9 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited COLOMBO, Jan 9 (Reuters) – The only problem Sri Lanka’s intrepid garment makers faced after a giant tsunami hit two weeks ago was a slight rise in absenteeism at some of the hundreds of garment factories dotting the Indian Ocean island. “In one zone in…
8 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited SAMMANTHURAI, Sri Lanka, Jan 8 (Reuters) – Sitting cross-legged on the cramped, bucking floor of a Black Hawk helicopter as it roars above central Sri Lanka’s pristine jungle and muddy rivers, aid has never seemed as complicated. A second U.S. Air Force Black Hawk…
7 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited COLOMBO, Jan 7 (Reuters) – More than 30,000 Sri Lankans lost their lives when the tsunami hit their island the day after Christmas, but perversely the economy looks like it will gain from the destruction, analysts said on Friday. The Sri Lankan rupee has been…
5 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited TANGALLA, Sri Lanka, Jan 5 (Reuters) – From a few hundred feet up, with the breakers curling lazily on mile after mile of yellow sand beneath blue skies, it is easy to see why this teardrop-shaped island was once called Serendip. But there was…
19 November 1997 Reuters News English (c) 1997 Reuters Limited NEW DELHI, Nov 19 (Reuters) – India’s lack of “grit” in pursuing its costly military foray into northern Sri Lanka may have led to Rajiv Gandhi’s 1991 murder by a suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber, New Delhi’s former envoy to Colombo said on Wednesday. “If…
3 January 2005 Reuters News English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited COLOMBO, Jan 3 (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s tsunami devastation has drawn a huge international aid response, but a geopolitical game of influence between India and the United States is playing not too subtly in the background, analysts said on Monday. “There is no innocence in…
The 35-km ride from Katunayake International Airport into Colombo in a slow Mitsubishi coach I driven by a nervous Sinhala I is enveloped in silence. Almost every Indian visitor is heading for the Lanka Oberoi, or the Galle Face, or the Ceylon Intercontinental— hotels that have escaped the attention of mobs in search of hiding…
Ganesha’s temple had never seen so many supplicants, all with unanswerable prayers Colombo’s Tamils call it Pillaiyar Kovil, and its ornamented gateway on Galle Road in the Wella-watta area is flanked by carefully incinerated Tamil shops. Wella-watta was a genteel Tamil ghetto. Now the temple is a refugee camp, and cheek-by-jowl stand three others at…