Word: tamil
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More than 4,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, in fighting between government forces and Tamil separatists in the past three years...
Government officials blamed both attacks on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the most radical of the insurgent factions fighting to establish an independent state in the northern and eastern parts of the country. The two bombings suggest that the militant Tamil insurgents are willing to bring the fighting to the capital, a significant escalation of the bitter three-year civil war in which more than 3,000 people have been killed. "These attacks," said an official of the National Security Ministry on TV following the second bombing, "indicate the group is no longer interested in a peaceful settlement...
Throughout the increasingly bloody conflict there have been charges that the separatists have been aided by India, which has a substantial Tamil population in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, 22 miles from Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait. But in the past ten months, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has tried to broker a peace agreement between the Sri Lanka government and the insurgents. Last year he helped arrange two ceasefires, only to see the fragile agreement crumble. Sri Lanka's President J.R. Jayewardene, for his part, has offered greater political autonomy to the Tamils but rejects the idea...
John Paul ended the service by saying "Happy Easter" or "Christ is risen" in 49 languages, including Maltese, Tamil, Vietnamese, Arabic and Hebrew. He concluded with a longer greeting in his native Polish and Latin...
...time the Tamils wanted to set up their own independent nation within Sri Lanka. Now they have softened this demand, while still seeking self government for those areas of the island in the north and the east where they constitute a majority. The nearly two million Tamils in these regions, most of them Hindu, complain of persecution at the hands of the country's 12 million Sinhalese, who are predominantly Buddhist. The Tamils' main hope for the future now rests with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who helped arrange the latest cease-fire. Tamil leaders are pressing Gandhi to persuade...