Word: rajapaksa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will get the credit for ending Sri Lanka's 26-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: the tough Army commander or the President who appointed him? That's the question at the heart of island's Jan. 26 elections that will pit President Mahinda Rajapaksa against retired Lieut. Gen. Sarath Fonseka. A political novice, Fonseka may not have the organizational strength to beat Rajapaksa, but he has proven to be a sharp thorn in the side of a president who recently seemed unbeatable...
Fonseka has spent nearly 40 years as a soldier. He joined the Army at the age of 19, and he will turn 59 on Dec. 18, the day his campaign officially begins. The same year that Fonseka joined the Army, Rajapaksa won his first election to Parliament. A shrewd, brash career politician, Rajapaksa made eliminating the LTTE, an armed separatist group, the all-consuming mission of his four years in office. Since the collapse of the Tigers, Colombo has been full of enormous cut-outs of the president, congratulating him on his victory. Rajapaksa called early elections to capitalize...
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...
Fonseka's own reasons for entering politics are much more personal. In an interview with TIME on Dec. 13 in Colombo, Fonseka explained that just two months after the war ended in May, President Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sidelined him. He says he was given a prestigious new post - Chief of Defense Staff - without any operational authority. "Even to get a corporal to the CDS office I had to get the Defense Secretary's approval," Fonseka says. "So then I was not happy with the job there. Then I also realised that they were not trusting...
...civilian tradition if the general is elected. Fonseka dismisses that concern, taking as his models Eisenhower and De Gaulle. If he really wanted to seize power, he asks, why give up the uniform now and "go around asking for the vote?" He says the high-handed treatment by the Rajapaksa government forced him into politics. "The government was responsible for pushing me into that," Fonseka says. "Now they have to face the music...