Guerrillas in Their Midst: a Perpetual Island War

The latest episode of Sri Lanka's 25-year-old war did not resume today, when the truce between the government and rebels officially ended, but in April 2006, when a dispute over water rights in the east of the island boiled over into murderous fighting.

Since then the ceasefire agreement has been broken many times, becoming merely a fig leaf masking the awful truth: war had returned to the Indian Ocean isle, and was claiming hundreds of lives.

It is a battle rooted in deadly identity politics: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are fighting for an independent homeland for the country's three million Tamils, who are mainly Hindu. The rebels say the Tamils have been the victims of racist pogroms and discriminatory policies for decades at the hands of the majority Buddhist Sinhalese population.

It is true that Sri Lankan politicians had produced questionable policies; first by stopping Tamil language teaching in schools, then allowing anti-Tamil riots to spiral out of control.

The whirlwind reaped by the island has been bloody. Beginning in 1983, a ruthless campaign by the Tigers saw them eliminate first their rivals, then Sri Lanka's president. They assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, who had sent in Indian troops to unsuccessfully keep the peace in Sri Lanka.

War has once again become a fact of life in Sri Lanka. The Tigers have used extra judicial killings indiscriminately, resulting in many "disappearances" and child abductions. Meanwhile, the armed forces have bombed and shot their way through the forests.

No respite has been offered in the past twenty months: aid workers working for foreign agencies have been hacked to death; Sri Lankan ministers have been assassinated; the army chief barely escaped with his life, surviving a suicide bomber; the Tigers' peace negotiator was blown up in an air strike, and the group's intelligence chief was killed earlier this month. Even the rebels' shadowy leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was rumored to have been badly injured in a bombing raid last month. Some 5,000 people have died in the past two years of "ceasefire".

It had seemed so different in the days after September 11. Sensing a new geopolitic, both parties in Sri Lanka talked about reconciling their views. In 2002 Norway brokered a "ceasefire agreement". In 2003 international donors promised huge financial assistance to the country if the war ended. But a peaceful political solution implies a federal-type arrangement in Sri Lanka; a policy that raises fear in the Sinhalese - fear that the country would be split up.

For two years until the end of 2005, the Tigers went about creating a de jure state in the north, replete with banks, courts and schools draped in rebel flags. This stirred unease in the Sinhalese, leading to the election of Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse, a rabble-rousing nationalist politician.

Foreign countries can do little to stop war erupting again. President Rajapakse relies on stoking nationalist passions among the Sinhalese and his administration talks of finding a "military solution". Prabhakaran appears to approve of Rajapakse's warmongering, seeing a fight to the death as preferable to foreign peace efforts. The inevitable consequence is a slide back into all-out war.