Word: rajapaksas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lankan Army is fighting - and apparently about to win - a 25-year-old war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal ethnic separatist movement. Alongside the conventional war, which is now in its final stages, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been fighting a carefully orchestrated public-relations battle...
...Rajapaksa enjoys overwhelming support for the war among the Sri Lankan public, but the plight of civilians in and near the war zone - 100,000 have fled in the last few weeks - has sparked strong statements from the U.S., the U.K. and France, which have called on the Sri Lankan government to halt the fighting until the 50,000 or so remaining civilians can leave. The LTTE are believed to be using them as human shields, but Rajapaksa has been unmoved by entreaties from Western countries to allow aid agencies to enter the war zone to help them. On April...
...military conflict—but certainly not everyday social conflict or even paramilitary conflict—descends into stasis, it is worth meditating upon what the war has been worth. Amidst all the rhetoric of doubts and redoubts, one practical concern should worry President Rajapaksa in particular: What are the chances of a legitimized nation-state if an entire ethnic group feels that it has, for the last 25 years, been a target for elimination or, as the more impassioned critics claim, genocide...
...Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has staked his political future on achieving a military victory over the Tigers, following the collapse of a 2002 cease-fire. The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 to establish a separate homeland in the island's ethnic Tamil-majority areas, a conflict that has claimed more than 70,000 lives. To capture Prabhakaran - dead or alive - would symbolize the successful conclusion of a military offensive that began late in 2006 but has since dragged, despite the capture of nearly every town under Tiger control. Rajapaksa had one message for the Tiger leadership - above all Prabhakaran...
...Tamils from LTTE territory, Kadirgamar notes, "their sense of citizenship will be determined by how they are treated." They may re-enter Sri Lankan society only to find themselves subject to security measures that fulfill the worst predictions of the Tigers' relentless propaganda about the persecution of Tamils. Rajapaksa's muscular, nationalist ideology appears to be winning the war. But it may be at the cost of the open, outward-looking, multiethnic character of the nation that Sri Lanka once tried...