Word: sri
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...tiny blue chairs set up in rows, a group of young children begin their lessons at a makeshift preschool in northern Sri Lanka. They listen to stories, learn their colors, giggle, fidget and cry. The children are among thousands of Tamils who have fled their homes in the past 12 months, as the Sri Lankan army has surged toward the end of a 25-year war against an armed separatist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Government officials and the aid agencies that help maintain the camp where these children live call them "internally displaced persons" (IDPs...
...limit the scope of military action that a government can take to face a rebellion, which has been proven insufficient to protect internally displaced persons. Moreover, this pressure imbalance is often abused by parties with vested interests to interfere in the internal politics of war-affected countries like Sri Lanka, further compounding the vicious cycle for those affected...
...Modern conflicts with sophisticated international involvements—combined with the bitter experiences faced by countries like Sri Lanka during the colonial past—often lead such governments to take extreme precautions to ensure no covert foreign force creeps into their internal politics again. This was evident in Sri Lanka when the government ordered all non-governmental organizations except the International Committee of Red Cross to leave rebel-held areas in September 2008. This action was taken after Sri Lankan authorities learned that several NGOs had wittingly or unwittingly given material aid to the Tamil Tigers...
...great need to introduce innovative global conventions to exert adequate pressure on NGOs operating in war-affected countries—especially with a colonial history—to absolutely honor the sovereignty of the country. The pressure from the donors alone has proven to be insufficient in the Sri Lankan case...
...absence of independent information sources to assess the situation of IDPs trapped between the warring parties, the global community should empower international organizations like the United Nations to use modern technology such as satellite imagery and reconnaissance aircrafts to verify claims made by various parties. For instance, the Sri Lankan government claimed that the Tamil Tigers had moved more than six heavy artillery guns into the governmentally declared safe zone to invite return fire to civilian neighborhoods. The LTTE, on the other hand, claimed that the government forces had shelled a hospital in Puthukkudyiruppu. This hit the headlines of many...