Ending the Exile and Back to Roots: Fears, Challenges and Hopes

*groundview journalism For citizens

[Editors note: The author was married to Dr. Rajini Thiranagama (née Rajasingham), a Tamil human rights activist and feminist murdered in 1989 by the LTTE. She was one of the founding members of the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna, which during the war, published some of the most hard hitting critiques and exposes of Government as well as LTTE atrocities and human rights violations. Since 2009, Dayapala Thiranagama's insightful articles to Groundviewshave been amongst the site's most read and shared.]

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“Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means” (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, London, 1940, Page 81).

On 27 December 1989 I arrived in Heathrow along with my two young daughters, aged 9 and 11 years. At the Immigration Desk the Officer asked me how long we intended to stay.I replied ‘a couple of weeks’. My youngest daughter still hanging on to my hand and whispered to me ‘Thaththa, don’t tell lies we are not going back to Sri Lanka’. She of course was telling the truth. Now after more than two decades I had to return to Sri Lanka alone, leaving them behind.

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