Word: sri
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...Sri Lanka's treatment of the Tamil minority is a central issue in the election. During the last months of war, the government had restricted nearly 300,000 Tamils who fled the fighting to detention camps. Under intense domestic and international pressure, Rajapaksa announced on Dec. 1 that the 130,000 people still in the camps would have limited freedom to leave. The opposition parties have taken up the cause of these internally displaced people, or IDPs, and Fonseka says the government should give them complete freedom of movement: "If they handled the situation properly, we would have been...
...mission of his four years in office. Since the collapse of the Tigers, Colombo has been full of enormous cut-outs of the president, congratulating him on his victory. Rajapaksa called early elections to capitalize on the post-war euphoria. (See pictures from deep inside Tamil Tiger territory in Sri Lanka...
...their war hero. "He was someone who could prove to be an effective counter to the popularity and the credibility that President Mahinda Rajapaksa enjoys," says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council, a research and advocacy group in Colombo. (See a video about civilians caught in Sri Lanka's civil...
...Sri Lanka has never had a coup or a military president, and some political observers fear the end of that proud civilian tradition if the general is elected. Fonseka dismisses that concern, taking as his models Eisenhower and De Gaulle. If he really wanted to seize power, he asks, why give up the uniform now and "go around asking for the vote?" He says the high-handed treatment by the Rajapaksa government forced him into politics. "The government was responsible for pushing me into that," Fonseka says. "Now they have to face the music...
Fonseka's base of support cuts right into Rajapaksa's. Both are from the increasingly vocal bourgeoisie of the rural south, the heartland of Sri Lanka's Sinhala Buddhist majority. The LTTE's Tamil nationalism and its dream of a separate homeland for the Tamil minority were a challenge to Sinhala Buddhist dominance. Fonseka has the reputation of being an even more strident Sinhala nationalist than Rajapaksa but is now trying to soften that image. "I am a very good Sinhalese, a very good Buddhist, there is no question about it," he says. "But towards minorities I never...