Word: rajapaksas
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...Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa sits at the head of a long banquet table, presiding over what looks like a hotel's lunch buffet. The mood is informal as Cabinet ministers, their clerks and assorted relatives and friends line up patiently to eat in the main dining room of Rajapaksa's official compound. Outside, on the streets of Colombo, he is the all-conquering hero. In May, Rajapaksa's government ended Sri Lanka's 26-year-long civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the capital's broad avenues are dominated by enormous banners glorifying...
...barrel-chested rugby fan, Rajapaksa, 63, will need that common touch to bring Sri Lanka to a true and lasting peace between the island nation's Sinhalese majority (which is mostly Buddhist) and Tamil minority (mostly Hindu). The civil war began in earnest in July 1983, after nearly 3,000 Tamils were killed in several days of systematic anti-Tamil violence. It was the low point of what Sri Lanka's Tamils felt had been decades of official discrimination and military repression in Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. The LTTE took up arms in the name...
...Rajapaksa faces questions about human-rights violations over the targeting of civilians in the final offensive, unexplained disappearances of Tamils and controls on the media. He must revive an economy that has been badly strained by military spending. Most importantly, he will have to restore to their homes and livelihoods some 300,000 Tamils in the north, a major chunk of the population of that region, who fled the fighting only to be detained in overcrowded internment camps. Without that crucial first step toward peace, Sri Lanka's alienated Tamils may never feel truly part of the nation. "If that...
...rare interview with TIME on July 10, Rajapaksa made no apologies about how he prosecuted his war with the Tigers. "We showed that you can defeat terrorism," he said. The U.S. and Europe, his biggest trading partners, publicly criticized his apparent disregard for human rights, but he dismisses the West's objections. "Some people think we are still colonies," he said. "That mentality must go." (Read "How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example...
...Tigers? Above all, he represents Sri Lanka's Sinhalese Buddhist heartland in the rural south. His sarong and tunic are the spotless white of a devout Buddhist; his reddish brown scarf the color of korakan, a rough grain eaten as the staple diet of poor farmers. Everything about Rajapaksa - his big laugh, his rough-and-ready English, his bejeweled fingers and ink-black hair - marks him as part of the rural bourgeoisie, not the urban élite educated abroad. This is more than just an image. He was elected to Parliament as its youngest member in 1970 and moved slowly...