for both her and her older brother but send them out anyway in the hope that a kindly bus driver or conductor will agree to take them for less. "Sometimes that’s how they go," says Nishanthini’s father, Marimuthu Maheswaran. "If they go in a known bus, those boys will help out because they know th

The explosions in 1990 were the start of the second phase of the civil war between the Sri Lankan military and ethnic Tamil separatists that ravaged the island from 1983 to 2009. Almost all of Palaly’s 44,000 residents who were mostly Tamil, either fled or were evacuated by the Sri Lankan government in June and July 1990. For many in Palaly, that was the last time they would set foot on their ancestral land, and for almost all of them, the last time they would see their homes. Shatheeskumar, who

KILINOCHCHI, Oct 26 (Reuters) - (This Oct. 26 story has been corrected to fix name of official to Mahesh Katulanda in paragraph 16 and 20) Arumuga Lakshmi, tormented by questions about the fate of her two children, missing for years, marched through a town in northern Sri Lanka with a group of women, many holding up photographs, black flags and burning torches. During a brutal 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and a militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),

MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Under a blazing sun, a 44-year-old Tamil labourer tended his rented patch of peanut field in Sri Lanka, striking his spade against the earth in a daily struggle to beat inflation that has put many necessities out of reach. "I have more difficulties than a daily wage labourer," said Singaram Soosaiyamutthu, who moves around on the palms of his hands after an air strike in 2009 took both his legs and injured his left arm. That was during the last stages

MANNAR, Sri Lanka, Sept 7 (Reuters) - As the sun rose over Sri Lanka one morning in late August, around a dozen fishermen were laying out their nets on a beach in Mannar, a small island just off the country's northwestern coast, the start of the day's work. But many other fishermen in the community are unable to go to sea at all, crippled by the country's devastating economic crisis, the worst it has faced since independence in 1948. Fuel shortages and runaway inflation mean they are strugglin

On a snowy afternoon in January, 24-year-old Thanujan Sellathurai delivered a speech in front of a small crowd of protesters from the Tamil community in Geneva. He called for the United Nations, which has several of its agencies headquartered there, to condemn the “brutal atrocity” that had just taken place in Sri Lanka. Authorities at the University of Jaffna, on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, had ordered the bulldozing of a memorial paying tribute to the victims of the Mullivaikkal massacre.