Word: lankan
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...domestic dispute that threatens to become another culture-war circus, complete with a clash-of-religions angle to boot: the battle for Rifqa Bary, a 17-year-old girl from Columbus, Ohio, who ran away to an Evangelical church in Orlando, Fla., because, she claims, her Sri Lankan Muslim family has threatened to kill her for recently converting to Christianity...
...Mahinda the Conqueror The statements made by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in his interview with TIME should serve as a lesson for the leaders of larger regional neighbors such as India and Pakistan - countries where extremists, terrorists and separatists have made the lives of common people miserable [July 27]. Rajapaksa, though, has smashed a longstanding Tamil insurgency and united the country. He truly means what he says when he declares Sri Lankans are "my citizens. I am responsible for them." He has aptly demonstrated how a country should be ruled. Brij Agarwal, Bhopal, India...
...Rajapaksa professes his buddhist faith, which is based on nonviolence. Yet, by some accounts, his army behaved like butchers. Is it wrong for the Tamils in Sri Lanka to save their language and their culture? The whole world watched as the Sri Lankan army racked up significant civilian casualties on the grounds that it was fighting terrorism. Even now, Rajapaksa does not allow international observers to visit and see for themselves what happened. The press is gagged there. But the dreams of the Tamils will remain undimmed and Rajapaksa's successors will still have to wrestle with that quest...
...restrictions on the press imposed as war measures. On July 12, the government banned a popular news website that had run stories critical of the government after the war's end, and it has not yet found those responsible for the murder in January of a prominent Sri Lankan journalist and critic of the government, Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was also a freelance reporter for TIME. But those who know Rajapaksa well say that his pragmatism may, in the end, win out. He never took a strong position on the LTTE until he ran for President, and he has supported privatization...
...hint of it in the President's dining room. Three years ago, he co-opted two former leaders of the LTTE, who fed intelligence to the army and helped bring the eastern provinces under its control. They had spent their whole lives fighting for the destruction of the Sri Lankan state but are now ministers in Rajapaksa's government. They stood in the buffet line with everyone else, and then quietly sat down to discuss the afternoon's committee meetings over lunch. The real world may be less civil and much more complicated, but at this table there is room...