Word: warring
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...barrel-chested rugby fan, Rajapaksa, 63, will need that common touch to bring Sri Lanka to a true and lasting peace between the island nation's Sinhalese majority (which is mostly Buddhist) and Tamil minority (mostly Hindu). The civil war began in earnest in July 1983, after nearly 3,000 Tamils were killed in several days of systematic anti-Tamil violence. It was the low point of what Sri Lanka's Tamils felt had been decades of official discrimination and military repression in Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. The LTTE took up arms in the name...
...rare interview with TIME on July 10, Rajapaksa made no apologies about how he prosecuted his war with the Tigers. "We showed that you can defeat terrorism," he said. The U.S. and Europe, his biggest trading partners, publicly criticized his apparent disregard for human rights, but he dismisses the West's objections. "Some people think we are still colonies," he said. "That mentality must go." (Read "How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example...
...Tigers; within a year of his presidency, he abandoned talks and bet everything on force. He appealed to Sinhalese nationalism to recruit soldiers, promising them good salaries, pensions and respect. The cost was high. At least 6,200 troops were killed in the last three years of the war - more than the total U.S. military deaths so far in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Rajapaksa's popularity remains undiminished. In his victory speech to the nation on June 3, he spoke a few lines in Tamil as a gesture of reconciliation, but most of the oration was spent in praise...
...When asked about the future of Tamils in Sri Lanka, Rajapaksa says all the right things: that Sri Lanka is one nation, which respects all peoples and faiths. Yet the strident Sinhalese nationalism, in Rajapaksa's party and in his more extreme allies, helped mobilize support for the war and influenced the way it was conducted. The U.N. issued several warnings - which Colombo ignored - about civilian casualties as the Sri Lankan army closed in on the Tigers, and estimates Tamil civilian deaths at 7,000. Nearly 300,000 Tamils from the northern war zone - including 45,000 children - have been...
...neocolonial sermonizing. He rejects the U.N.'s civilian-casualty figures and insists that conditions in the camps are good. But he has refused - even after declaring victory - to allow the press or international observers to verify those claims. No journalists or U.N. agencies have been permitted into the former war zone (with the exception of an entourage flying over it with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon), and journalists are allowed into the camps only on government-sponsored tours. The U.N. and other international agencies - "58 of them!" Rajapaksa points out - do have some access to the camps, but they...