[The Global and Mail]

For Tamils, the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war has brought no peace dividend; for Tamil women, peace has brought with it a continuation – and in some cases an intensification – of violence and insecurity. In the country’s predominantly Tamil-speaking north and east – a region half the size of Nova Scotia – tens of thousands of “war widows” have been living under the control of the central government and Sinhalese security forces since 2009 and the end of the civil war, whose last few months saw as many as 40,000 civilians killed.

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[BBC]

“My husband was a fisherman. About three years ago, when he returned from a fishing trip, somebody checked his identity card and shot him dead,” says Jeyarulai Puwanendran, weeping. The single mother, 23, is a resident of Kiran, Batticaloa, in Sri Lanka’s eastern region. “I have a four-year-old daughter. I don’t get help from the government or anybody else. My parents are the ones who look after me and my daughter. My father is a labourer. They have six other children apart from me,” she says.

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