Sri Lanka Voices From A War Zone

If we don't tell our stories who will?' They were ordinary peoplefarmers fisherfolk businessmen pensioners housewives and school childrenuntil a relentless war machine invaded their lives. These are their storiesstories of intense suffering but also of great courage resilience and dignity. Nirupama Subramanian a journalist who spent seven years reporting the vicious face-off between Sri Lanka's government and the separatist LTTE criss-crossed the towns and villages of a beautiful but ravaged island to uncover these little histories' as she calls themof children forcibly recruited into Tiger training camps of parents waiting for mass graves to reveal their bleak secrets of people fleeing their homes in war zones only to become prisoners in refugee camps of the families of the missing who still wait and hope of women in the maid-trade bonded in virtual slavery in foreign lands. Woven into these narratives are the larger storiesof a President Chandrika Kumaratunga elected with a massive mandate for peace but trapped in a war so intense that she was unable to make good her promise and of Tiger supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran trapped too but in a cage fashioned out of his own egoism and ruthlessnessone he never dare leave. As Sri Lanka searches for an elusive peace read this book to understand the price that Sri Lankans have paid for a war that has raged for over twenty years.