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STEPHANIE NOLEN

From Monday's Globe and Mail

January 26, 2009 at 4:30 AM EST

VAVUNIYA, SRI LANKA — When he saw the pair of young women walking up to his front door, Anthony T knew his family had not escaped.

Months before, he had at last succeeded in scraping together loans for $50,000 (U.S.) and paid a smuggler to get his son to Canada as a refugee claimant. He got his oldest daughter into pre-college bioscience studies. He thought, then, that his children might be spared.

But 18 months ago, recruiters for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam came to the home of Mr. T, 57, a coconut and rice farmer whose identity has been confirmed by The Globe and Mail but will not be published due to concerns for the safety of his family.

The young women spoke at length to Mr. T and his family about the Vietnam war. "They told us it was a long war that no one thought the Vietnamese could win, but that they endured and it was a people's war and they won in the end," Mr. T recalled a few days ago with a small, painful smile.

He had managed to send his son out beyond their reach but now the Tigers wanted one of his daughters. "I never thought they would come for her."

During the past 18 months, the government has used a massive military offensive to squeeze the LTTE in all directions, and yesterday announced that the army had seized the northern town of Mullaitivu, the rebels' last stronghold - although no journalists are allowed in the area to try to confirm this.

"The Sri Lankan army captured the Mullaittivu bastion completely today," Lieutenant-General Sarath Fonseka, the army commander, said last night in a speech after LTTE fighters had been driven out of the town earlier in the day.

The guerrillas have come back from near-obliteration before, but this time it seems likely that their control over the north is ended.

The end didn't come soon enough for Mr. T's daughter. The recruiters came back to their home, in a village 12 kilometres from Mullaitivu, three more times. His daughters were terrified, he said, and didn't want to go; their parents were equally afraid. So the Tigers turned up the pressure, taking Mr. T himself away for "questioning." They only held him for a day, he said, but their message had been effectively delivered: when he arrived back home, it was to find his three daughters arguing over whom should go, so that their father would not face incarceration or worse. They decided in the end to send the eldest, who was then nearly 18, because her educational background might get her a job as a medic, and perhaps some security away from the front lines.

So she went, just as the Sri Lankan government intensified ground and air attacks on the area where the LTTE had long run a sort of autonomous semi-state. And so began Mr. T's days of worry, an anxiety that has sharpened to corrosive fear as the Tigers lost their capital, Kilinochchi, three weeks ago, and then, day by day, were pushed back up against the sea. "It's all I think about, all I can ever think about," he said.

Mr. T, a quiet, grey-haired man wearing a pale blue sarong, relayed all this in Vavuniya, the "exchange point" where some civilians are allowed to pass between army and Tiger territory. He came down a few days before, bringing a nephew in urgent need of medical treatment; as the oldest family member, he was the least likely to incur the suspicion, and possible detention, by the Sri Lankan government when he crossed out of rebel territory.

Since he arrived, he has learned his family has been almost constantly on the run, driven from one area to another by aerial bombing and by the Tigers.

The practice has been condemned by the United Nations, which estimates that as many as 300,000 civilians have been trapped now between the opposing forces. "Pretty soon there will be nowhere to go but into the sea," Mr. T said quietly.

The LTTE has been fighting since the mid-1970s for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, which continues to be oppressed by the Sinhalese majority that dominates the national government.

The Tigers have been listed as a terrorist organization by countries, including Canada, because of their use of suicide attacks on civilians, and have long been condemned by human-rights organizations for their forcible recruitment of soldiers, including a great many children.

He has lost all hope that the LTTE will maintain their "independent homeland" in the north, and in some ways, he won't miss them, dragging off people's children and constantly demanding "donations" for the cause, as soon as he had saved a few rupees.

Yet at the same time he fears the repression that will come with living in a militarized north under government control. "Intelligence has a list of whose family is in the LTTE," he said. "If we cross over here, we will be under surveillance and persecuted."

All the options are bad, he said simply. "There is no saviour, neither the LTTE nor the government." But neither side cares how he and people in his village feel, he added.

"It doesn't matter who we are living under, it has to be without violence. We are not troublemakers. We want to live in peace, independence and dignity. We want the same facilities and rights that people enjoy in the rest of the country: education, jobs and access to land. If we have this, then there won't be any problem."

Now he waits in Vavuniya, desperate to go home, or as close to it as he can manage, in case his daughter is either released by the Tigers, or manages to slip away.

"Maybe, maybe, I will be able to get to her and somehow I can get her away. We can all get away."

snolen@globeandmail.com