Word: sri
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...either side of her head, and a smile that explodes across her face, as if someone has switched on a spotlight. She's smart, too, likes social studies best, and especially learning about different cultures in far-off lands. Crouched on a mat in a refugee camp on Sri Lanka's east coast, flicking the pages of a schoolbook, pencil by her side, she looks like a normal kid. And then you spot it: Jeevatharsini has no left arm. Through the hole in her dress where her upper arm should join her shoulder, a stump is just visible, the skin...
...Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans share Jeevatharsini's scars. In 2002 the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), as the rebels call themselves, signed a cease-fire designed to lead to a political agreement. While the rebels want a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and east, the government wants to keep the island whole. A federation seemed a possible compromise. But peace talks sputtered and then collapsed (both sides accused the other of being insincere), and since December 2005, Sri Lanka has again been at undeclared war with itself. The latest...
...Government forces have pushed the Tigers out of much of the east, in part because a breakaway faction of Tamil fighters that fell out with the main rebel group has joined with government troops against their old comrades. The Sri Lankan military is now opening up a new front in the northwest. But there are few signs that the military is on the verge of victory. The L.T.T.E. has used tactical withdrawals to regroup following defeats in the past and is still able to spring surprises. In late February a group of foreign diplomats, including the U.S. and Italian ambassadors...
...Sri Lanka has been in ceaseless turmoil for more than three decades. During the 1970s and '80s, Marxist radicals in the south engaged in a fierce campaign against the government and were just as brutally put down. The conflict with the L.T.T.E. was sparked in 1975 when the Tigers assassinated the mayor of Jaffna, Sri Lanka's northernmost city, and intensified after the killing of 13 soldiers in 1983. Fighting has gone on for so long now that it has brutalized an entire society, creating a culture of violence that haunts the country whether there is fighting...
WHAT IT MEANS: The group that perfected suicide bombing adds a deadly new wrinkle in its 24-year conflict. The sortie killed three but also disrupted commercial air traffic to Sri Lanka's main airport...