News stories by Amantha Perera, page 19

A year since Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war ended on May 18 last year, tourists are returning in huge numbers to a popular beach destination located over 300 kilometres from where the last battles were fought.

Well before the northern Sri Lankan region of the Jaffna Peninsula was devastated by over two and a half decades of a bloody sectarian war, fisheries and agriculture had been the mainstays of its economy.

Voter turnout in the Apr. 8 election was one of the lowest in Sri Lanka's post- independence history. But the result was a landslide win that has strengthened the hand of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s administration like never before.

The war of words between the Sri Lankan government and the United Nations has begun all over again, this time over the creation of an experts’ panel on the island’s human rights record.

Tensions between Sri Lanka and Britain may have calmed down somewhat after the civil conflict ended in this South Asian country last year, but are rising again after the government accused London of aiding the defeated Tamil Tigers to regroup internationally.

For garment factory workers like Anoma Piyaseele, the European Union’s (EU) concessionary tariffs for imports from Sri Lanka meant little more than a vague term for policymakers to deal with — until news came that they would be suspended soon.

Street protests that erupted in Colombo and other cities following the Feb. 8 arrest of defeated Presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka have yet to gain wider support from non-political groups.

Call it a novel election propaganda ploy.

Waves hitting a train and carriages half submerged in water. Scores of men, women and children leaping above the water, hands outstretched, bodies strewn all over.

'We have been here for almost five years. So many promises have been made, but very few have been kept,' complains Mohideen Nafia, 22, one of the survivors of the 2004 Asian tsunami still living in a temporary facility in the coastal town of Kalmunai, located 300 kilometres east of the capital, Colombo.