Sri Lanka

A former Indonesian general pleaded guilty in federal court in Baltimore yesterday after he was ensnared in an undercover operation targeting illegal arms dealers. In September, federal customs agents arrested six South Asian arms dealers who were accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship restricted, high-tech weapons to rebels in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian Army. The elaborate sting was centered in Baltimore last year, where federal agents put up a Singapore arms broker at an Inner Harbor hotel and took him to a shooting range in Harford County so he could test-fire machine guns.

TODAY IS GEORGE Washington's birthday. Had the life expectancy for men with wooden teeth not been so short during the 18th and 19th centuries, Washington would have been 267 and America could have been enjoying this great man's leadership today.Alas, he's dead. This year marks the 200th anniversary of his death, and the Maryland college that bears Washington's name wants to celebrate.(Wait. That came out wrong. Washington College is not celebrating Washington's death. It's celebrating his life, his legacy and that fact that in 1782 he gave his name and 50 gold guineas to establish the first college in the new nation.

The Rev. William H. Moran, 72, Jesuit officialThe Rev. William H. Moran, S.J., who had been a Jesuit official in Baltimore, died of heart failure Saturday at St. Ignatius Residence in New Orleans. He was 72.From 1981 to 1997, when he moved to New Orleans, Father Moran was associate director of the Jamshedpur Mission Bureau and administrator at Loyola College, both in Baltimore.From 1971 to 1981, he was treasurer and taught at Xavier Management Institute in Jamshedpur, India.Born in Omaha, Neb., he graduated from high school in Tampa, Fla., and entered the Society of Jesus, a religious order of men, in 1942.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Talks between India and Pakistan collapsed yesterday amid disagreements over the disputed region of Kashmir, ending in insults and dashing hopes of a detente between the now-nuclear rivals.Tariq Altaf, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, accused India of taking a "rigid and inflexible" position on the Himalayan region claimed by both countries and said there was no reason for the talks to go on.Indian Foreign Minister K. Raghunath accused Pakistan of sponsoring terrorism and of harboring an unhealthy fixation over Kashmir, saying, "An obsessive focus on a single issue or a one-point agenda is as neurotic for individuals as for nation-states."

Call her a traitor, a killjoy, a Thanksgiving Day scrooge.Go ahead. Call her un-American. It won't change her mind.Pumpkin pie, says Joanna Kraft, is simply "the worst thing invented."Kraft, a Western Maryland College sophomore from Finland, is ++ one of hundreds of foreign students who spent yesterday trying to understand how football, turkey and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade have anything -- anything at all -- to do with this elusive tale of Pilgrims and Indians.Gathered yesterday around Lloyd Helt's and Ruth Gray's dining room table in Westminster were Western Maryland College students from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India.

FOR TERRORISM to succeed politically, all peaceful options have to be foreclosed and its objectives have to be achievable. The suicide truck bombing of the central bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo, killing at least 73 and wounding 1,400 and crippling the poor little country's economy, is likely to fail, having met neither of these tests.Of some 18 million people in the island country, little more than 3 million are Tamils. Ghettoized in the far north and identified with a far larger Tamil population across the Palk Strait in southern India, the Sri Lankan Tamils do not have the makings of a nation state.

Any United World Federalists left over from the 1940s and 1950s - and other romantic celebrants of the concept of a benevolent and democratic one-world order - will detest "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," by Samuel P. Huntington (Simon & Schuster. 320 pages. $24).Many others will hate it as well. It is distinguished by uncompromising candor, clarity of analysis, conviction and contempt for feel-good hypocrisies. It collides, often violently, with much of the catechism of human universality and the banalities of American self-congratulatory multiculturalism.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- It would be fair to say that Nora Janake is a normal office secretary who lives in a city under terrorist siege.Janake, 18, is not diagnosed as a paranoid or a schizophrenic, but she hurries home at sunset, avoids crowds and becomes tense at the sight of strangers."

The concerns of Sama Gunawardhana are typical of a parent whose child is away at college. But the distance between them is most unusual.Gunawardhana, who lives in Sri Lanka, an island off the southern tip of India, said he worries about his son's health "and about him being alone, about his food, about his beer. But I spent a lot of time with him when he was a kid that I am confident that he could do no wrong."That faith stretches a lot of miles, all the way to Mount St. Mary's, where Genuan Gunawardhana (pronounced Gen-a-wan Goon-a-var-duna)

"Funny Boy" by Shyam Selvadurai. William Morrow. 305 pages. $23 "Funny Boy," isn't funny "ha-ha." And it's more than funny "different"- it is intriguing, compelling and sometimes heart-breaking.Shyam Selvadurai's first book transcends the trendy coming-of-age Gay Novel formula it at first seems to be (loose definition of Gay Novel: a novel in which the protagonist realizes he is gay and not much else). His story, set in a deeply divided Sri Lanka, encompasses individuality, family, politics and human rights, as seen through the eyes of a child.

The Sri Lankan government's stunning defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was as swift as it was unusual in world history. Rarely has a government won so decisive a military victory against a long-running domestic armed group. However, this victory has come at a steep price. The regime of President Mahinda Rajapakse is now widely known to have been responsible for grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Besides, the political settlement of the Tamil question is still unresolved.

Separatists' capital falls to government COLOMBO, Sri Lanka: Sri Lankan forces captured the Tamil Tigers' de facto capital yesterday, winning a major victory in a decades-long battle to destroy the ethnic separatists and crush their dream of establishing an independent state. The rebels, who still control 620 square miles of northeastern jungle, swiftly sent the message that they would fight on. They carried out a suicide attack near air force headquarters in the capital, Colombo, killing three airmen and wounding 37 other people, authorities said.

A retired Indonesian Marine Corps general was sentenced yesterday to 30 months in prison for orchestrating a deal in Baltimore to smuggle hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high-tech weapons to rebels in Sri Lanka whom the U.S. government considers terrorists. Erick Wotulo, 61, whom authorities considered the mastermind of the operation, is to be deported after serving his sentence in federal prison, according to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake. Authorities who conducted a three-year investigation of the deals said undercover FBI agents posed as weapons dealers, put up a Singapore arms broker in a four-star Inner Harbor hotel, arranged for him to attend religious services at a mosque in Laurel and invited him to test-fire machine guns at a Harford County firing range.

Before consummating the arms deal, buyers for a South Asian rebel group needed an expert. So they turned to Thirunavukarasu Varatharasa, a citizen of Sri Lanka and a member of the Tamil Tigers, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Prosecutors say he knew how to inspect the fully automatic weapons and surface-to-air missiles to determine whether they had flaws. Varatharasa was arrested in Guam after inspecting the military hardware during a clandestine meeting with undercover American agents from Maryland.

A federal judge in Baltimore yesterday brushed aside prosecutors' calls to impose a hefty prison sentence on an Indonesian arms dealer who attempted to send almost $1 million worth of American military-class weapons to a Sri Lankan rebel group. U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake instead imposed a prison term of slightly more than three years for Haji Subandi, describing the recommended guidelines calculated for the case - a prison term between 46 and 57 months - as "somewhat higher than necessary."

A former Indonesian general pleaded guilty in federal court in Baltimore yesterday after he was ensnared in an undercover operation targeting illegal arms dealers. In September, federal customs agents arrested six South Asian arms dealers who were accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship restricted, high-tech weapons to rebels in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian Army. The elaborate sting was centered in Baltimore last year, where federal agents put up a Singapore arms broker at an Inner Harbor hotel and took him to a shooting range in Harford County so he could test-fire machine guns.

Two of the half-dozen men charged with paying undercover customs agents in Maryland to export restricted high-tech weapons to rebels in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian army pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in Baltimore yesterday. Dressed in prison clothing, Reinhard Rusli, 34, and Helmi Soedirdja, 33, both citizens of Indonesia, entered guilty pleas to attempting to illegally export arms and money laundering. Prosecutors accused Rusli and Soedirdja of contacting undercover agents to buy monocular night vision and holographic weapons sight devices, which they indicated would be used by the Indonesian military.

Last 2 in arms case enter not-guilty pleas The last of six South Asian men accused of paying undercover customs agents in Maryland to export banned military weapons from the United States to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka appeared in a Baltimore courtroom yesterday. The suspected arms dealers were arrested late last month after an elaborate sting operation in which alleged representatives of the Tamil Tigers insurgents in Sri Lanka deposited $700,000 with undercover agents as a down payment for millions of dollars in sniper rifles, submachine guns and grenade launchers, officials say. The defendants - Haniffa Bin Osman, 55, of Singapore; Thirunavukarasu Varatharasa, 36, of Sri Lanka; and Erick Wotulo, 60, Haji Subandi, 69, Reinhard Rusli, 34, and Helmi Soedirdja, 33, of Indonesia - were apprehended in Guam and extradited to Baltimore for trial.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- In what could be the last hope for averting all-out war, the government of this island nation and the rebel Tamil Tigers are to sit down today for their first face-to-face talks in months over one of Asia's most intractable conflicts. Both sides have been stung by heavy losses and international criticism in recent weeks, after a surge in combat that has left hundreds of people dead and thousands more refugees in their own country, forced to flee homes and livelihoods to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Powerful explosions rocked a southern tourist and port town in Sri Lanka yesterday when suicide bombers detonated two boats packed with explosives near a naval base. The terrorist attack, the first on Sri Lanka's southern coast, was attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the militant separatist group. The Tigers have been battling the government for years, demanding the creation of an independent state in the northern and eastern parts of the country, where the Tamil minority is predominant.