| Well, I guess there's some good come out of it... |
This town is no stranger to carnage, always bouncing back from the damages suffered during its periodic turns on the front lines of Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war. A government assault drove out ethnic Tamil rebels in 1990. After six years of siege, the guerrillas took it back in a ferocious, one-day battle that wiped out the army garrison of 1,200 and killed 800 rebels. The Tamils rebuilt, and the rebels' secretive chief, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, even made the town his home. But Mullaitivu met its match in Asia's tsunami catastrophe. Sitting on Sri Lanka's northeast coast, the town took the full force of Sunday's mammoth waves _ devastation in full evidence Friday when Associated Press journalists got one of the first glimpses by outsiders of the damage inside the rebel-controlled part of this island nation off the southern tip of India. Row upon row of houses were flattened, walls ripped from their foundations. At the Roman Catholic Church, only one wall with its icons and the bell tower still stand. Worrying about the spread of disease, Tamil soldiers shot dogs scrabbling through the debris and around rotting bodies. |