Word: lanka
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...Lanka's treatment of the Tamil minority is a central issue in the election. During the last months of war, the government had restricted nearly 300,000 Tamils who fled the fighting to detention camps. Under intense domestic and international pressure, Rajapaksa announced on Dec. 1 that the 130,000 people still in the camps would have limited freedom to leave. The opposition parties have taken up the cause of these internally displaced people, or IDPs, and Fonseka says the government should give them complete freedom of movement: "If they handled the situation properly, we would have been...
...detention of these civilians has become an international human rights issue. On Dec. 16, the European Union proposed suspending a major trade agreement with Sri Lanka, mainly due to the continued detention of IDPs. But Sri Lankan authorities have justified the camps as a security measure, allowing them to screen out suspected LTTE fighters hiding among the civilian population. Fonseka says he would have handled the process more effectively and warns of the consequences of failing to identify lurking LTTE cadres. "If there is a single terrorist act, the army will have to again start searching these people, putting...
...Lanka has never had a coup or a military president, and some political observers fear the end of that proud civilian tradition if the general is elected. Fonseka dismisses that concern, taking as his models Eisenhower and De Gaulle. If he really wanted to seize power, he asks, why give up the uniform now and "go around asking for the vote?" He says the high-handed treatment by the Rajapaksa government forced him into politics. "The government was responsible for pushing me into that," Fonseka says. "Now they have to face the music...
Fonseka's base of support cuts right into Rajapaksa's. Both are from the increasingly vocal bourgeoisie of the rural south, the heartland of Sri Lanka's Sinhala Buddhist majority. The LTTE's Tamil nationalism and its dream of a separate homeland for the Tamil minority were a challenge to Sinhala Buddhist dominance. Fonseka has the reputation of being an even more strident Sinhala nationalist than Rajapaksa but is now trying to soften that image. "I am a very good Sinhalese, a very good Buddhist, there is no question about it," he says. "But towards minorities I never...
Read "Under Global Pressure, Sri Lanka Opens Camps...