War in Sri Lanka for the past 25 years?

Does anyone know what's been going on in Sri Lanka for the past 25 years? I don't know anything about this subject and you would think we would have heard more if the fighting has been going on this long. Here is an article on it. Anybody have more please enlighten me...



COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – Tamil politicians accused the Sri Lankan government Tuesday of ignoring the safety of tens of thousands of civilians in its campaign to wipe out the Tamil Tiger rebels, saying more than 2,000 noncombatants have been killed in the recent fighting.

The accusation came as UNICEF accused the rebels of stepping up their forcible recruitment of child soldiers to aid in the fight against the military onslaught.

In recent weeks the military has pushed the rebels to the brink of defeat, ousting them from their administrative capital of Kilinochchi and trapping them — and an estimated 200,000 ethnic Tamil civilians — in a small strip of land along the coast where artillery and gunbattles routinely erupt.

Government officials say they are on the verge of crushing the rebels' quarter-century war for a breakaway state for the nation's Tamil minority.

Independent information on the fighting is not available because the government has barred journalists and most aid workers from the war zone.

The pro-rebel Tamil National Alliance political party said it had managed to compile a list of the civilians killed using the Tamil media, witness accounts and reports from medical authorities in the war zone.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090217/ap_on_re_as/as_sri_lanka_civil_war

It's been a fairly low level conflict with occasional flareups. The majority Sinhalese are Theravadan Buddhist and the Tamil are Hindu, so it's got a religious underpinning.

It's a gorgeous island, just off the southern coast of India.But it has no oil or precious metals in any quantity, which explains alot as to why we don't here much about it. It's also where Arthur C. Clarke lived, outside Colombo the main city.

And that's all I can remember off the top of my head.