“I was extremely happy to hear the president (Rajapaksa) say today that the word ‘minority’ will be removed from our dictionary.”

The government said it killed rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, ending an ethnic conflict that has claimed more than 80,000 lives. Prabhakaran, who founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the mid-1970s, led the group’s campaign for autonomy for the predominantly Tamil areas of the Indian Ocean island.

Pope Benedict XVI appealed to both sides to protect civilians and asked the international community to provide aid to tens of thousands of refugees. In northern Sri Lanka, there are “thousands of children, women and elderly from whom the war has taken years of life and of hope,” the Pope said May 17.

The Pope asked government and rebel troops to facilitate the evacuation of civilians, guaranteeing their safety.

“I also ask humanitarian institutions, including Catholic ones, not to leave anything untried in meeting the urgent need of the refugees for food and medicine,” the Pope said.

Fernando said the conflict, which turned into a virtual civil war beginning in 1983, was caused by “the treatment of a section of our people (ethnic Tamils) as not fully Sri Lankan.”

The country’s Tamil-speaking ethnic minority accounts for 18 per cent of Sri Lanka’s 19 million people.

Many among the Sinhalese-speaking Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka believe that Buddhism and Buddhists should enjoy supremacy in Sri Lanka.

Fernando said the immediate challenge before the nation is “to take care of the quarter-million Tamil civilians who have been rescued (from the war zone) and help them rebuild their lives.”

On May 19 Rajapaksa pledged the rapid resettlement of those Tamils, now in camps for internally displaced persons, but in a statement the same day Ann Veneman, executive director of UNICEF, said humanitarian agencies needed unrestricted access to the camps.