Sri Lanka’s key foreign aid donors will meet to reevaluate the troubled nation’s faltering peace process this week at a meeting in Tokyo as blood continues to be spilt in the south Asian nation. Japan’s peace envoy Yasushi Akashi is to host a meeting of the United States, the European Union and Norway in order to review their involvement in Sri Lanka’s faltering peace process.
Sri Lanka’s air force resumed retaliatory strikes against Tamil Tiger positions on Wednesday, police said amid fears that the country was sliding back to full-scale war after a four-year truce. Air attacks were carried out in the north-eastern district of Trincomalee where the military bombed a cluster of boats of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on Tuesday night.
At least eight people were killed in two separate mine blasts in northern Sri Lanka on Monday, hours after Tiger rebels announced they are suspending participation in peace talks. The latest deaths raised to 64 the number of people, mostly police or troops, killed in bomb attacks in the past week in the latest surge of violence linked to the decades-old Tamil separatist conflict.
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/ 24 January 2006
Sri Lanka’s president on Tuesday asked Norway to arrange early talks with Tamil Tiger rebels and help stem the latest wave of violence that has killed at least 151 people. President Mahinda Rajapakse held closed-door talks with Norway’s top peace envoy, Erik Solheim, on salvaging the island’s Oslo-backed peace process, which has remained deadlocked since April 2003.
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/ 17 January 2006
Suspected Tiger rebels set off two more mines and fought a gun battle with troops on Tuesday as the United Nations urged talks and Norway made a fresh bid to pull Sri Lanka back from the brink of war. Military officials said members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ambushed a navy bus by setting off a landmine in the restive northeast port district of Trincomalee.
Suspected Tamil rebels blew up a naval gunboat on Saturday, killing 15 Sri Lankan sailors in a suicide attack that caused the biggest military loss of life since a truce began four years ago, the military said. The pre-dawn attack came as the United States expressed concern over the recent escalation of violence in Sri Lanka.
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/ 14 November 2005
Sri Lanka’s presidential election this week has turned into a vote on the country’s distressed economy and the troubled peace process, with the two main contenders diverging sharply on the major issues. About 13,3-million eligible voters will effectively be choosing on Thursday between the current and former prime ministers, who have radically different views on how to save the nation from economic and ethnic implosion.
Sri Lanka’s slain minister of foreign affairs Lakshman Kadirgamar, a Tamil himself, was a fierce foe of Tamil Tiger rebels. Snipers gunned down Kadirgamar, whom the rebels dubbed a traitor to their cause of seeking a separate homeland, at his home late on Friday.
International lenders have downgraded Sri Lanka’s economic growth forecasts for this year after tsunamis devastated its coastline, but the island is banking on a flood of foreign aid to keep its head above the water. ”The tsunami has certainly given the country a new lease of life,” said Alastair Corera, country head of Fitch Ratings.
Birds can eat too many worms, paper kites can cripple them and even crows with cast-iron stomachs develop aches in the pollution-rife Indian capital.