Word: rajapaksas
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...that the Tigers have been defeated, governments and security forces around the world may try to learn from the success of the Sri Lanka government. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his army have turned the conventional wisdom on fighting insurgencies on its head, adopting strategies and tactics long discredited, both in the battlefield and in the military classroom. Since they appear to have worked against the Tigers, other countries wracked by insurgencies - from Pakistan to Sudan to Algeria - may be tempted to follow suit. But Rajapaksa's triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a sharp decline...
...Rajapaksa's campaign has a bit in common with the one General David Petraeus deployed so successfully in Iraq, and is rolling out in Afghanistan. Just as the American general was able to use Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, Sri Lanka's President turned a splinter group of Tigers into allies. Colombo and Washington (and other Western capitals) also cooperated in cutting off funding to the Tigers from a global network of sympathizers. Beyond that, however, the Rajapaksa counterinsurgency doctrine seems ripped from a bygone era. The main principles...
Negotiations Don't After numerous attempts at mediation - most notably by Norway - led to nothing, Rajapaksa basically abandoned the pursuit of a negotiated solution. Once the military had the upper hand, there was little effort to treaty with the Tigers...
...That left Prabhakaran with control of the north, secured by several thousand soldiers. But the transformation from running a guerrilla force to a conventional army may have been the leader's undoing. The nation's current President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, took office in 2005 and vowed to pursue a military solution. In a conventional war against an army many times its size, the LTTE was sure to be outmatched, and eventually it was. Prabhakaran never again appeared before the press after 2002, but he continued to release photos and speeches every year. "With its greed for land, Sinhalam [Sri Lanka...
...Prabhakaran was correct. The LTTE had been banned by the U.S., the European Union and several other countries as a terrorist organization, and Rajapaksa pursued what he called a "war on terror" against the LTTE despite the repeated concerns of the U.N. and other groups about human-rights violations and civilian casualties inflicted by both sides. More than 220,000 Tamil civilians are still being held in the north in internment camps, and it is not clear when they will be allowed to go home. The U.N. estimates that 40,000 to 60,000 people are en route...