04/24/2011
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Time magazine
Right through our one hour interview, she kept twitching her fingers nervously. A blue handkerchief, neatly folded when we sat down, was a crushed mess by the time the we stopped talking. She did not want her real name used; instead, she wanted me to call her Selvi. A former member of the women's wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Selvi is, for the first time in her adult life, unsure about what she will do next. Like many of the women in their ranks, Selvi was a semi-forced recruit of the Tigers. Now the insurgency, is no more, their once-feared military might brought to naught by Sri Lankan government forces in May 2009.
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.
08/15/2010
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Time magazine
They are everywhere and more are coming: huge billboards advertising everything from formula to mobile phones dominate most vantage points in Sri Lanka's former war zone. Where artillery and shells shrieked overhead a little over 15 months back, there are now gigantic, smiling women holding tubes of skin-whitening cream. In Kilinochchi, the former political and administrative nerve center of the Tamil Tigers, a toppled water tank once symbolized the wanton destruction caused by war. The tank is now obscured by a billboard for Highland milk; the ad is a vision of the future, the tank a vision of the past.
07/09/2010
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Time magazine
An already testy relationship between the United Nations and the Sri Lankan government came under greater strain this week after a firebrand government minister's hunger strike at the gates of the main U.N. office here prompted the U.N.'s resident representative to be recalled.
04/28/2010
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Time magazine
He won his first presidential election in 2005 by a razor thin margin of 180,000 votes. Five years later, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa was re-elected, by a victory margin of over 1.8 million votes.
Since then, the man hailing from the deep south of the country has proved countless detracters and arm-chair critics wrong. There were doubters who did not think he could get his own party's candidacy for the 2005 presidential race to replace Chandrika Kumaratunga. Ever fewer gave him any chance of victory when he launched military operations against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2005 to end the island's long years of bloody civil war. (Read an interview with the president.)
01/07/2010
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Time magazine
A year after the murder of the prominent Sri Lankan editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, the island's independent media is still under siege. An investigation into Wickrematunge's death has gone nowhere, and at least half a dozen other journalists, including his widow, have left the country in fear since his death.