Word: lanka
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...small a size (the Maldives' population is less than 400,000), the new government's task is monumental. "It is as if, in the same country, both Saddam Hussein was toppled and the Berlin Wall fell," says Ahmed Naseer, a painter and dissident who lived in exile in Sri Lanka with Nasheed. It falls to the new President - a slight, erudite former journalist who peppers conversation with quotes from Dostoyevsky and Dante - to save the Maldives from sinking under the weight of its problems. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international body of scientists, forecasts that sea levels will...
...skin-deep. "Gayoom developed resorts and buildings," says Aishath Velezinee, a journalist and consultant for the U.N., "but he didn't develop people." After 30 years of Gayoom's rule, the Maldives still has no university. The absence of a public ferry system makes travel to India or Sri Lanka, 400 miles (640 km) northwest, more affordable for some Maldivians than going to other islands in their own country. Many of the outlying atolls lack basic sewage-treatment facilities, while in Malé, political power and privilege have until recently remained tightly clustered around a coterie of Gayoom's family...
...With the aid of the Internet and radio broadcasts produced in Europe and Sri Lanka, the country's activists chipped away at the edifice of state control. U.S. State Department reports rebuked Gayoom's government for its brutal prison practices, particularly in September 2003 when Evan Naseem, a teenager in detention on petty-drug charges, was killed by guards. His death was a catalyst for change, triggering mass riots that, combined with mounting international pressure, forced Gayoom to initiate the process of reforms and liberalization that would finally lead to his defeat in the polls last year...
Firecrackers exploded around Colombo on Monday as Sri Lankans celebrated what they hoped would be the end to a civil war that has plagued the nation since 1983. At 1:40 p.m., Sri Lanka's government radio announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed early this morning by special forces in the island's northern Karayamullavaikkal area. The 54-year-old Prabhakaran, who headed the Tamil separatist movement for 33 years, had been trying to flee the shrinking 100-m by 100-m pocket of land still under Tiger control...
...square-kilometer area still controlled by the Tamil Tigers, which have been fighting for a separate ethnic Tamil homeland since 1983. The Sri Lankan government says there are no more than 15,000 to 20,000. The LTTE holds only this small strip of territory on Sri Lanka's northeastern coast within an area designated by the Army as a so-called safe zone. Over the weekend, the Army announced that it had re-demarcated the safe zone, chopping it down to just 2.5 km long. The Army did not specify how it informed civilians that their safe area...