Word: lankans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi emerged from the President's House in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo last week, he had reason to smile. The previous day the Prime Minister had signed an agreement with Sri Lankan President Junius R. Jayewardene that promised to end a brutal civil war. But as Gandhi passed the white-uniformed men of a Sri Lankan naval honor guard, one of the sailors broke ranks and swung at Gandhi with the butt of his rifle. The Prime Minister caught a glancing blow in the back and stumbled. Guards quickly hustled Gandhi away and hauled...
Though Jayewardene eased those laws in 1977, hard feelings lingered. Tamil resentment erupted into sporadic violence. In July 1983 one of those incidents catapulted the country into war: after Tamil terrorists ambushed and killed 13 Sri Lankan soldiers, enraged Sinhalese stampeded through Colombo and killed at least 600 Tamils...
...rebels, dominated by the 3,500-man Tigers, demand a unified, independent state of "Eelam" (homeland) for Tamils in the island's northern and eastern provinces. Outnumbered by the Sri Lankan military and poorly armed, the insurgents would not have gone far without assistance from India. Just 22 miles across the Palk Strait from northern Sri Lanka lies India's Tamil Nadu state, where the rebels maintain training camps. Despite this support, New Delhi did not endorse the Tigers' demand for independence, insisting instead that Colombo grant the Tamil regions local rule...
...India's 3,000 troops arrived in the Jaffna area last week, J.N. Dixit, the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, heightened Sinhalese fears that India might be aiming at more than a temporary stay. When the troop deployment was announced, Colombo promised that the units would be under Sri Lankan command. Sounding a bit like a proconsul, Dixit told a Colombo news conference that the troops would answer to him. The next day Dixit retreated, saying the Indian troops were ultimately under Jayewardene's authority...
...slight injury that Rajiv Gandhi suffered when he was attacked by a Sri Lankan honor guardsman last week is not the only insult the Indian Prime Minister has endured lately. Just two years ago Gandhi, 42, was hailed as the most promising of leaders, an enlightened Prime Minister whose reputation for probity won him the nickname "Mr. Clean." Today, battered by corruption scandals, local-election defeats, the defection of ministers and worsening communal violence, Gandhi, 42, is widely regarded as pathetically inept. As the newsmagazine India Today put it, "Rajiv Gandhi is not just in crisis. He is the crisis...