Word: tamils
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...Soviet monolith may be euphoria, but all too often, as demonstrated by other countries where ethnic rivalries have shattered national integrity, bloodshed soon follows. In Yugoslavia fierce fighting has killed more than 300 people since Croatia declared independence on June 25. In Sri Lanka an eight-year war between Tamil guerrillas and the Sinhalese majority has left 18,000 dead and countless numbers homeless and destitute. Tamil Tigers have also been held responsible for the assassination last May of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who sent in troops in July 1987 to bolster the ruling Sinhalese. Does this kind...
...week's first round of balloting was attended by an unprecedented wave of killings and vote rigging. And yet Gandhi had held out an at least plausible promise that a restoration of his leadership might help bring back stability after 18 months of rudderless rule. His campaign swing through Tamil Nadu, the keystone state of south India, was almost a perfunctory exercise; it was safe territory, and his Congress Party seemed en route to recovering the national government. In the rural temple town of Sriperumbudur, 26 miles southwest of Madras, Gandhi stepped out of his touring car and greeted...
...that when he arrived in Sriperumbudur, he barely paused before wading into the crowd. A woman, judged to be Tamil and in her late 20s, pushed her way forward to the red-carpeted greeting queue and handed him a garland. As she bent forward deferentially, as if to touch his feet, a sophisticated explosive device went off with a huge blast, triggered by a manual detonator. It killed him instantly, ripping into his torso and mutilating his face beyond recognition. It also killed at least 15 others. A policewoman lay dead with both legs severed. Nearby was a slain photographer...
Suspicions zeroed in at once on the Tamil Tigers, a combat-hardened band of guerrillas who have been fighting for a separate state in northeast Sri Lanka. Notoriously dedicated and vengeful, the Tigers have mastered terrorist bombing to a degree still unknown among India's own insurgents. Gandhi, whose mother's policies had done much to whelp and teethe the Tigers, earned their enmity in 1987 when he co-authored a peace plan for their offshore island republic. Instead of surrendering their arms, the Tigers fought Indian peacekeeping troops in hit-and-run warfare with extensive casualties...
...have originated in policies of their own devising. Indira had covertly helped promote the rise of Sikh extremism in Punjab in an effort to thwart a more moderate rival party in the troubled northwestern state. In his turn, Rajiv had gone along for a while with arming the Tamil Tigers and furnishing them with sanctuary and training camps in southern India. But he had abandoned that effort by mid-1987, and the image that survives him is mostly favorable...