Usha Devi Selvaratnam holds up a photograph of her son Sivakajan at an orphanage …
Girls line up for lunch at their orphanage in the Sri Lankan town of Vavuniya. Officials …Orphan girls at the compound of their orphanage in Vavuniya. Two and a half years …
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- Orphan girls at the compound of their orphanage in Vavuniya. The Vavuniya-based Family …
Two and a half years after the end of Sri Lanka's bloody ethnic conflict, hundreds of families displaced by the war are still engaged in a fraught, exhausting search for missing children.
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians were caught up in the chaos of the military's ferocious final assault on cornered Tamil Tiger rebels in the jungles of northeast Sri Lanka in April and May 2009.
As the offensive intensified, Usha Devi Selvaratnam said goodbye to her teenage son, Sivakajan, having sold a gold chain to buy him passage on a rebel-controlled vessel bound for the relative safety of the northern Jaffna peninsula.
She never saw him again.
"There is no trace of him... just a big hole in my heart," she told AFP in Vavuniya where huge numbers of refugees were interned in the months following the end of the war. Full Story>>>
