{"id":2319,"date":"2002-08-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-08-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/08\/25\/2002-08-25-armitage-says-devastation-in-jaffna-reminds-him-of-vietnam\/"},"modified":"2002-08-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-08-25T12:00:00","slug":"2002-08-25-armitage-says-devastation-in-jaffna-reminds-him-of-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/08\/25\/2002-08-25-armitage-says-devastation-in-jaffna-reminds-him-of-vietnam\/","title":{"rendered":"Armitage Says Devastation in Jaffna Reminds Him of Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?file=\/news\/archive\/2002\/08\/22\/international0848EDT0508.DTL\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>COLOMBO, SRI LANKA August 22, 2002: After touring the heartland of Sri Lanka&#8217;s bloody civil war Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said what he saw reminded him of the devastation of the Vietnam War. Armitage&#8217;s visit was the first to Sri Lanka by a senior U.S. official since the war began in 1983 and reflects Washington&#8217;s support for ending one of Asia&#8217;s longest running conflicts. &#8220;I am here to physically demonstrate the U.S. support for this process toward peace,&#8221; Armitage said after a 30-minute meeting with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in the capital, Colombo. The jungle-cloaked Jaffna Peninsula is the center of the 19-year insurgency by Tamil Tiger rebels for a homeland for Sri Lanka&#8217;s Tamil minority. The fighting has killed more than 64,500 people. He said he was in Sri Lanka at the request of President Bush, who had said he &#8220;was moved&#8221; by a meeting with Wickremesinghe in Washington last month. The rebels claim the island&#8217;s 3.2 million Tamils are denied equal opportunity in jobs and education by the Sinhalese, who make up 74 percent of Sri Lanka&#8217;s 18.6 million people. Armitage did not meet with officials of the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, which is outlawed as a terrorist group in the United States. But he met with moderate Tamil, Muslim and opposition representatives on his return to Colombo. &#8220;The international community expects the government and LTTE to move forward in the negotiations toward a permanent settlement &#8230; and keep the country united,&#8221; Armitage said.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE COLOMBO, SRI LANKA August 22, 2002: After touring the heartland of Sri Lanka&#8217;s bloody civil war Thursday,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}