What Have You Done With My Husband?

As Sri Lanka’s bitter civil war ground to a bloody end, many rebel leaders disappeared, never to be seen again. Seven years later, one wife wants answers.

Comic by Danielle Chenette

In October 2015, the United Nations called for the Sri Lankan government to account for gross violations of international law that occurred at the end of the country’s nearly thirty-year civil war. Since the late 1970s, a militant organization known as The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged war against the government of Sri Lanka (the teardrop-shaped island just south of India) seeking to create an independent state in the north and east for the minority Tamil people. At the height of its power, the LTTE launched targeted assaults including suicide bombings against the Singhalese ethnic majority. Whereas both sides stand accused of having committed grave violations of international law, throughout the war and at its end, what the Sri Lankan government stands accused of is no less than a mass atrocity.

In 2009, as the government launched a final offensive against the Tigers, four hundred thousand Tamil civilians were rounded into what the government …