Word: lankans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Colombo city employees dismantle a cutout billboard of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa displayed during May Day festivities at which the 68- year-old Premadasa was blown to bits by a suicidal assassin who detonated explosives strapped to his body. The bomber who killed the President and 23 others was identified last week as a Tamil militant who had ingratiated himself with the President's staff...
...these ghostly materials Michael Ondaatje has fashioned a magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times. Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan poet who lives in Toronto, has gained considerable acclaim before, most notably for his one-of-a-kind memoir of colonial Ceylon, Running in the Family. He has also established himself as one of the most inspired chroniclers, and exemplars, of the new cross-cultural mix taking shape all around us, able to light up Salman Rushdie-land with a visual daring that must have moviemakers salivating. Two weeks ago, The English Patient won England's prestigious...
Five years ago, police in the resort town of Wadduwa, Sri Lanka, raided a seaside hotel owned by a German and his Sri Lankan wife. The building was occupied not by tourists but by 20 young Sri Lankan women and their 22 infants, some just a few weeks old. The hotel was a "baby farm," where foreigners looking for children to adopt could come to browse, and for a fee $ of $1,000 to $5,000, have their pick of the babies. The mothers, all desperately poor, would get about $50 in exchange for each of their children...
...baby traffic, Romania forbade all adoptions by foreigners until it formulates new procedures; it is not expected to begin again soon. Few Third World countries are likely to follow suit. Ending foreign adoptions would not necessarily stop the buying and stealing of babies. It would merely, as one Sri Lankan lawyer points out, dump thousands more orphans and abandoned children into the care of the state -- a burden that neither Sri Lanka nor most other poor countries are equipped to bear...
...carnage. Much of Sri Lanka's north and east have been devastated economically, and the murderous campaigns of both sides have shattered any hope of trust between Tamils and Sinhalese perhaps for generations. Both sides butcher their enemies, and an Amnesty International report claims that the Sri Lankan army killed thousands of civilians in Tamil areas last year. In less than a decade, the island has become heavily militarized. In the early 1980s, it had a small army of 16,000 and a defense budget of $30 million (2.5% of government spending). Today it has an army...