Word: lankans
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...Jayatilleka says the bombings and assassinations have gone on for so long that he now navigates Colombo according to where atrocities occurred. "Every place has a story of violence," he says. "The whole landscape." The brutality colors the way people think about the current fighting. Sri Lankan film star and would-be peacemaker Ranjan Ramanayaka is given to phrases like "the most powerful God is nature," and "the conflict can be ended with the weapon of love, the weapon of having sex, the weapon of making little babies together." But even he recently applied for a gun license after...
...Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans share Jeevatharsini's scars. In 2002 the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), as the rebels call themselves, signed a cease-fire designed to lead to a political agreement. While the rebels want a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and east, the government wants to keep the island whole. A federation seemed a possible compromise. But peace talks sputtered and then collapsed (both sides accused the other of being insincere), and since December 2005, Sri Lanka has again been at undeclared war with itself. The latest...
...Government forces have pushed the Tigers out of much of the east, in part because a breakaway faction of Tamil fighters that fell out with the main rebel group has joined with government troops against their old comrades. The Sri Lankan military is now opening up a new front in the northwest. But there are few signs that the military is on the verge of victory. The L.T.T.E. has used tactical withdrawals to regroup following defeats in the past and is still able to spring surprises. In late February a group of foreign diplomats, including the U.S. and Italian ambassadors...
...Fighting has gone on for so long now that it has brutalized an entire society, creating a culture of violence that haunts the country whether there is fighting or not. In his exquisitely written novel Anil's Ghost, set in an earlier phase of the conflict, Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje describes the unnatural horrors that grip this tropical South Asian island of 21 million people. In Sri Lanka, Ondaatje writes, "the reason...
...violence has infected other parts of Sri Lankan society. The country has high rates of domestic violence and alcoholism. The suicide rate, especially among Sri Lanka's young, is one of the worst in Asia. The fighting and threat of suicide bombings means many children miss long periods of school. Cell phones have turbocharged Sri Lanka's rumor mill and kids are yanked from classes at even the whiff of potential trouble. Many of those who do well in school end up leaving the country for opportunities abroad...