IPS, November 25, 2012 - Mullaitivu, Sri Lanka. The tour guide’s voice echoes around the dark, musty room, three stories underground. Fifty visitors — among them mothers holding infants, youths snapping pictures on mobile phones and grandparents leaning against the walls — are crammed into the narrow stairwell that leads down into the chamber, listening attentively to his every word.

COLOMBO, Jul 17 2012 (IPS) - A bloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all. Fighting during the early months of 2009, in the last phase of Sri Lanka’s 30 year-long civil conflict, was so intense that a Tamil couple in their sixties was forced to make a heart-wrenching choice when they fled the bloody warzone: whether or not to leave behind Thangamathi, the elderly unmarried sister in the family who had been mentally handicapped since birth and required constant care.

By Feizal Samath, IPS, May 11, 2012 - COLOMBO - On May 18, some 800 women in Sri Lanka’s northern region will hold Hindu religious ceremonies for the welfare of thier husbands who disappeared or surrendered to the military as it moved in to mop up nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatism. "These women continue to live in hope even though many of those Tamil men may have died in the last days of the fighting," says Shreen Abdul Saroor, a prominent rights activist working with conflict-affected women in northern Sri Lanka. "On the other hand, even if they do acknowledge that their men have died, they don’t want to be known as widows as that could result in them being seen in a negative light in the community," Saroor explained to IPS. "They prefer to be known as single women or as women heading households."