Word: rajapaksas
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...Lanka's 26-year civil war between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) came to a dramatic end in May with a decisive military victory and the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers' fearsome leader. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is the man who tamed the Tigers. Now his task is to heal a nation still divided by tensions between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. In a rare, wide-ranging interview, Rajapaksa, 63, talked with TIME's Jyoti Thottam at the President's official compound in Colombo on July...
...years, young Tamils have been staging protests calling for international intervention in Sri Lanka's civil war to help establish a permanent cease-fire. Now they're shifting their energies to persuade Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa to provide desperately needed resources to war-torn areas across the nation. Many young Tamils have grown loudly critical of Rajapaksa, who they say does not respect the rights of minority groups in the country. On June 17 in London, a 73-day protest calling for an end to discrimination against the Tamils by the Sri Lankan government ended with a series...
...afraid of walking up to any gallows, having defeated the world's worst terrorists.' MAHINDA RAJAPAKSA, Sri Lankan President, on suggestions that he and his advisers should be investigated for committing war crimes during the country's 26-year conflict...
...Tiger targets. Refugees fleeing the fighting said thousands of innocents were being killed in the army's bombardments. Modern militaries typically halt hostilities when large numbers of civilians are killed. The Sri Lankan army barely paused. Reva Bhalla, director of analysis at Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, says Rajapaksa's "disregard for civilian casualties" was a key to the success of the military operation...
Lack of accurate reporting from the war front was one reason why the international outcry against the military's heavy-handedness was so muted - especially in the U.S. Rajapaksa also benefited from the post-9/11 global consensus that insurgent groups using terror tactics "can no longer call themselves freedom fighters," according to Daniel Markey, a South Asia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The Tigers didn't understand this, and paid a significant price...