Word: sri
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...Under Palachamy's prone head is a shallow well of blood. On the shiny brown bellies of his two dead boys is blood from their mother, who has been shot in the face. The murders were part of a wave of executions on May 13 on the remote northern Sri Lankan island of Kayts. That evening, the gunmen killed nine others, including four of the Ketheeswarans' relatives. "I can't imagine what type of animals would do this," says Father Amal Raj from nearby St. Philip Neri's church, who helped move the bodies...
...Just two days earlier, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), which is fighting for a separate Tamil state, had killed 17 Sri Lankan navymen in a suicide attack. So the murder of the Ketheeswarans, who were ethnic Tamils living near a naval base, was viewed by some as revenge by wayward sailors. Others saw it differently: some supporters of the Tigers blamed rival Tamils; an aide to President Mahinda Rajapakse spoke of unspecified forces "trying to discredit the President"; and Sinhalese nationalists even suggested the Tigers had killed their own to justify future attacks. To make sense...
...senior Tiger commander in the east, Karuna, broke away from the L.T.T.E., claiming its leaders were biased against eastern Tamils. The violence escalated in the east, and the L.T.T.E. accused the government of covertly backing Karuna. There was more anger after the December 2004 tsunami, which killed 36,000 Sri Lankans: Sinhalese hard-liners objected to giving the Tigers aid to distribute in areas they controlled, saying that would legitimize terrorism. Today both sides maintain they are abiding by the cease-fire and neither has launched an all-out offensive, for fear of being blamed for declaring hostilities. But with...
...Samandi's chances of a normal life were shaky from the day she was born in Tamil Tiger territory in northern Sri Lanka. But Samandi said it was the death of 125 friends and neighbors in the government's carpet-bombing of her village that forced her to put aside thoughts of anything much but death. "I saw all that, all that blood and all those bodies and I thought, ?Tomorrow, I will die like this too. So I will join the L.T.T.E. and die for a reason...
...reason the international community pays particular attention to Sri Lanka, beyond a simple desire for peace, is the Tigers' world reach. To fund their war in the dirt-poor salt marshes of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers built a multimillion-dollar fund-raising arm, cajoling and strong-arming the expatriate ethnic Tamil community which settled abroad, particularly in Britain, Australia and Canada. They assembled a fleet of boats, which Sri Lankan intelligence estimates at 22 ships, to smuggle weapons across the Indian Ocean and beyond. And they exported their know-how to the world...