Word: colombos
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...week to sack three senior ministers, suspend Parliament and impose a state of emergency?all while her Prime Minister was overseas?represented, even her party members admit, a naked power grab rather than an attempt to protect "national security" as she claimed. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's return to Colombo three days later and his triumphant procession to the cheers of tens of thousands were, his supporters agree, premature victory celebrations. To the north, the decision by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to recall 180 of its guerrillas from "family leave" is, Wickremesinghe tells TIME, actually a cover...
...immediate responsibility for this crisis falls squarely on President Kumaratunga. "She took these decisions alone... to take power into her own hands," says Mahinda Rajapakse, vice president of Kumaratunga's People's Alliance party. A Colombo-based diplomat says international observers were "flabbergasted" by the timing of Kumaratunga's moves. Just three days earlier, the LTTE had injected new life into a peace process that had been moribund since talks were broken off in April by submitting a comprehensive set of demands to Colombo. While uncompromising, the LTTE proposals were only a starting point for negotiations, the diplomat stresses. Moreover...
...prosperity extends far beyond Colombo's busy shopping malls and car showrooms, boosted in part by the resumption of internal trade with the Tamil-dominated northern and eastern areas of the country, isolated for years by a government-imposed embargo. Before the peace process began, Wickremesinghe says, "we were a market of 15 million. Now we are a market of 19 million." In Dambulla, a trading town in the center of Sri Lanka, vegetable sellers now do brisk business with Jaffna, the chief city in the Tamil north: these days, large onions and pineapples are sent up north, while trucks...
...prosperity to continue, though, the peace must hold. On Oct. 24, President Chandrika Kumaratunga, Wickremesinghe's main political rival, convened a giant rally in Colombo to charge that the government was preparing to hand over the north and east to the LTTE by acceding to all its demands. In addition to offending the Tamil population?which is mostly Hindu?by holding the rally on the Hindu sacred day of Deepavali, Kumaratunga is considering an alliance with an ultra-nationalist Sinhalese group in the next elections. Those elections could be held at any time: constitutionally, the President has almost arbitrary power...
...impoverished the LTTE-controlled north and east. Opponents accused him of endangering national security, but the gamble paid off. Three months later, the rebels, in part encouraged by his gesture, signed a formal cease-fire. TIME's Aravind Adiga met with the PM at his official residence in Colombo...