Word: eelam
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...beach resort. The navy gunboats sweeping the harbor are another. So why are hotels in this northeastern Sri Lankan town booked nearly solid these days? Blame it on the cease-fire. For years, Trincomalee's proximity to the front lines of the war against separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and its strategic value as a major deepwater harbor made it a city on edge. The war also kept visitors from some of the island's finest beaches on the little-visited eastern coast. Just six months ago, the Tigers launched a suicide attack on a troop-transport ship just...
...draw parallels with, say, the Tamils and LTTE," another official explains, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been waging a bloody campaign for two decades for an independent state in Sri Lanka. "If Tamils set up businesses in Sri Lanka and then support the Tamil Tigers, what can the Sri Lankan government do? It can only monitor these businessmen but cannot arrest them without concrete proof. It's the same here. Al-Qaeda representatives are sent to ensure the radical groups in the region have the necessary funding to buy arms and don't have...
...Jaffna Wednesday, two days after President Chandrika Kumaratunga rejected a rebel truce offer allowing her troops safe passage out of the beleaguered Jaffna peninsula, vowing instead to defend the territory to the last man. The secessionist fighters, who regard Jaffna as the capital of their desired homeland of Tamil Eelam, last week delivered a crushing blow to the Sri Lankan military by overrunning its strategic Elephant Base complex at the gateway to the peninsula, killing some 350 government troops in the process, wounding more than 2,000 and leaving a further 350 missing in action. Government forces are now surrounded...
...hard to beat a guerrilla army fighting for independence on home ground, but even more so when the insurgents are better armed than the government forces. Sri Lanka found itself forced to declare martial law Thursday following another dramatic defeat at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who last week took control of the gateway to the disputed Jaffna province, leaving some 40,000 government troops trapped and surrounded. And to make matters worse, India - whose government includes parties from India's Tamil province, and which was eventually asked by Sri Lanka to withdraw the last time...
...line against the guerrillas the centerpiece of its tenure, faces the humiliating prospect of having to negotiate a cease-fire with the LTTE in order to save thousands of its soldiers. And the rebels, who are fighting for independence for the mostly Tamil northern provinces they refer to as Eelam (the Hindu Tamil form about 20 percent of Sri Lanka's population, with the majority Sinhalese, who are largely Buddhist, making up about 75 percent) are likely to demand de facto control over the Jaffna peninsula as their price. In acceding to such a demand the government would concede defeat...