Word: lankans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After a week of fighting, Sri Lankan troops had battled their way up Jaffna Peninsula, ousting ethnic Tamil separatists from a number of strongholds in the northern tip of the island nation. The cost was high: as many as 200 civilians believed dead and thousands more left without food. But, said a high-ranking official in Colombo, the capital, "we were winning...
Undeterred, Gandhi ordered five of the Indian air force's Soviet-built An- 32 transports, escorted by four French-built Mirage-2000 fighter jets, into Sri Lankan airspace to drop 25 tons of "humanitarian relief supplies" onto Jaffna. Colombo immediately charged that the airlift was a "naked violation of Sri Lanka's sovereignty and independence." India insisted that the move was needed to meet the "continuing deterioration" of Sri Lanka's Tamils, a condition Colombo denies...
India's decision to intervene so visibly in the civil war apparently slowed the Sri Lankan government's military campaign. Though Tamils make up only 18% of the island's 16 million people, the separatist guerrillas have found support and safe haven among the 50 million Tamils living across the strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Last week's airlift seemed to indicate that Gandhi was giving in to pressure from Indian Tamils to intervene more actively in Sri Lanka. Said an official in Colombo: "Whatever India may say about humanitarian aid, what they actually wanted...
Unable to provide the swift military victory demanded by the island's Buddhist Sinhalese majority, Sri Lankan President Junius Jayewardene may now try to appease that constituency by continuing to stand up to India, though he will surely try to avoid provoking a military response that would topple him from power. He also faces the problem of preventing Sinhalese anger from erupting into bloody race riots, such as those in which an estimated 1,000 Tamils were massacred in 1983. "Rajiv Gandhi may have acted out of domestic compulsion," said a Sri Lankan official, "but he doesn't seem...
...terrifyingly familiar episode in Sri Lanka's bloody four- year-old civil war -- except for its gruesome magnitude. Last week separatist Tamil rebels, who are fighting for an independent homeland in Northern and Eastern provinces, waylaid six vehicles with mostly Sinhalese holidaymakers returning home from celebrating the Sri Lankan New Year. The rebels dragged passengers, including women and children, from the buses and trucks, then mowed them down with machine-gun fire. When the shooting stopped, at least 126 travelers lay dead on the jungle roadside. The violence prompted the government to terminate a cease-fire with the rebels...