Word: lankans
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Virtually every night since then, small groups of guerrillas have stolen across the waters to prepare for a showdown battle with the Sri Lankan army. Last week the war all but broke out. First the rebels, who represent the island's 2.6 million mostly Hindu Tamils in a separatist struggle against 11 million mainly Buddhist Sinhalese, killed three civilians whom they suspected of being government informers. Then they planted a bomb that ripped apart sections of a train in the capital, Colombo. Finally, hundreds of the so- called Tamil Tigers cut off electricity in the northern city of Jaffna, blasted...
...northern and southeastern parts of the island has brought Sri Lanka perilously close to full-scale civil war. Today much of Sri Lanka's northern region, which is heavily populated by Tamils, is under de facto military rule, garrisoned by nearly half the 12,000-man-strong Sri Lankan army. Since the collapse of ; negotiations between the government of President J.R. Jayawardene and leading Tamil politicians last December, more than 700 people, mostly civilians, have been killed. Says Lalith Athulathmudali, Jayawardene's Minister of National Security: "This is the most dangerous time Sri Lanka has ever known...
...Tamils," says a U.S. official, "have been on the losing end of Sri Lankan democracy for decades." Simmering unrest finally came to a boil in July 1983. After the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in an ambush, Sinhalese mobs ran wild through Colombo, killing at least 412 Tamils and leaving 100,000 others homeless...
During the prolonged question-and-answer period after the Secretary's afternoon speech at the Yenching Library, a self-described Tamilese man gave Perez de Cuellar a sealed document entreating him, the man said, to "stop the killing" of Tamils by the Sri Lankan government...
...also ordered his troops to stamp out the separatists by force and, according to an Amnesty International report, had sent Tamils to prisons in which they have been brutally tortured. Forced in May to invoke the fifth state of emergency since Jayawardene took office in 1977, the Sri Lankan government last Saturday proposed a constitutional amendment that would ban the secessionist party, as well as all separatist activity...