This book describes what life was like on the ground inside Tamil-controlled territory where the forces of war were held at bay—what the author has referred to in the title of this book as “The Fleeting Moment…”.

What followed was a process of the destruction of everything that she described when it was overrun by the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil genocide began.

“Can the readers who did not experience this imagine what it is like to watch the complete destruction of one’s country: the physical destruction, the destruction of the governance structures, the complete dispersal of its people, and massacres on a massive scale? Has there ever been such complete destruction of a country in history? The only reason why it is not seen as such is because my country was only in the minds of its people, but was not recognized by the global system of states.”        N. Malathy

CLARITY PRESS, INC.

N. MALATHY is member of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora and a naturalised New Zealand citizen who has lived in New Zealand for four decades. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where she has worked as an analyst and programmer. She has written extensively on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka and also translated a short novel set in the Vanni context which has been accepted for publication by Penguin India. She spent four years in Sri Lanka, in the Vanni District under the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), from 2005 till 2009, a period marked by the gradual weakening of the 2002 Norwegian brokered ceasefire, which eventually led to the brutal war in which LTTE was defeated and its leadership killed or imprisoned. During this period she worked in many institutions, including a human rights body, a women’s organization, and an orphanage. Her experiences spanned working with LTTE to release child soldiers, preparing documentation for peace talks for the same body, documenting human rights violations by the Sri Lankan military and working on a project to raise awareness of domestic violence.