this massacre in the parliament. All those efforts were of no avail. There is no justice here. No compensation was paid either to members of the family of the victims or to us who were raped by the soldiers.”Another resident Nakamany Kandasamy says,“I escaped the massacre because I was out on business that day. Everyone was scared. We were able to get here only the next day. The threshing floor was full of burnt and half burnt bodies. It was an unbearable sight. A boy who escaped and hid in the jungle told us that some of the victims were alive when the soldiers set them on fire. Exactly five months later the military came here again and shot dead two men from the village, on 19 July 86”. Aftermath Three years after the gruesome massacre, those villagers who dared to remain in Udumbankulam were driven out en masse by the elite counter insurgency arm of the Sri Lankan military the Special Task Force (STF).“STF commandos burnt our house and shop in 1990. They destroyed the village school and co-operative society building too. The STF set fire to our harvested paddy and destroyed 25 thousand manioc plants in our farm which we had planted for the season. My husband and I barely escaped death. We hid in the jungles for many days. We have come back here after 12 years. But starting life all over again is very hard”, says Kumarakulasingham Thangeswary, 45.“But worst of all is that the STF blew up the bunds of water reservoirs here. The reservoirs have remained breached for almost a decade. The Tamil Eelam Economic Development Organisation (TEEDOR) has helped repair the bund of the Udumbankulam reservoir. Other the breached bunds of the other minor tanks (reservoirs) have also been repaired in recent months”, said the President of the Rural Development Society for the area, Mr. Murugesu Varatharajan, 33. He said families are reluctant to resettle on a permanent basis because even the rudimentary infrastructure needed to sustain human habitation has been systematically and ruthlessly destroyed in the STF’s counter insurgency operations in the region. He said families are reluctant to resettle on a permanent basis because even the rudimentary infrastructure needed to sustain human habitation has been systematically and ruthlessly destroyed in the STF’s counter insurgency operations in the region.To many of our people who go about in luxury vehicles, discussing the reconstruction