The European Union has welcomed the significant progress made in many areas in Sri Lanka.

by Aritha Wickramasinghe

I was born in 1984 at St Michael's Nursing Home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Then a small, but bustling metropolis, Colombo had already experienced its first taste of societal division. In 1983, race riots largely targeting the Tamil minority population engulfed this once picture perfect paradise in flames -- flames which would continue to torch the land that was my home for the next 26 years. Sri Lanka's civil war ended 100,000 lives and destroyed much more than that. It destroyed our hope, our faith in justice and above all, it destroyed the belief that we were all equal.