“If you tell anyone, we will kill you and your husband”

http://womenforrefugeewomen.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/if-you-tell-anyone-we-will-kill-you-and-your-husband/

Frances Harrison, author of Still Counting the Dead, explains how Sri Lankan refugee women are living in fear.

All I had was an address in East London. The interview was set up by a series of lawyers and priests and I still don’t know the woman’s real name. We sat in a tiny back room of a terraced house and she told me, a complete stranger, the story that she’d never told her mother or husband. Then, understandably, she never wanted to see me again.

Manimolly, as I’ve called her, is a Sri Lankan Tamil who has sought asylum in Britain. Growing up in the capital Colombo, the civil war between the Tamil Tiger rebels and the predominantly Sinhalese army was just a distant backdrop to her early life. Her family was  from the Tamil minority, but she didn’t come from the conflict areas and she was about as apolitical as it’s possible to be in such a situation.

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Mass graves surface along bunkers in Mu'l'livaaykkaal

http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=35617

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 October 2012]
An official who recently visited the outskirts of Mu'l'livaaykkaal with the soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army told TamilNet this week that he had personally witnessed skeletal remains of hundreds of slain people surfacing along the few kilometers long, L-shaped bunker, running from Vadduvaakal to northwards along the land of the genocidal onslaught. A vast area is still not cleared and is strictly prohibited from access to anyone except SL military officials. “There are booby traps and UXOs. Rotten automatic rifles and RPG ammunitions are lying around in the area. When I walked across a bunker, I was able to sense that it was a bunker of mass slaughter. As the bodies buried underneath have rotten, the soil was going under as we walked across,” he said. Meanwhile, some other mass graves show the use of chemicals that have burnt even the bones to become ashes, journalists report. 

Mu'l'livaaykkaal bunker area.