Word: wars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Without any other compelling candidate, the opposition parties have rallied around Fonseka as their war hero. "He was someone who could prove to be an effective counter to the popularity and the credibility that President Mahinda Rajapaksa enjoys," says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council, a research and advocacy group in Colombo. (See a video about civilians caught in Sri Lanka's civil war...
Fonseka's own reasons for entering politics are much more personal. In an interview with TIME on Dec. 13 in Colombo, Fonseka explained that just two months after the war ended in May, President Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sidelined him. He says he was given a prestigious new post - Chief of Defense Staff - without any operational authority. "Even to get a corporal to the CDS office I had to get the Defense Secretary's approval," Fonseka says. "So then I was not happy with the job there. Then I also realised that they were not trusting...
...Tigers, and for setting aside seniority to promote talented, effective junior commanders. But military analysts say the last push on land would not have been effective without the Navy, who cut off the Tigers? vital supply line and escape route by sea. "Sarath Fonseka could not have won the war, if not for the crucial support he received from Secretary Defense Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the other service chiefs, especially the navy and air chiefs and the intelligence agencies," says Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore...
...never even consulted me. I only came to know this after two days after everything was over. And I never gave any instructions about the white flags." Fonseka told TIME that, during a recent visit to the U.S., immigration authorities had attempted to interview him about alleged war crimes committed by the Defense Secretary but he declined because he was still a government officer...