Word: tamils
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...Just two days earlier, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), which is fighting for a separate Tamil state, had killed 17 Sri Lankan navymen in a suicide attack. So the murder of the Ketheeswarans, who were ethnic Tamils living near a naval base, was viewed by some as revenge by wayward sailors. Others saw it differently: some supporters of the Tigers blamed rival Tamils; an aide to President Mahinda Rajapakse spoke of unspecified forces "trying to discredit the President"; and Sinhalese nationalists even suggested the Tigers had killed their own to justify future attacks. To make sense...
...FIGHT? The island's two main ethnic groups are the majority Sinhalese (who number 14 million, are Buddhist, and live mainly in the south) and the Tamils (who number 2 million, are Hindu, and are concentrated in the north and east). The roots of discord go back to colonial times. The British favored the Tamils in the civil service in what Neil DeVotta, author of Blowback, a book about the origins of the conflict, says was "classic divide and rule." After independence in 1948, the Sinhalese took revenge. They made Sinhala the official language, discriminated against Tamils in areas like...
...above all, Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's real genius was to build a culture of sacrifice and martyrdom around his guerrilla force, with himself as demi-god leader - an almost exact forerunner of jihadi terrorism. In July 2002 TIME spent a few days with a female Tamil Tiger suicide squad at their base in northern Sri Lanka, and got a firsthand understanding of how he has been so successful...
...Samandi's chances of a normal life were shaky from the day she was born in Tamil Tiger territory in northern Sri Lanka. But Samandi said it was the death of 125 friends and neighbors in the government's carpet-bombing of her village that forced her to put aside thoughts of anything much but death. "I saw all that, all that blood and all those bodies and I thought, ?Tomorrow, I will die like this too. So I will join the L.T.T.E. and die for a reason...
...international community pays particular attention to Sri Lanka, beyond a simple desire for peace, is the Tigers' world reach. To fund their war in the dirt-poor salt marshes of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers built a multimillion-dollar fund-raising arm, cajoling and strong-arming the expatriate ethnic Tamil community which settled abroad, particularly in Britain, Australia and Canada. They assembled a fleet of boats, which Sri Lankan intelligence estimates at 22 ships, to smuggle weapons across the Indian Ocean and beyond. And they exported their know-how to the world...