Word: jaffna
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...retaliatory attacks timed with each new announcement of a victory by the army. "They'll want to show that they can do something in Colombo and the suburbs," says Hulugalle. The government says that Elephant Pass, another key stretch of territory on the road to the northern port of Jaffna, will be the next to fall. Colombo is bracing itself - for celebration and its consequences...
...back to Colombo, we were warned to finish our work there and go back to our home towns [immediately]," says a 19-year-old who gave his name as Ramalingam, of the raid in which he was swept up. Sixty-two-year-old Nadaraja had traveled to Colombo from Jaffna in the north with his family in the hope that they could get to India for treatment for his sick wife. When "we showed a letter from a doctor, the police told us we will have to go back," he says. "Now, it seems even in Colombo...
...ceaseless turmoil for more than three decades. During the 1970s and '80s, Marxist radicals in the south engaged in a fierce campaign against the government and were just as brutally put down. The conflict with the L.T.T.E. was sparked in 1975 when the Tigers assassinated the mayor of Jaffna, Sri Lanka's northernmost city, and intensified after the killing of 13 soldiers in 1983. Fighting has gone on for so long now that it has brutalized an entire society, creating a culture of violence that haunts the country whether there is fighting or not. In his exquisitely written novel Anil...
...FORMIDABLE ARE THE TAMIL TIGERS? Sri Lankan Presidents and Prime Ministers come and go, but L.T.T.E. leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has been around for 30 years. Born in a far-north village known as a smugglers' haven, he started young, allegedly killing the mayor of Jaffna, Sri Lanka's northernmost city, at the age of 20. Prabhakaran has displayed a genius for guerrilla warfare, forging the Tigers into what is widely acknowledged as the world's most ruthlessly effective rebel army. Extraordinarily disciplined, the Tigers make an art form of suicide attacks. They hide explosives around or even inside the body...
...defend my country." Hawks are ascendant on both sides. DeVotta says elements in the government believe the split within the L.T.T.E. has weakened the rebels to a point where they can be beaten in war. Chalk and other observers predict a full-scale attack by the Tigers on Jaffna, accompanied by suicide bombs in Colombo. "If war breaks out it will spell doom to the entire country and create an unbridgeable ethnic chasm," says the L.T.T.E.'s Balasingham. That realization makes it no less likely to happen...