Word: lankan
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Humanitarian agencies have been warning for months that there would be huge civilian casualties if the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam continued their fight to the death with thousands of unarmed people caught between them. No one paid much heed to the desperate warnings except for the relief agencies themselves, and on Sunday, they appeared to prove correct...
...Lankan government has denied that government forces were responsible for the attack and called the doctor's report a fabrication. "There is absolutely no way that this doctor could have used a telephone, dialed BBC, or CNN or al-Jazeera, and said that the shelling was coming from the government side and so many people have been killed," says Mahinda Samarasinghe, Sri Lankan Minister for Human Rights and Disaster Management. No one within areas held by the Tigers can act independently and are under pressure from the Tigers, Samarasinghe says. "There may have been a gun pointed at the doctor...
...public, given the sensitivities involved, especially at a time when emotions are running high, not only in Sri Lanka, but elsewhere as well," Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said. Weiss has overstepped his mandate, Kohona says, effectively giving a stamp of authenticity to unverified claims about the war. The Sri Lankan government has made it all but impossible to verify any claims about events inside the war zone by refusing requests for unmonitored access by independent journalists...
...north after nearly 30 years of war. Spending on military pay, pensions and hardware has put a huge burden on Sri Lanka's budget. This year, the government's total tax revenue, after debt servicing, will not be enough to meet its expected spending. And yet the Sri Lankan government has not only refused to accept humanitarian conditions on aid; it has tightened its position on access to civilian refugees, whom it calls the beneficiaries of "the largest hostage rescue in the world's history." The Army's screening of civilians, for example, in which suspected LTTE fighters are weeded...
...military must first finish a difficult endgame. The remaining Tigers, numbering perhaps in the hundreds, are far outnumbered by the thousands of Sri Lankan soldiers arrayed around them. They could be dealt with within a matter of hours, says Army Commander Lt.-Gen. Sarath Fonseka, if not for the civilians. And so the military is moving cautiously. Military officers near the combat zone say that they believe that Prabhakaran is very close, suspected to be holed up at Vellamullivaikal, deep within the 7-km-long sliver under the Tigers. There is one unspoken fear among them: what will the final...