Lanka burning... again?

It?s in India?s interests to play a more proactive role in Sri Lanka that?d help end the strife. Resolving Sri Lanka?s ethnic conflict also involves addressing related Indian concerns.

Is Sri Lanka heading back to war? The question hangs heavy over the island nation in the wake of the suicide bomb attack on the Sri Lankan army headquarters in Colombo, which killed several people and seriously injured army chief Lt Gen Sarath Fonseka. It isn’t surprising that the LTTE has not claimed responsibility for the attack, as it never owns up to its acts of terrorism. Nevertheless, the latest outrage has the LTTE’s hallmark written all over. For only it could have carried out an operation like this, using precise intelligence regarding the movements of the army chief, and a highly motivated female suicide bomber to penetrate such a heavily-guarded nerve centre in the capital. The Sri Lankan government’s retaliatory air and naval strikes on Tamil bases in the north-east of the country -- the first official military action since a ceasefire was signed in 2002 -- suggests there is every possibility of open hostilities breaking out. Although the ceasefire still holds formally, escalating violence in the north and east of the country has left over a 100 people dead in the last three weeks.

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LTTE cadres under Prabhakaran are obviously upset with the strong mandate that President Rajapakse won in the local polls and the increased assertion of their breakaway faction, led by Karuna, in the east, which threatens to hamper the LTTE’s activities across the world. The scathing Human Rights Watch report on the LTTE’s record of child recruitment would have added to its frustration. The Sri Lankan security forces are in no position to defeat the LTTE militarily. But that shouldn’t prevent Colombo from devising other ways to combat these terrorist acts. The government could, for instance, choke the flow of funds to the LTTE’s war chest. Apart from the contributions made by the Tamil diaspora, the LTTE depends a lot on the earnings from its commercial shipping fleet and the narcotics trade in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The government could also make appropriate political gestures to Sri Lankan Tamils so that the LTTE would find new recruits hard to come by.