Word: mahinda
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President Mahinda Rajapaksa - Sri Lanka's self-described "rebel with a cause" - extended his four decades in politics with a landslide victory on Jan. 27 in the country's first election since the end of its 26-year civil war. Upending predictions that the contest would be a close fight, Rajapaksa easily beat his challenger, General Sarath Fonseka - a former ally in Sri Lanka's military victory over the separatist Tamil Tigers - with 57.9% of the vote. Though he was hailed by many members of Sri Lanka's ethnic Sinhalese majority for emerging victorious from the decades-long conflict with...
...tight electoral contest predicted between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and retired Army commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka failed to materialize when Sri Lanka went to the polls on Tuesday. Instead, Rajapaksa won easily - with 57.9% of the vote, by official count, 1.8 million more votes than Fonseka, who received around 40%. But Fonseka immediately rejected the result, alleging vote-rigging, prompting a tense standoff...
...race between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his challenger, the former army commander Sarath Fonseka, is unexpectedly close. Rajapaksa won the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal ethnic separatist group that once controlled much of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. But Fonseka, a hero in his own right in the same war, is a formidable opponent. He represents a patchwork coalition of opposition parties united in their antipathy to Rajapaksa, whom they say has disregarded the rights of the Tamil minority and indulged in blatant crony capitalism.(Watch a video about the final days...
...work. His car was followed by two motorcycles, which blocked his path as the gunmen shot him through the driver-side window, when he was just five minutes away from his office. He was rushed to the hospital but died after surgery. Wickrematunge was a staunch critic of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and his murder came in the middle of the government's final offensive to crush the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The government did not brook any criticism of its conduct of the war, but even since declaring victory last May things are little improved...
Without any other compelling candidate, the opposition parties have rallied around Fonseka as their war hero. "He was someone who could prove to be an effective counter to the popularity and the credibility that President Mahinda Rajapaksa enjoys," says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council, a research and advocacy group in Colombo. (See a video about civilians caught in Sri Lanka's civil...