First the Tsunami, Now the Slide Into Civil War

By Simon Tisdall

A recent suicide bomb attack on a navy gunboat, officially blamed on Tamil Tiger insurgents, has dramatized fears that Sri Lanka is sliding back into civil war after an uneasy four-year truce. But while aware of the gathering crisis, governments and international monitors seem to have little idea how to forestall it.

The bombing, which killed 13 crewmen, was the most lethal attack since November’s narrow presidential election victory of Mahinda Rajapakse, a former actor turned politician backed by Sinhalese chauvinist parties. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who control much of the north and east of the country and want autonomy from Colombo, dubbed Mr Rajapakse the "war candidate" and enforced a Tamil boycott of the poll.

Almost 60 soldiers and police have died in a spate of recent incidents that each side blames on the other. Tension is acute in the Tamil-dominated, government-controlled Jaffna peninsula where civilian complaints about security force "excesses", including shootings and disappearances, are rising, according to Sri Lanka’s human rights commission and the Tigers’ website. "If the Tigers are behind this [the gunboat attack], then they are pushing the situation closer to war. I have never been so worried," said Hagrup Haukland, chief monitor of the 2002 Norwegian-brokered truce. Sri Lanka currently tops the independent International Crisis Group’s list of deteriorating conflict situations.

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ leader, said in November the group wanted to talk. But warning that time was running out, he threatened to "intensify the struggle for self-determination" this year in the absence of meaningful progress.

Despite rejecting a federal solution proposed by Sinhalese political opponents, Mr Rajapakse insisted this week he also wanted talks: "We are still ready and committed to solve this problem in a peaceful manner." But he said he would not be intimidated. "If someone takes my patience, inculcated through Buddhist values, as weakness, they would be mistaken."

The two sides have yet to agree an agenda or even a venue. In an apparent effort to strengthen his position rather than address the issues himself, Mr Rajapakse has asked Norway’s peace envoy, Eric Solheim, to help jump-start talks and has appealed to foreign governments for help.

India, its regional superpower pretensions tempered by memories of its intervention in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, is standing clear. But Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, told Sri Lanka’s visiting foreign minister last week that Washington, which like Britain has proscribed the Tigers as a terrorist organization, viewed the conflict as another front in the global "war on terror".

Ms Rice "expressed concern over the recent upsurge in violence ... and lauded the Sri Lankan government’s restraint in the face of Tamil Tiger provocations", a spokesman said. Whether this approach will expedite a settlement or fuel an escalation is debatable. The US already trains Sri Lankan troops now it is sending an envoy, Nicholas Burns, to Colombo.

With Sri Lanka once again teetering between war and peace, it is clear that hopes of an Aceh-style reconciliation sparked by the 2004 tsunami disaster have come to nought. "A courageous initiative tried to set up a joint tsunami response mechanism with both government and the Tigers," said the LSE’s Marlies Glasius in World Today magazine. "But the government in particular, hampered by the Sinhala nationalist JVP party’s presence in the coalition, dragged its heels. The feeling of national unity soon evaporated in a climate of distrust."

It was also clear that renewed war would benefit nobody, said political scientist SY Surendra Kumar in the Delhi-based World Affairs journal. "The Sri Lankan government does not have any military solution to the problem of the Black Tigers [fanatical suicide squads whose female members are called ‘Birds of Freedom]’," he said. "Separatist war will end only through political negotiations ... but the 2002 peace process has come to a standstill."