Word: tamil
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RELEASED. RAJKUMAR, 72, beloved Indian movie star kidnapped by the bandit Veerappan; after 108 days in jungle captivity; in Bangalore, India. Veerappan, who is accused of 120 murders but has eluded capture for 30 years and is regarded as a hero among Tamil separatists, took a $2.17 million ransom raised by two Indian state governments and retreated to his hideout, forgoing his demand for the release of government prisoners...
...FARC-ettes," as the women fighters are nicknamed, fascinated me. Before covering Latin America, I'd reported on the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in Sri Lanka. The Tiger women were spooky: They wore cyanide pills around their necks to be consumed in the event of capture, and dozens of them trained as suicide bombers. The FARC-ettes were, well, more Latina. Even when in their fatigues, they wore earrings and pink scrunchees to keep their hair in place, and listened to music on tiny radios. While sex had been forbidden among the Tigers, the FARC's more relaxed view is evidenced...
...step out of, and beyond, the old categories. Every time a Palestinian man, say, marries a Singhalese woman (and such unions are growing more common by the day) and produces a half-Palestinian, half-Singhalese child (living in Paris or London, no doubt), an Israeli or a Tamil is deprived of a tribal enemy. Even the Palestinian or Singhalese grandparents may be eased out of longtime prejudices. Mongrelism--the human equivalent of World Music and "fusion culture"--is the brightest child of fragmentation...
...dispassionate. Curiously, Ondaatje does not explicitly name the tri-faceted sides of the conflict. For one familiar with the ethnicities involved, this does not present much of a problem. But one imagines that the reader unfamiliar with this international landscape might have some trouble orienting the words Sinhalese and Tamil within the story...
...battle raging around Jaffna underscores Sri Lanka's difficulty in containing a separatist insurgency that has raged for 17 years and claimed some 55,000 lives. The government remains committed to a two-pronged strategy of seeking to militarily defeat the guerrillas while offering greater political autonomy to the Tamil minority from which they're drawn. But Prime Minister Kumaratunga has struggled to secure domestic political support for the autonomy plan, let alone engender Tamil enthusiasm. And a military defeat of the Tigers looks more and more like wishful thinking. Israel is reported to have recently helped out the government...