Word: tamils
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...Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group of ethnic Tamil guerrilla fighters, are widely supposed to be responsible for his death. They are battling to restore a separate Tamil homeland in the northern region of Sri Lanka. Neelan was known for his politics of reconciliation, especially his recent efforts to work with the Sinhalese-dominated government to change parts of the country's constitution to give the Tamils more autonomy...
...heard of him because every day, the media chooses to ignore a bloody ethnic war between the Sri Lankan Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority--a war that has taken and continues to take thousands of lives since...
...first was language. The Sinhalese instituted Sinhalese as the national language, requiring all official documents, such as employment applications, to be in Sinhalese. The career aspirations of an entire generation of young Tamils, who had been and were being educated in Tamil, were destroyed...
...second was colonization. The government sponsored groups of Sinhalese to settle in traditionally Tamil territories so that all regions of the country would have a Sinhalese majority. This left the Tamils little to no representation in parliament...
...third was quotas. Tamil students applying to universities found themselves faced with quotas. If 20 percent of the population was Tamil, no more than 20 percent of the university students could be Tamil. This meant that Tamils had to score significantly higher than Sinhalese on university entrance exams...