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War scars slowly heal in Jaffna peninsula
Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Mar 14: The road from the airport into town is often a good indicator of what a place is like.
Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Mar 14: The road from the airport into town is often a good indicator of what a place is like.
Nowhere is this more true than in Jaffna, the spiritual capital of the minority Tamils in northern Sri Lanka and a key battleground in a two-decade-old civil war.
You fly in on a half-full Fokker propeller plane, with only local residents, aid workers and a stray tourist on board. Soldiers with machine guns dot the tarmac, and a soldier drives a bus out of the army's high-security zone around Palaly airport.
The dusty road to the town of Jaffna goes through fallow fields. Nearly every house is bombed out. Every wall seems to be pockmarked by bullets. Signs everywhere warn of landmines. ''You have to be a pretty determined tourist to come here,'' said Charles Dumolin, a Belgian artist whose son is engaged to a Tamil, and who has been to Sri Lanka 15 times.
For centuries, this peninsula was the heart of a Tamil kingdom, before it was taken over by Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rulers of Sri Lanka.
After independence in 1948, Jaffna was Sri Lanka's second-biggest city. As well as a thriving centre for trade, it was home to the best schools on the island, where even the Sinhalese majority sent their children to be educated.
But in the past two decades of civil war, Jaffna has been fought over by the Sinhalese army, an Indian peacekeeping force and them separatist liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and each battle added yet more scars to this once-beautiful town.
Now, nearly a decade after the Sinhalese army retook it from the LTTE, Jaffna looks like an open-air museum of devastation, with houses, churches and factories reduced to overgrown rubble.
Meanwhile, the LTTE has built up Kilinochchi, in the rebel-held north of Sri Lanka, as the new Tamil ''capital''.
Bureau Report
You fly in on a half-full Fokker propeller plane, with only local residents, aid workers and a stray tourist on board. Soldiers with machine guns dot the tarmac, and a soldier drives a bus out of the army's high-security zone around Palaly airport.
The dusty road to the town of Jaffna goes through fallow fields. Nearly every house is bombed out. Every wall seems to be pockmarked by bullets. Signs everywhere warn of landmines. ''You have to be a pretty determined tourist to come here,'' said Charles Dumolin, a Belgian artist whose son is engaged to a Tamil, and who has been to Sri Lanka 15 times.
For centuries, this peninsula was the heart of a Tamil kingdom, before it was taken over by Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rulers of Sri Lanka.
After independence in 1948, Jaffna was Sri Lanka's second-biggest city. As well as a thriving centre for trade, it was home to the best schools on the island, where even the Sinhalese majority sent their children to be educated.
But in the past two decades of civil war, Jaffna has been fought over by the Sinhalese army, an Indian peacekeeping force and them separatist liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and each battle added yet more scars to this once-beautiful town.
Now, nearly a decade after the Sinhalese army retook it from the LTTE, Jaffna looks like an open-air museum of devastation, with houses, churches and factories reduced to overgrown rubble.
Meanwhile, the LTTE has built up Kilinochchi, in the rebel-held north of Sri Lanka, as the new Tamil ''capital''.
Bureau Report