Word: tamil
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...meeting room at Temple Trees, the stately British-colonial residence that now makes up the President's official compound, Mahinda Rajapaksa sat next to a framed 14th century temple painting and spoke with TIME's Jyoti Thottam about winning the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE...
...heard concern that new roads make it easier for people from the [Sinhalese-majority] south to move to the Tamil-majority north and east. Is there an effort to change the demography of the Tamil-majority areas? No, but it's happening in Colombo. The eastern-province Muslims have come here. The Tamils have come here. You ask them, Why are you coming here? Can I stop them? No. If anybody wants to come and live in any part of this island, it is the right...
...friends line up patiently to eat in the main dining room of Rajapaksa's official compound. Outside, on the streets of Colombo, he is the all-conquering hero. In May, Rajapaksa's government ended Sri Lanka's 26-year-long civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the capital's broad avenues are dominated by enormous banners glorifying him: "You are a divine gift to the country. May the gods bestow their blessings on you." But here, inside, Rajapaksa seems more like a down-to-earth family patriarch, nourished as much by the red rice...
...barrel-chested rugby fan, Rajapaksa, 63, will need that common touch to bring Sri Lanka to a true and lasting peace between the island nation's Sinhalese majority (which is mostly Buddhist) and Tamil minority (mostly Hindu). The civil war began in earnest in July 1983, after nearly 3,000 Tamils were killed in several days of systematic anti-Tamil violence. It was the low point of what Sri Lanka's Tamils felt had been decades of official discrimination and military repression in Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. The LTTE took up arms in the name...
...least 6,200 troops were killed in the last three years of the war - more than the total U.S. military deaths so far in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Rajapaksa's popularity remains undiminished. In his victory speech to the nation on June 3, he spoke a few lines in Tamil as a gesture of reconciliation, but most of the oration was spent in praise of "our armed forces who astonished the world by their skill in war." He linked their effort to the nation's heroic past defending itself against invaders. "The lessons we learnt from those great battles...