For elderly Sri Lankan refugee Ayiam Pillai, hearing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s promise last year to end an ethnic war that has killed more than 64,000 people was enough to bring him back from exile in India.The 74-year-old, partially paralysed from a shrapnel wound, accompanied two other ethnic Tamil refugees back to Sri Lanka this week from an Indian camp on a repatriation programme organised by the UNHCR. ‘‘I saw Wickremesinghe on a stage telling us there would be no more war,’’ Pillai said. ‘‘He said Sri Lanka would look after Tamils now, not kill them.’’The December pledge from the PM erased all doubts about homecoming, Pillai said, even though an Army attack had driven him from his home in war-battered Jaffna peninsula in 1996. About 5,000 families ran from their rice farm on that sunny April morning after hearing warnings the Army would attack soon, he said.
