Politics
See also: Tamil Eelam, Origins of the Sri Lankan civil war, and Sri Lankan Tamil nationalismSri Lanka became an independent nation in 1948. Since independence, the political relationship between Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamil community has been strained. Sri Lanka has been unable to contain its ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence, and finally to civil war. The Sri Lankan Civil War has several underlying causes: the ways in which modern ethnic identities have been made and remade since the colonial period, rhetorical wars over archaeological sites and place name etymologies, and the political use of the national past. The civil war has resulted in the death of over 70,000 people and, according to human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, the forced disappearance of thousands of others (see White van abductions in Sri Lanka). Since 1983, Sri Lanka has also witnessed massive civilian displacements of more than a million people, with eighty percent of them being Sri Lankan Tamils.
Read more about this topic: Sri Lankan Tamil People
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country—and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.”
—Charles Krauthammer (b. 1950)
“Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate. Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the “Principe,” has determined the development of European history ever since.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)