Word: lanka
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...either side of her head, and a smile that explodes across her face, as if someone has switched on a spotlight. She's smart, too, likes social studies best, and especially learning about different cultures in far-off lands. Crouched on a mat in a refugee camp on Sri Lanka's east coast, flicking the pages of a schoolbook, pencil by her side, she looks like a normal kid. And then you spot it: Jeevatharsini has no left arm. Through the hole in her dress where her upper arm should join her shoulder, a stump is just visible, the skin...
...thousands of Sri Lankans share Jeevatharsini's scars. In 2002 the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), as the rebels call themselves, signed a cease-fire designed to lead to a political agreement. While the rebels want a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and east, the government wants to keep the island whole. A federation seemed a possible compromise. But peace talks sputtered and then collapsed (both sides accused the other of being insincere), and since December 2005, Sri Lanka has again been at undeclared war with itself. The latest round...
...Lanka has been in 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...
...grapples with insurgencies in Iraq, and internecine fighting rages on in places like Darfur, the renewal of hostilities in Sri Lanka offers some lessons as to why civil wars are so hard to end. Part of the problem is that fratricidal disputes are often personal and heartfelt. "Both sides see themselves as being locked in a fight against evil," Jehan Perera, executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, wrote in a recent appraisal of his country's war. This fight is part ethnic, part religious and wholly vicious. "It is the belief in the unchanging nature...
WHAT IT MEANS: The group that perfected suicide bombing adds a deadly new wrinkle in its 24-year conflict. The sortie killed three but also disrupted commercial air traffic to Sri Lanka's main airport...