Sri Lanka

In the country of Sri Lanka (which used to be called Ceylon) the war between the Buddhist Sinhalese people and the Hindu Tamils has been going on for decades. In the 1990s the war consists of guerrilla fighting and terrorist attacks of one group on the other. The Sinhalese majority wants the Tamils to leave the country and militant Tamils, known as the Tamil Tigers, are fighting back against laws that favor the Sinhalese nationalists. For most of the time that the Tamils have lived in Sri Lanka (over 2,000 years) the two groups have lived peacefully together. There was much intermarriage and "cultural cross-fertilization" and Tamil Hinduism and Sinhalese Buddhism "were highly syncretic -- deities, rituals and caste structures were mixed and matched." In the middle of the nineteenth century a Buddhist book called the Mahavamsa (from the sixth century A.D.) was translated to modern languag

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