By Charles Haviland BBC News, Colombo

	Decades of fighting has displaced thousands in the north and east

At the same time a government minister says he believes women in the former war zone, including the widows of former rebel Tamil Tiger fighters, need to be helped in getting employment and compensation.

Father ESC Mariathas, a priest, quoted in the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror, gave a bleak picture of the situation faced by the widows he works with.

He alone gives pastoral care to 625 widows and 25 orphans and said many women just squat by their shelters with their children clinging to them, relating stories of loss, grief and anger.

At times they wake screaming in the middle of the night, he said, and some seem like mad people.

Social stigma

Father Mariathas said social stigma meant few widows could remarry; many were reacting to stress by taking painkilling drugs.

	Minister says he recently met thousands of widows in the north

The minister of rehabilitation, DEW Gunasekera, has echoed the priest on the urgent need to help women in the north.

He told the BBC he and his team recently met 8,000 women, many of them widows, in the north to discuss their needs.

He said the government hoped to work with UN agencies as soon as possible to set up schemes for self-employment.

Mr Gunasekera said he’d had “very friendly” conversations with some wives and widows of senior leaders of the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels and had told them he was “not worried about their politics”.

The minister said that in some cases he did not know whether their husbands were alive or dead.

There have been conflicting accounts of the status of some senior former rebel leaders, leading some to speculate that they may have died in detention.

The government recently said there were at least 40,000 widows in northern Sri Lanka and 50,000 in the east.