Word: sri
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...Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi emerged from the President's House in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo last week, he had reason to smile. The previous day the Prime Minister had signed an agreement with Sri Lankan President Junius R. Jayewardene that promised to end a brutal civil war. But as Gandhi passed the white-uniformed men of a Sri Lankan naval honor guard, one of the sailors broke ranks and swung at Gandhi with the butt of his rifle. The Prime Minister caught a glancing blow in the back and stumbled. Guards quickly hustled Gandhi away and hauled...
...police, the 173 men and an 18-year-old woman were Sikhs, members of a minority religious group in India. They were Canada's latest boat people, who arrived seeking to take advantage of the country's liberal refugee laws. Last August two lifeboats filled with 155 Tamils from Sri Lanka were found floating off Newfoundland, having paid for passage from West Germany...
Undeterred, Gandhi ordered five of the Indian air force's Soviet-built An- 32 transports, escorted by four French-built Mirage-2000 fighter jets, into Sri Lankan airspace to drop 25 tons of "humanitarian relief supplies" onto Jaffna. Colombo immediately charged that the airlift was a "naked violation of Sri Lanka's sovereignty and independence." India insisted that the move was needed to meet the "continuing deterioration" of Sri Lanka's Tamils, a condition Colombo denies...
India's decision to intervene so visibly in the civil war apparently slowed the Sri Lankan government's military campaign. Though Tamils make up only 18% of the island's 16 million people, the separatist guerrillas have found support and safe haven among the 50 million Tamils living across the strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Last week's airlift seemed to indicate that Gandhi was giving in to pressure from Indian Tamils to intervene more actively in Sri Lanka. Said an official in Colombo: "Whatever India may say about humanitarian aid, what they actually wanted...
Unable to provide the swift military victory demanded by the island's Buddhist Sinhalese majority, Sri Lankan President Junius Jayewardene may now try to appease that constituency by continuing to stand up to India, though he will surely try to avoid provoking a military response that would topple him from power. He also faces the problem of preventing Sinhalese anger from erupting into bloody race riots, such as those in which an estimated 1,000 Tamils were massacred in 1983. "Rajiv Gandhi may have acted out of domestic compulsion," said a Sri Lankan official, "but he doesn't seem...