Word: prabhakaran
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...rest of the world might never understand the violence Velupillai Prabhakaran stood for, but its imprint on Sri Lanka is wide and deep. For 26 years, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had waged war with the government to win an independent homeland, or eelam, for the island's Tamil minority. The struggle claimed more than 70,000 lives--including, on May 18, Prabhakaran's. The government says he was killed, along with 17 of his trusted lieutenants, while fleeing an army ambush...
...global diaspora to collect resources. The Tigers "were the pioneers in many of the terrorist tactics we see worldwide today," says Jason Campbell, an Iraq and Afghanistan analyst at the Brookings Institution. (Read a story about the life and death of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran...
...That left Prabhakaran with control of the north, secured by several thousand soldiers. But the transformation from running a guerrilla force to a conventional army may have been the leader's undoing. The nation's current President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, took office in 2005 and vowed to pursue a military solution. In a conventional war against an army many times its size, the LTTE was sure to be outmatched, and eventually it was. Prabhakaran never again appeared before the press after 2002, but he continued to release photos and speeches every year. "With its greed for land, Sinhalam [Sri Lanka...
...Prabhakaran was correct. The LTTE had been banned by the U.S., the European Union and several other countries as a terrorist organization, and Rajapaksa pursued what he called a "war on terror" against the LTTE despite the repeated concerns of the U.N. and other groups about human-rights violations and civilian casualties inflicted by both sides. More than 220,000 Tamil civilians are still being held in the north in internment camps, and it is not clear when they will be allowed to go home. The U.N. estimates that 40,000 to 60,000 people are en route...
...final offensive, the Sri Lankan army hunted Prabhakaran for months, even as rumors floated that he might have escaped by boat to the Persian Gulf, East Africa or Southeast Asia. By the end, he was reduced to his core group of about 250 loyalists. The body of Prabhakaran's son Charles Anthony was recovered first and displayed on television within hours of his death. Prabhakaran's life ended in Mullivaikal, a strip of land on the northeastern coast, a place not much different from where he began...