President Chandrika Kumaratunga of Sri Lanka has been told by doctors that she will probably be permanently blind in one eye following an assassination attempt.
"Medically [the doctors say] I can carry on but probably I have lost the sight of one eye", said Mrs Kumaratunga, who returned to Sri Lanka yesterday after receiving treatment in London.
Mrs Kumaratunga, who was reelected as president in elections before Christmas, narrowly escaped with her life when a suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber attacked her final campaign rally. The attack on the President two weeks ago and another bomb at an opposition rally left 35 people dead and some 150 injured.
The President, whose eye is still bruised and closed, said in a BBC interview broadcast yesterday she does not feel "hysterical" about her injury, despite the loss of sight. Soon after the bombing, she told the nation in a televised broadcast that those who had carried out the attack would not go "unchecked or unpunished".
"I'm surprised that I don't feel fear", said Mrs Kumaratunga when asked if she would be afraid to go out in future. "I feel that there is something special that somebody somewhere wants me to do." A spokesman for the President said that now she is back in the capital, Colombo, she will resume normal duties, although he added she was still "taking things a bit easy".
Mrs Kumaratunga witnessed the assassination of both her prime minister father, Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, and her husband, Viyaya Kumaratunga, a film star turned politician. She has two children - a daughter, Yasodara, who is studying medicine in Cambridge, and a son, Vimukti, who is at secondary school in Colombo.
She said soon after the bombing that fate had spared her life. She now feels she survived because she is meant to be "a messenger of peace".
She told the BBC she was determined to continue negotiating with the Tamil Tigers, despite the attempt on her life, and said that everything short of an independent state was negotiable. But she alleged that the Tamil Tiger leader, Mr Velupillai Prabakharan, had "an obsessive fear of peace", and she urged Tamils outside Sri Lanka to cut off funding to the separatist guerrillas. Analysts feel she will also continue to pursue a tough military campaign, her so-called "war for peace" policy, against the Tigers.
There has been fierce fighting in the past few weeks on the causeway that links the Jaffna peninsula to the mainland. Sri Lankan troops have responded with a counteroffensive and have put up a strong resistance to the Tiger advance.
Mrs Kumaratunga revealed for the first time in her BBC interview that international mediators have been trying to broker a peace deal with the Tigers for over two years.
The first attempt was by the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chief Anyoku, and more recently by the Norwegian government. She said both attempts proved fruitless.
She says she will now use the popular mandate she won in last week's presidential poll to devolve power to Tamil-dominated areas, despite lacking the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to do so.