Word: lanka
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...world's longest running conflicts. They have all been denied. The Defense Ministry set up the Media Center for National Security in 2006 specifically to monitor and control coverage of the war, and it has refused to allow journalists into the war zone in northern Sri Lanka since early 2008. That policy has not changed even with the announcement that the end is near. There have been hundreds of news stories written and broadcast about Sri Lanka in the last few weeks, but all of them have been written under tightly controlled conditions. The Army has arranged two recent trips...
...result, there are no recent pictures taken by independent photojournalists of Sri Lankan soldiers on the battlefield; of civilian or military casualties (other than the grisly, usually unsourced pictures occasionally released by the LTTE); or of of what war has done to the north of Sri Lanka since the effective collapse of a ceasefire in 2006. The primary source of news about the war within Sri Lanka comes from a handful of reporters and photographers who are embedded with the military, filing stories mainly for government-run television networks. The conflict in Sri Lanka may be unique among modern wars...
...human shields, but Rajapaksa has been unmoved by entreaties from Western countries to allow aid agencies to enter the war zone to help them. On April 28, the government denied a visa to a Swedish diplomat who was supposed to be part of a European mission to Sri Lanka. On April 29, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the President's brother, met with the British and French foreign secretaries and upbraided them for being "duped by the misinformation campaign the LTTE was carrying out," according to a report of the meeting published on the Defense Ministry's website. The Red Cross...
...Lankan government has been more welcoming of delegations from sympathetic countries, such as India, South Asia's regional superpower, and Japan, Sri Lanka's largest donor country. Neither has tried to exert similar public pressure. The Indian foreign secretary, Shivshankar Menon, met with Rajapaksa on April 24; three days later the Army announced that "combat operations have reached their conclusion," a declaration that was quickly clarified - it meant the Army would cease only heavy bombardment. On April 30, the Times of London reported that the U.S. and Britain were trying to use Sri Lanka's application for a $1.9 billion...
...Once upon a time, the island of Sri Lanka was predicted to become the fifth Asian Tiger. That dream of prosperity can still be realized. But the state must adopt a more mature perspective on the possibilities of peace and prosperity. Nothing good will come through an asymmetric imposition of power based on ethnic lines. As Martin Luther King once said, “In the final analysis, the end is pre-existent in the means.” If sustainable peace is to be an end for Sri Lanka, the government must embody a new set of values...