Cheddikulam, Sri Lanka: When the piercing whistle and sharp thuds of artillery shells grew faint, S. Theventhran dashed to safety. After days of cowering in a narrow, open trench on a strip of beach in the north-eastern corner of Sri Lanka, he was cheered by the sight of Sri Lankan army soldiers helping wounded and terrified survivors of the last stand of the Tamil Tiger rebels, who had held nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians hostage.
More than two months later, Theventhran, a 56-year-old Tamil civil servant, finds himself once again a captive, this time of the people who freed him from the Tigers' grip.
"We were liberated," he said in an interview at one of the sprawling, closed camps set up here to house those displaced in the war against the rebel group, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. "Now we are prisoners again. I lost everything in this war. The Tigers killed my son. I lost my property. Now I have lost my freedom, too."
Held hostage: People displaced by the war at a camp near Vavuniya, Sri Lanka. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked behind razor wire in camps, say human rights investigators and political leaders. Keith Bedford / NYT
Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off-limits to journalists, human rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says that the people in the camps are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them.
But diplomats, analysts, aid workers and many Sri Lankans worry that the historic chance to finally bring to a close one of the world's most enduring ethnic conflicts is slipping away, as the government curtails the rights of Tamil civilians in its efforts to stamp out the last remnants of the Tigers.
"The government told these people it would look after them," said Veerasingham Anandasangaree, a prominent Tamil politician who has been a staunch supporter of the government's fight against the Tamil Tigers. "But instead they have locked them up like animals with no date certain of when they will be released. This is simply asking for another conflict later on down the road."
The Sri Lankan government has portrayed its final battle against the 26-year insurgency by the Tamil Tigers, which ended in late May with the killing of the group's leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, as a rescue mission to liberate civilians held hostage by one of the world's richest and most ruthless armed groups, branded terrorists by governments across the globe.
"We can't say this was a war; it was a humanitarian operation to safeguard the people of the area," said Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in a rare interview last week. "They knew we were not against the Tamil people, against the civilians. This was only against the terrorists."