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Post by Frenchie on May 22, 2009 19:31:30 GMT 1
Sri Lanka has for the first time made public its heavy casualties from the last phase of the 25-year war, and the U.N. chief flew to the island on Friday to push for a rapid end to a lingering humanitarian crisis. Officials said over 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 injured since a battle in July 2006 that the military marks as the start of "Eelam War IV," the final stage of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the capital Colombo, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets on Friday to parliament's grounds for a rally called to honour soldiers. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaking to the assembled throng, brushed off Western calls for a war crimes probe into acts by both sides in the final months of the war. "Since (the July 2006 battle at) Mavil Aru, 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded," Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa told the state-run Independent Television Network. Reuters >>
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bigstevie
Kingsman
Honorary Member
Posts: 197
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Post by bigstevie on May 22, 2009 20:11:34 GMT 1
That's not bad, full and complete casualty figures only days after the war 'ended'. Given how long it had taken for our HMG to get the casualty figures right for NI, I think this figure might be 'corrected' over the next few years, sadly in a sharply upward direction.
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