Word: sri
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...Bangladesh's next-door neighbors, India, also was quick to announce its support. After committing $10 million, along with medical personnel and food, to the stricken land, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi scheduled a visit to Bangladesh to express his sympathy and to tour the ravaged areas. Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene, who was due to hold talks with Gandhi, promised to come too, in a show of "South Asian solidarity...
...Sri Lanka seemed gripped by madness last week as a series of violent attacks resulted in the slaughter of more than 200 people. The killings began when separatist guerrillas belonging to the country's predominantly Hindu Tamil minority hijacked a bus and headed for Anuradhapura, a city largely inhabited by Buddhist Sinhalese. As the guerrillas drove into the city's crowded main bus station, they opened fire with automatic weapons, killing about 100 men, women and children. Then they drove to the Sri Maha Bodhiya, a sacred Buddhist site, and fired indiscriminately into a crowd that included nuns and monks...
...attacking the Sri Maha Bodhiya, the site of a sacred 2,200-year-old bo tree said to have grown from a sapling of the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment, the guerrillas seemed almost eager to provoke retaliation. It did not take long. In the bloodiest strike, assailants boarded a ferry off the northern coast of Sri Lanka, near Jaffna, and hacked 39 Tamils to death with axes, swords and knives. The Sri Lankan navy has denied accusations that it was involved in the slaughter; the same day, police surprised Tamil rebels hiding in a cave in the Eastern...
...struggle between the island's 2.6 million Tamils and its 11 million Sinhalese. Over the past two years Tamil guerrillas have stepped up their attacks on troops in an effort to force the government into granting them an independent homeland. The Tamils claim that in the 37 years since Sri Lanka achieved independence from Britain, their political rights have been gradually eroded by the Sinhalese majority. Last week's Tamil rampage through Anuradhapura was the guerrillas' first major attack on unarmed civilians...
...prevail in an all-out confrontation with the army. Should the guerrillas effectively seize control of the north of the island, Jayawardene might be forced to step down in favor of a government more sympathetic to Tamil grievances. "The initiative now lies with the forces of violence," says a Sri Lankan colonel. "We would be stupid not to admit that they have the strength to do what they want." But Western analysts also suspect that if the Tigers, whose politics range from Marxism to Tamil nationalism, do manage to triumph, they may find themselves unable to remain united, let alone...