Word: tamil
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...agreement was worked out during three weeks of secret talks between New Delhi and Colombo. Its centerpiece was Jayewardene's concession of local rule in two provinces heavily populated by Tamils, who make up one-eighth of the country's 16 million people. In exchange Gandhi, whose country is home to about 50 million Tamils and who has provided refuge and arms to Tamil insurgents fighting the Colombo government, promised to ensure that the rebels would lay down their arms...
...after the signing ceremony, some 3,000 Indian troops landed on the Tamil-dominated Jaffna peninsula in the north of the island. Their task: to disarm the guerrillas and take up peacekeeping duties. Those efforts promised + to be tricky; the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the largest and most militant of five rebel groups, insisted that they would not consider disarming until New Delhi released their leader, Vellupillai Prabakaran. He had been under house arrest in New Delhi after calling the pact a "stab in the back, but early this week Prabakaran was released and returned to Jaffna after pledging...
Sinhalese distrust of India runs deep. Over two millenniums, Sri Lanka's Buddhist majority has fought back periodic invasions from Hindu India. Sri Lanka's Tamils are Hindus too, and the Sinhalese tend to regard them as India's natural allies. The current round of Tamil-Sinhalese conflict goes back to 1956, when the Sinhalese-dominated government made Sinhala the sole official language and restricted job and educational opportunities for minorities, effectively reducing the Tamils to second-class citizens...
...official language of Singapore is Malay, however; the most commonly spoken tongues are English, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil...
India's decision to intervene so visibly in the civil war apparently slowed the Sri Lankan government's military campaign. Though Tamils make up only 18% of the island's 16 million people, the separatist guerrillas have found support and safe haven among the 50 million Tamils living across the strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Last week's airlift seemed to indicate that Gandhi was giving in to pressure from Indian Tamils to intervene more actively in Sri Lanka. Said an official in Colombo: "Whatever India may say about humanitarian aid, what they actually wanted...