Word: sri
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Thus ended the voyage, but not the story, of the mysterious seafarers. When they reached St. John's, the castaways, most of whom were in their 20s, identified themselves as Hindu Tamils from Sri Lanka who had fled their strife-torn homeland to escape persecution at the hands of the Buddhist Sinhalese majority. They said they were students, businessmen and skilled ! workers, and claimed to have paid an Indian "agent" up to $3,000 each for passage to Canada. Then followed a month aboard a ship that had picked them up at the south Indian port of Madras. But five...
...week's end Canadian and West German police had pieced together the probable course of events. Late last month at least 200 Sri Lankans arrived in the small port of Brake, about 60 miles west of Hamburg, from elsewhere in Germany. Each had paid nearly $2,500 in cash and valuables for passage to Canada, but only 155 were permitted to board a ship, where they were confined to the hold and fed boiled rice. They were reportedly warned that they or their relatives would be harmed if they told the truth about their trip...
Many of the refugees apparently reached West Germany after flying from Sri Lanka to East Berlin and then crossing legally into West Berlin. They then fled West Germany because they were worried that authorities would reject their applications for asylum. Since 1949 Bonn has accepted any foreigner "persecuted on political grounds" in his native land. This lenient policy has led more than 37,000 Sri Lankans to pour into the country since 1980. The flood has provoked racial conflicts and calls for stricter immigration laws; new arrivals meet rising hostility. At the same time, rumors spreading through Tamil communities...
...Tamils, most of whom are Hindus, form 18 percent of Sri Lanka's population of 16 million and they claim economic and political discrimination by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority...
More than 4,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, in fighting between government forces and Tamil separatists in the past three years...