Word: sri
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...race between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his challenger, the former army commander Sarath Fonseka, is unexpectedly close. Rajapaksa won the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal ethnic separatist group that once controlled much of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. But Fonseka, a hero in his own right in the same war, is a formidable opponent. He represents a patchwork coalition of opposition parties united in their antipathy to Rajapaksa, whom they say has disregarded the rights of the Tamil minority and indulged in blatant crony capitalism.(Watch a video about the final days of Sri...
Some people may celebrate Jan. 26, 2010, at Sri Lanka's first post-civil war presidential election - the island nation ended the 26-year-long conflict last May - but the advent of the poll has brought out deep tension, division and several alarming incidents of violence. "There is this foreboding sense that things could turn really bad," Keerthi Thenakoon, the chief executive of the election-monitoring body Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE), told TIME. "It is like sitting on a dynamite pile that is giving off sparks...
...bomb targeting a ruling-party politician killed one Rajapaksa supporter; another was shot when two rival groups clashed. Five days before the election, the house of Tiran Alles, a key Fonseka aide and former ally of Rajapaksa, was fire-bombed, although no one was injured. (Read "Sri Lanka Closes In on Leader of the Tamil Tigers...
...There are measures in place to prevent election fraud. Rohana Hettiarachchi, executive director of People's Action for Free and Fair Elections, says his group has already allocated additional local and international election monitors to sensitive polling districts. Sri Lanka has a well-established, compulsory national identity-card system used to verify voter rolls, and each candidate is allowed four representatives at each counting station. Hettiarachchi has appealed to the police and armed forces to uphold the law and maintain order, no matter what the result. "It is a crucial election, and their impartiality will matter a lot," he says...
...other important voting bloc is Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. With Rajapaksa and Fonseka expected to split the vote of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, Tamils could become kingmakers. But election monitors have serious concerns about their access to the polls. There are about 170,000 recently resettled war refugees, and another 108,000 displaced people who are still held in camps. The Rajapaksa administration has repeatedly said they will all have a chance to vote, but only 35,000 of the displaced have been registered according to officials at People's Action for Free and Fair Elections, the country...