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Sri Lankan Catholic civil-society groups have highlighted the plight of their countrymen in the embattled Jaffna peninsula through an exhibition of photos and video clips taken by priests and rights activists.

“People in the southern part of Sri Lanka do not know what is happening with the 600,000 people in Jaffna,” said Ruki Fernando of Law and Society Trust during the Dec. 21 exhibition at the Center for Society and Religion in Colombo. The trust, a secular NGO, works with Catholic and other groups on human rights issues.

The program, organized by Catholic human rights activists, included a photo exhibit, video footage, a drama, speeches and a forum for experience sharing. About 40 priests, Religious and civic activists including members of women’s movements attended.

Sri Lanka is caught in a 25-year-old ethnic war between Sinhalese-led state forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The LTTE in 1983 launched an armed struggle for a separate homeland in the north and east for the minority Tamil community. More than 70,000 people have died since then because of the war.

The rebel stronghold is in northern Sri Lanka, where the government wrested nominal control of the Jaffna peninsula, including Jaffna city, 396 kilometers north of Colombo, in late 1995.

A cease-fire signed in February 2002 held for several years, but began to fray toward the end of 2005. Large-scale fighting erupted around Jaffna in August 2006, and government forces have closed the road linking the peninsula to the mainland indefinitely.

Travel to and from Jaffna is now possible only by air or sea. Information from the peninsula is also limited by state control over the media. Organizers of the Dec. 21 event said they arranged the exhibition to tell Jaffna’s story, since people in the south mostly get only Colombo-based reports.

“In many homes there are only tears, despair and hopelessness,” Fernando said as he showed photos and video footage providing rare glimpses of destroyed homes, churches, temples and schools in Jaffna. Refugees and war widows also were seen, as well as weeping men and women searching for missing loved ones.

“Tell your own stories to others about Jaffna and create public opinion against the war,” Oblate Father Tissa Balasuriya urged the gathering.

During the program, nine Tamil Religious novices from the north staged a play in which they exposed what Father Balasuriya called “the bitter suffering and agony of Jaffna people.”

They portrayed the suffering of children and mothers through the play, which depicted the plight of a pregnant Tamil woman named Mary, who is forced to give birth on the run with fighting erupting around her. Nobody gives her shelter, and finally she delivers her baby in an isolated bunker.

Audience members-Sinhalese and Tamils-discussed the many difficulties faced in Jaffna such as a fishing ban and nightly curfew, high prices, and shortages of essential items such as medicine and fuel. A number spoke from personal experience.

Long military convoys move along Jaffna roads, forcing people including schoolchildren to wait even an hour or longer to cross.

All families are required to hang “family photographs” on the wall, and anyone staying in a house who is not in one of the photos can be taken for questioning. This leaves people reluctant to take in anyone outside their family.

“People are scared. They are reluctant to talk,” asserted Arul Nesiah, a policy and advocacy advisor for World Vision, a Christian NGO.

Father Rohan De Silva recalled one woman crying to him, “The LTTE killed my husband.” People suffer at the hands of all armed groups, he pointed out, since “killing and abduction go unabated.”

Father M. Selvaratnam, who heads the Oblates’ Jaffna province, recently told UCA News Jaffna “is in fact a closed prison,” despite claims it is open.

Anglican Bishop Duleep de Chickera of Colombo said in a Dec. 22 media statement, “Something sinister is going on in Jaffna peninsula.”

According to the prelate, the trials and tribulations faced by the people of Jaffna have gotten worse over the past couple of months as extortion, extrajudicial killings and general lawlessness paralyzed Jaffna society. [Union of Catholic Asian News]