JAFFNA: Sri Lanka’s president Monday launched train services to the battle-scarred city of Jaffna nearly 25 years after a bloody ethnic conflict destroyed the region’s entire railway network.

President Mahinda Rajapakse boarded a special train from the town of Palai on the southern end of the Jaffna peninsula and travelled to the cultural capital of Sri Lanka’s ethnic minority Tamils.

His train stopped at three stations rebuilt as part of the reconstruction of 250-kms of track across the former war zone, both in the Jaffna peninsula and the northern mainland.

“The resumption of the train service shows Jaffna is fast becoming a centre of development” after decades of war, Transport Minister Kumara Welgama said.

The train service from Jaffna, 400kms north of the capital Colombo, came to a halt in June 1990 after the collapse of a truce between separatist Tamil Tiger rebels and government forces.The railways were restored under an $800-million Indian credit line and Ircon Internationa, India’s leading public-sector construction company, began the work in 2011.

The line to Jaffna was initially laid in the early part of the last century with the first train commissioned in 1905 by the then British colonial rulers.

Published in Dawn, October 14th , 2014