12/24/2010
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Time
Elephantpass, a narrow causeway linking the northern Jaffna Peninsula with the rest of Sri Lanka, was the site of many bloody battles during the island's quarter-century civil war. Now it's the site of nation's most famous bulldozer. Covered in iron meshing and armour plating, the mean-looking machine sits on a pedestal, a testament to the over 25 years of conflict that ended in May 2009, and the nearly 80,000 lives lost along the way.
11/16/2010
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Time
Spending five years in a Saudi Arabian jail while facing death by beheading would be traumatic for anyone, let alone for a 17-year-old thousands of miles away from home.
But that's exactly what Rizana Fathima Nafeek, who moved to Riyadh from Sri Lanka to work as a maid, has endured since 2005. Nafeek, now 22, has spent the past half-decade in a Riyadh prison facing a death sentence in a country where she does not speak the language and where she does not have any relatives. Her job, obtained through a Sri Lankan recruitment agency, was supposed to be the ticket out of abysmal poverty for her family, says her mother, Razeena Nafeek. The family of six found it hard to get by on the income that Mohammed Nafeek, her father, earned as a woodcutter in the remote village of Muttur, east of Colombo. "We pinned all our hopes on the job," she adds.
10/28/2010
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Time, Time magazine
During the last years of Sri Lanka's battle against the Tamil Tigers, the military hierarchy used to receive a regular — if somewhat unusual — request: members of the forces wanted to be on reality TV.
03/31/2010
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Time
The civil war in Sri Lanka may be over, but you can buy a landmine on the side of the road in Jaffna — though they're more likely to explode in your mouth than anywhere else. In the main city on Sri Lanka's northernmost peninsula, besieged by two and half decades of bloody sectarian violence until last May, the spicy samosa sold by street vendors throughout the city is still known by its nom-de-guerre: "midi-vedi," the Tamil word for landmine.
12/03/2009
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Time
"You will only know how wonderful walking on the road like this feels if you have gone through what we have." Dharmeshwaran, 30, was walking toward Vavuniya, a town in the north of Sri Lanka and a journey of about 18 miles (30km) from Menik Farm, the camp for displaced persons where he and his family have been detained for about seven months. They were among the 225,000 to 280,000 people who were held in several detention camps after fleeing the fighting in the last stages of the 26-year-long war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which ended in May.