Thurairaja Kanagamma hasn’t stepped foot on her land for 29 years. She lost her home in the Jaffna peninsula in 1989, when fighting escalated between government forces and ethnic Tamil insurgents. The Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), known as the ‘Tamil Tigers’, waged a 26-year war to try to establish a state in the north and east, independent of the succession of largely Sinhalese Buddhist governments. Although the civil war ended in 2009, Thurairaja is still living in a camp for internally displaced people.
‘I came to this camp when my daughter was three,’ she says. ‘She’s 26 now.’
