Word: tamil
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...emergency - which she lifted two days later - while Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was on a trip to Washington, D.C. Kumaratunga denied she was trying to grab power for its own sake, accusing Wickremesinghe of endangering national security through "willful neglect" of the military and granting too many concessions to Tamil Tiger rebels in peace negotiations...
...prosperity extends far beyond Colombo's busy shopping malls and car showrooms, boosted in part by the resumption of internal trade with the Tamil-dominated northern and eastern areas of the country, isolated for years by a government-imposed embargo. Before the peace process began, Wickremesinghe says, "we were a market of 15 million. Now we are a market of 19 million." In Dambulla, a trading town in the center of Sri Lanka, vegetable sellers now do brisk business with Jaffna, the chief city in the Tamil north: these days, large onions and pineapples are sent up north, while trucks...
...surge in spending by international aid agencies is also stimulating the economy, even reaching up to the ravaged Tamil north, where a highway to Jaffna is being rebuilt by the Asian Development Bank. Although thousands of Tamils who had to leave their homes during the civil war still languish in refugee camps, conditions in the north are slowly improving. In Killinochchi, an LTTE-controlled town that saw some of the fiercest fighting, a landscape of burned-out, bullet-scarred buildings is intermittently relieved by a brand-new office or restaurant. The LTTE has even opened its own caf? in town...
...catching up to do. In 1977 it became the first South Asian country to dismantle its socialist economy. Foreign investment was welcomed, and from 1977-84 the economy grew by 6% a year. But in July 1983, long-simmering tension between the nation's Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority led to violent anti-Tamil riots, and the country plunged into civil war. By 1987, Sri Lanka's growth rate had halved. Tourism and tea exports remained relatively strong, and in the 1990s, Sri Lankans fancied that the country's economy had learned to live with the fighting. That illusion...
...peace must hold. On Oct. 24, President Chandrika Kumaratunga, Wickremesinghe's main political rival, convened a giant rally in Colombo to charge that the government was preparing to hand over the north and east to the LTTE by acceding to all its demands. In addition to offending the Tamil population?which is mostly Hindu?by holding the rally on the Hindu sacred day of Deepavali, Kumaratunga is considering an alliance with an ultra-nationalist Sinhalese group in the next elections. Those elections could be held at any time: constitutionally, the President has almost arbitrary power to dismiss the Prime Minister...