Word: tamil
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Firecrackers exploded around Colombo on Monday as Sri Lankans celebrated what they hoped would be the end to a civil war that has plagued the nation since 1983. At 1:40 p.m., Sri Lanka's government radio announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed early this morning by special forces in the island's northern Karayamullavaikkal area. The 54-year-old Prabhakaran, who headed the Tamil separatist movement for 33 years, had been trying to flee the shrinking 100-m by 100-m pocket of land still under Tiger control...
Humanitarian agencies have been warning for months that there would be huge civilian casualties if the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam continued their fight to the death with thousands of unarmed people caught between them. No one paid much heed to the desperate warnings except for the relief agencies themselves, and on Sunday, they appeared to prove correct...
...What is not debatable is that thousands of civilians remain trapped in a very small area with their lives at tremendous and increasing risk. The United Nations estimates that 50,000 people remain trapped in the six-square-kilometer area still controlled by the Tamil Tigers, which have been fighting for a separate ethnic Tamil homeland since 1983. The Sri Lankan government says there are no more than 15,000 to 20,000. The LTTE holds only this small strip of territory on Sri Lanka's northeastern coast within an area designated by the Army as a so-called safe...
...Lankan Army is fighting - and apparently about to win - a 25-year-old war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal ethnic separatist movement. Alongside the conventional war, which is now in its final stages, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been fighting a carefully orchestrated public-relations battle...
Read a brief history of the Tamil Tigers...