NO CRYSTAL BALL FOR SRI LANKA
The refusal of the Australian and West Indies cricket teams to play World Cup matches in Colombo, ironically, was enough to shift international attention away from the event that had caused that reluctance in the first place. The event was the 31 January bomb explosion that devastated Colombo´s plush business district and killed nearly a hundred people, injuring 1500 more.
The message that Vellupillai Prabhakaran and his Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) sent was chillingly clear: the Tigers may have been driven from their lair in Jaffna, but they had not been de-fanged. Plastic explosives and dynamite hidden in a lorry carrying rice bags, were what blew up the city centre, destroying property worth billions of rupees. The imposing central bank building, one of the biggest and best in the city, and its 2300 employees, took the brunt of the blast.
What differentiated this blast from earlier ones, other than its magnitude, was that the middle and upper classes—senior Central Bank officials, business leaders and the like—were killed. Such people had been immune previously, at least from the physical effects of terror.
The lion flag of Lanka had been hoisted over Jaffna barely two months ago at the end of a bloody campaign, in which the death count was 2000 for the Tigers, and 500 for the military. Though ejected from their Jaffna stronghold, Prabhakaran has clearly signaled that the fanatically-motivated Tigers retain a frightening terrorist capability.
The Colombo attack was not necessarily terror for terror´s sake. The tactic was to force the military to help secure vulnerable villages and thus, to provide more manoeuvrability to the Tigers. The Deputy Defence Minister and political boss of the armed forces Gen Anuruddha Ratwatte may also be forced to deploy more troops to secure Colombo, reducing the strength in the frontlines.
The Operation Riviresa (Sunshine), which drove the LTTE out of Jaffna, required troop deployments. This led the government to lose ground to the Tigers in the previously largely-secured east. The strategy now is to retake the eastern province. It is highly probable that Prabhakaran will utilise suicide cadres, of which he seems to have an almost inexhaustible supply, to mount attacks on the southern and central parts of the country, particularly Colombo, to force troop reductions in the east. Such attacks can also provoke a backlash on Tamils living among the Sinhalese, a danger the government has always faced.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga and her ministers constantly exhort the majority community not to fall into that trap. Communal rioting in 1983, following the killing by the LTTE of 13 soldiers in Jaffna, cost the country dearly. But the risk of a backlash always remains. Any attack on Tamils will certainly alienate the international support the government now has in fighting a group which Kumaratunga says clings on "to their particular cult of savage terror" despite her best efforts to resolve the ethnic problem politically with a package of generous devolution proposals.
Kumaratunga´s dilemma is that the LTTE will almost certainly not be willing to negotiate, unless the status quo is restored in Jaffna. Kumaratunga must also sell her political package to the Sinhalese, many of whom demand a fight to the finish. Prabhakaran too, is unlikely to meet the President´s demand that a "substantial laying down of arms" must precede any talks. The reality is that no political package is worth anything without LTTE concurrence. The Tamils who favour the government´s proposals cannot even go to the north. The biggest plus for Kumaratunga, in an otherwise gloomy scene, is the war weariness of the whole country. This is particularly true of the people of the north and east who have taken the brunt of the fighting.
Kumaratunga hopes that the LTTE can be isolated from those it claims to represent. However, it is unlikely that the Tigers, who have never stood an electoral test, will easily let go of their hold on the Tamils of the claimed homeland in the north and east. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that Ms Kumaratunga won immense popularity between January and April 1995, when what was officially called a "cessation of hostilities" was negotiated, and truce held for a hundred days.
The Tigers broke the truce unilaterally, partly because of their unhappiness with the popularity the President gained by stopping the fighting and beginning to supply the north with goods and amenities that the peninsula had long been deprived of. There were even instances when the public lit lamps under her picture during the period of truce.
But now Prabhakaran is trying to make a Jaffna out of Colombo. Ms Kumaratunga, who is very much a target of the LTTE, soldiers on, a virtual captive of her security corps—a prisoner in paradise. There is no crystal ball to indicate where Sri Lanka is headed.