Every day, the women get up in the cool of early morning and walk a few kilometres north to the heavily fortified checkpoint that stands between them and their families. And every day a kindly staffer from the International Committee of the Red Cross tells them that they still cannot cross.
So they turn away from the barbed wire and stacks of sandbags and camouflage and walk back into town, where they squat in the shade of the main government office, waiting for the road home to open — and knowing it won't, until home has changed so much that they will scarcely recognize it.
These women (along with their children and a few old men) come from a war zone — a region of Sri Lanka called Vanni, where until a few weeks ago the vicious Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) maintained a de facto independent state Now, a punishing air, sea and land campaign by the Sri Lankan military has driven the Tigers into a tiny corner of the north, their backs against the bright blue sea.
In their retreat, the rebels have taken with them most of the civilians who lived under their control — an estimated 300,000 people.
One of the world's longest-running conflicts, the 25-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka, seems to be entering its final phase of conventional warfare.
The Red Cross says an unknown number of civilians have been killed and injured since President Mahinda Rajapaksa set out in 2006 to crush the LTTE — which most Western countries, including Canada, consider a terrorist organization, best known internationally for carrying out grisly suicide attacks on civilians.
The rebels now hold an area no bigger than 30-by-30-kilometres, around the northern city of Mullaitivu. They have been pinned down before and fought their way back to power, but most observers think this is probably their end as a controlling force.
However, this war, which has already cost the lives of at least 70,000 people, seems certain to get much bloodier before it ends, as the cornered Tigers dig in and prepare to unleash their considerable arsenal.
The United Nations has issued repeated calls for the Tigers to release civilians and for the government to treat them well. The assumption is that all the civilians in the north would flee if they could.
A few have managed to get out, and these people stand on one side of the checkpoint, awaiting a long and unpleasant "security screening" by government soldiers hunting for any sign they have links with the Tigers. Those who pass muster — and most men 14 to 45 years old don't even bother to try — are waved through and taken to a refugee camp, where they will live behind thick coils of razor wire, forbidden to leave.
But no one here is talking about the other line in Vavuniya, the one five times as long — the line of people desperate to go back the other way. No one admits what it says about the chances for real peace in Sri Lanka that so many people see more hope for their families in a war zone than in the calm of the government-held side.
But the Tamil women here have no trouble explaining it. Each has come across in the past few days or weeks to seek medical treatment or write exams, as part of a system of exchanges between LTTE and government territory that, surprisingly, kept functioning through the worst of the war until now.
"I'd rather go back and die with my family than be here alone," says Kala, a 29-year-old schoolteacher (like many others here, she is afraid to be quoted with her full name). Kala's family has been displaced at least three times so far in the fighting; in the five days since she left to bring an aunt to the hospital here, their village has been shelled and her family is on the run again.
