The decisive re-election of Sri Lanka's Mahinda Rajapaksa yesterday presents the president with a momentous choice. He can continue the Sinhalese nationalist policies that defined his first term, or he can address the serious grievances of the minority Tamil population that lay behind the country's 26-year-long civil war. That turnout...

Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvam was slated to be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1999. A renowned constitutional lawyer from Sri Lanka, Neelan was better known to me as a leading Tamil human rights activist who had thrown his hat into the political ring. As a...

The last stand of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger insurgents appears to be nearing its horrific end. Reduced to a sandy strip no bigger than New York's Central Park, the Tigers seem intent on fighting to the last man, woman and child. Disastrously, the Sri Lanka army has obliged the Tiger's...

It was a typically steamy day in the Mekong Delta in 1994 when I first met Leah Melnick. Thousands of ethnic Vietnamese fleeing violence in Cambodia had been stuck for months in horrendous conditions on small fishing boats on the Cambodia-Vietnam frontier. Leah, a diminutive, 20-something UN official was giving...

(New York, August 22, 2007) -- The crystal blue waters and bright, hot day begged for a jump in the surf. But my friend, a refugee from Ethiopia, just wouldn't go near the ocean. "I haven't gone swimming for years," he said, shaking his head sadly, "Ever since the...