Word: rajapaksas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...LTTE is short on supplies and fighters, and has gone to ground in an ever ever-shrinking pocket of jungle in the northeast of the country as government forces advance. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Sunday called for the LTTE's surrender, but there is little chance that a rebel movement whose fighters over the years have chosen suicide over capture will go down quietly. (See pictures from inside Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger territory...
...Having brought the LTTE insurgency to the verge of collapse is a triumph for President Rajapaksa, who has revitalized the Sri Lankan armed forces through a massive injection of funds that has boosted everything from tactical capability to morale. Some 20% of the nation's budget is now devoted to military spending (6% of its GDP), and the boost in resources has, over the past nine months, helped the military make steady gains against what had once seemed intractable positions held by the rebels. Some have taken Colombo's example as a message for counterinsurgency efforts elsewhere...
...decades of suppression of the country's largest minority. A cease-fire agreement signed in 2002 raised hopes that the bombings, assassinations and terrorism had finally come to an end. But the Tigers and the government failed to reach a meaningful political compromise and returned to war. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has promised a "military solution" to the Tamil question. He is almost there. After months of intense fighting in the LTTE-controlled areas of the Tamil-majority north, the army has captured Kilinochchi, the rebels' administrative capital, and it is moving toward their last strongholds in the jungles around Mullaitivu...
...report on these successes--or on their human toll. The war zone is all but off-limits to the media, one of the many security measures imposed by a government with little tolerance for dissent. "I ask this of all political parties, all media and all people's organizations," Rajapaksa said in a speech in 2006. "You decide whether you should be with a handful of terrorists or with the common man ... You must clearly choose between these two sides...
...holds-barred, occasionally salacious stories alleging corruption and self-dealing among the powerful. No matter who the ruling party was, all officials were his potential targets. And Wickrematunge believed he had become theirs. His paper's stories and editorials about the administration of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa have been particularly controversial. The newspaper is fighting a defamation lawsuit by Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the President's brother, over a series of Leader articles alleging corruption. The Sri Lankan government has denied responsibility for the attack on Wickrematunge and has called for an investigation...