Frances Harrison- on female war victims in Sri Lanka

Former BBC Correspondent and former Head of News at Amnesty International Frances Harrison discusses her book 'Still Counting the Dead', which details the experiences of Sri Lankan war victims.

What inspired you to write the book?

A feeling that the story of the war had not been told - & the intention of the government of the time to hide what happened there very effectively from the outside world. They keep journalists and aid workers out on purpose - so as a journalist I am quite bloody minded and decided to make sure that tactic would not work. Also of course a genuine curiosity given I talked to people in the war zone at the height of the bombardment and knew people who died.

What difficulties did you face when trying to get people to open up to you?

When I did the book people did open up - but some were too traumatised to cope for long. But their accounts helped enrich the stories I did tell.

In what ways do you think women were impacted differently to men during the final stages of the war?

Women who were mothers had to care for children in the midst of that hell -the worst story I heard was the one where a mum was dying and screaming for her baby. Finally they found the baby and she breast fed it and died while doing so. She knew she had to feed the kid to give it a chance as there was no food. That is my definition of being a good mother. Parents who starved but fed their kids, who bent their bodies over their babies to protect them from the shrapnel, who hid their kids’ eyes to save them from seeing the dismembered corpses. Women who submitted to rape knowing they had to do so to save their children’s lives - or save their young daughters from rape. The list of different types of sacrifice and suffering is horrific.

Do you think a domestic inquiry will hinder the reconciliation process and if so, why?

I think a domestic inquiry in the current situation will put witnesses and victims at an unacceptable level of risk - how can they safely testify against the security forces who are still running the areas they live in? The abductions, rape and torture are also still ongoing. Even witnesses outside Sri Lanka cannot testify openly as their families have been threatened, beaten, detained, raped or even killed.