Word: lankans
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...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 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...