Word: tamils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just five minutes away from his office. He was rushed to the hospital but died after surgery. Wickrematunge was a staunch critic of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and his murder came in the middle of the government's final offensive to crush the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The government did not brook any criticism of its conduct of the war, but even since declaring victory last May things are little improved for journalists. (Watch a video about the final days of Sri Lanka's civil...
...menace of terrorism and separatism from its shores. After all, this historic event should have taken precedence over a merely parochial one like the Red Sox World Series victory, which is of absolutely no interest to the rest of the world. Sri Lanka's victory over the terrorist Tamil Tigers surely is a bright spot not only in this decade but for all history, and ought to receive its proper recognition. Ravi Gunawardana Nugegoda, Sri Lanka...
...year-long civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam finally ended this year after Sri Lanka's army closed in on the separatist group's last stronghold, killing Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. At least 7,000 Tamil civilians died in the offensive; another 250,000 were displaced by the fighting. In December the government moved to accelerate their resettlement...
...Lanka's treatment of the Tamil minority is a central issue in the election. During the last months of war, the government had restricted nearly 300,000 Tamils who fled the fighting to detention camps. Under intense domestic and international pressure, Rajapaksa announced on Dec. 1 that the 130,000 people still in the camps would have limited freedom to leave. The opposition parties have taken up the cause of these internally displaced people, or IDPs, and Fonseka says the government should give them complete freedom of movement: "If they handled the situation properly, we would have been...
Fonseka's base of support cuts right into Rajapaksa's. Both are from the increasingly vocal bourgeoisie of the rural south, the heartland of Sri Lanka's Sinhala Buddhist majority. The LTTE's Tamil nationalism and its dream of a separate homeland for the Tamil minority were a challenge to Sinhala Buddhist dominance. Fonseka has the reputation of being an even more strident Sinhala nationalist than Rajapaksa but is now trying to soften that image. "I am a very good Sinhalese, a very good Buddhist, there is no question about it," he says. "But towards minorities I never...