Unreported World

Around 100,000 British tourists holiday in Sri Lanka every year, but thanks to a clampdown on the international media, few realise that away from its famous beaches, a new chapter in the country's 30-year civil war has opened, in which innocent civilians are paying a bloody price.

Unreported World's Sandra Jordan and Siobhan Sinnerton are the first foreign journalists to travel to Jaffna, in the North of Sri Lanka, for many months, and they experience for themselves the heavy-handed tactics used by the government against ordinary people in the troubled parts of the country.

Two years ago, a new hard-line nationalist government began a fresh phase of Sri Lanka's civil war, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives. The ceasefire signed in 2002 now exists in name only, with the Government declaring that the Tamil Tigers must be defeated militarily.

A fierce military campaign has driven the Tigers out of their strongholds in the East, and the military are now turning their attention to the North. At the same time the Tigers have split, and former comrades are now working against each other in a shadowy war of abductions and disappearances.

Jordan and Sinnerton begin their journey at a recently-abandoned Sea Tiger naval base in Mannar, scene of some of some of the most recent fighting. The Sri Lankan air force has dropped massive bombs on Tiger bunkers and weapons caches, leaving huge craters. The Tigers fled, but so did terrified civilians targeted by both sides. In this latest round of the conflict, more than 315,000 people have been displaced.

In the current climate of fear, it is hard to get anyone to tell their story. The Bishop of Mannar gives the team photos of a local family horribly massacred by unidentified killers. But if the neighbours know who committed the crime, they aren't saying.

The team moves on to the former Tiger stronghold of Batticaloa, and attends a Hindu festival in an area where the Tigers have been vanquished and refugees resettled. But again, terror is not far away. Locals tell them about extra-judicial killings and disappearances in the area, which they blame on the Sri Lankan Police's Special Task Force, and about masked paramilitary death squads, which roam at night, targeting those who denounce their activities. One young mother tells Jordan that witnesses saw her husband being abducted by the STF months earlier. 'I just want them to tell me if he's dead,' she says, 'so I can give my children away and kill myself.'

Jordan and Sinnerton decide to travel to Jaffna to investigate more claims of disappearances and abductions, but, arriving at the airport, they are immediately intercepted by the military and forced to spend the night at a military base. The next day they are sent back to Colombo.

Back in the capital, Colombo, Tamil politician and human rights activist Mano Ganeshan tells the team that every day his office is filled with the relatives of the disappeared, and points the finger firmly at the military.

The team puts these claims to the leader of the Sri Lankan army, who denies the allegations. But, he says ominously, we have already taught the Tigers a lesson in the East. If they still don't listen, we'll have to teach them again.

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