MANIK FARMS, Sri Lanka, May 23 -- Night after night, with heavy shelling over their farming village, Krishma Lela and his family did what they could to survive: They dug a trench out of the red earth and huddled inside. They moved only among a network of bunkers, made by hundreds of other Tamil villagers trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil Tiger rebels during the last days of fighting in a quarter-century-long civil war that came to an apparent end Monday.
"We were so afraid," said Lela, a rice farmer who had made it to Manik Farms, a hastily erected camp now housing 200,000 people. "Sometimes at night my wife screams out. Her mind can't rest. She thinks like she's still inside the trenches, hiding."
Their story and others like it emerged Saturday as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toured the biggest displacement camp for Tamil civilians and flew over the ravaged northeastern coastal villages, where the final battles were fought. |