Word: tamils
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...convenience of colonial administrators and enclosed peoples who had never got along with each other. Jockeying among varied ethnic-religious groups for pieces of the old imperial turf has been igniting secessionist wars ever since. Possibly the deadliest one within the past decade has been the insurrection of Hindu Tamil groups against the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace counts, among many others, six separate conflicts in India and three each in Burma and Indonesia in which guerrilla groups are seeking independence...
State's figures, however, do not include incidents staged by terrorists who operate within one country with little or no foreign state sponsorship, such as the Irish Republican Army, the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Even the more conventional Middle East-based terrorists retain a dangerous capacity for bloodshed, as evidenced by the mid- March bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and assaults by Kurdish separatists who last week machine-gunned a bus in Istanbul and attacked policemen and police stations in five cities throughout Turkey...
...blood goes back at least a thousand years to a time when a powerful Tamil dynasty in India invaded the island of Sri Lanka and pushed the Sinhalese natives deep into the south. The conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese has ebbed and flowed ever since, but today it rages more violently than ever -- only with artillery and automatic rifles rather than swords and spears. The stakes would have been familiar to Sri Lankans at any point in the past 10 centuries: the minority Tamil population wants independence from the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo. They speak a different language...
...July the eight-year-old war, which has mainly been a guerrilla conflict, suddenly turned into an even more bloody set-piece struggle. Tamil fighters, known as Tigers, dropped their usual tactics of ambush and evasion to launch a 3,000-strong force against a government base controlling Elephant Pass, a narrow, one-mile causeway, surrounded by marsh, beaches and sand dunes, that connects the mainland with the Tigers' heartland, the Jaffna Peninsula...
...eight years of conflict between the Tamils and the government, 18,000 people have died. But that is only the beginning of the carnage. Much of Sri Lanka's north and east have been devastated economically, and the murderous campaigns of both sides have shattered any hope of trust between Tamils and Sinhalese perhaps for generations. Both sides butcher their enemies, and an Amnesty International report claims that the Sri Lankan army killed thousands of civilians in Tamil areas last year. In less than a decade, the island has become heavily militarized. In the early 1980s, it had a small...