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A chronology of key events:
Fifth century BC – Indo-Aryan migrants from northern India settle on the island; the Sinhalese emerge as the most powerful of the various clans.
Third century BC – Beginning of Tamil migration from India.
1505 – Portuguese arrive in Colombo, marking beginning of European interest.
1658 – Dutch force out Portuguese and establish control over whole island except central kingdom of Kandy.
1796 – Britain begins to take over island.
1815 – Kingdom of Kandy conquered. Britain starts bringing in Tamil labourers from southern India to work in tea, coffee and coconut plantations.
1833 – Whole island united under one British administration.
1931 – British grant the right to vote and introduce power sharing with Sinhalese-run cabinet.
1948 – Ceylon gains full independence.
Sinhala nationalism
1949 – Indian Tamil plantation workers disenfranchised and many deprived of citizenship.
1956 – Solomon Bandaranaike elected on wave of Sinhalese nationalism. Sinhala made sole official language and other measures introduced to bolster Sinhalese and Buddhist feeling. More than 100 Tamils killed in widespread violence after Tamil parliamentarians protest at new laws.
1958 – Anti-Tamil riots leave more than 200 people dead. Thousands of Tamils displaced.
1959 – Bandaranaike assassinated by a Buddhist monk. Succeeded by widow, Srimavo, who continues nationalisation programme.
1965 – Opposition United National Party wins elections and attempts to reverse nationalisation measures.
1970 – Srimavo Bandaranaike returns to power and extends nationalisation programme.
Ethnic tensions
1971 – Sinhalese Marxist uprising led by students and activists.
1972 – Ceylon changes its name to Sri Lanka and Buddhism given primary place as country’s religion, further antagonising Tamil minority.
1976 – Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) formed as tensions increase in Tamil-dominated areas of north and east.
1977 – Separatist Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) party wins all seats in Tamil areas. Anti-Tamil riots leave more than 100 Tamils dead.
1981 Sinhala policemen accused of burning the Jaffna Public Library, causing further resentment in Tamil community.
Full Timeline

Betrayed by defectors from within and cornered by mortal foes from without, PC VINOJ KUMAR examines how Sri Lanka won the war. And why the LTTE lost it

SRI LANKAN President Mahinda Rajapaksa should consider writing a book on how to win wars. The Rajapaksa Doctrine is quite simple. There are three main rules. The First (and most important) Rule: Conduct the War Without Witnesses. Ensure that the theatre of war is out of bounds for the media, international monitors and aid agencies. The Second Rule: Give the Army a Free Hand. Do not constrain them with rules and international conventions. The Third Rule: (In the absence of witnesses), Don’t Worry About Human Rights Violations.

This strategy has paid rich dividends in Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE, the rebel group fighting for Eelam, a separate nation for the Tamils of Sri Lanka. When Rajapaksa became President in November 2005, the LTTE controlled large swathes of territory in the northern districts of Mullaithivu, Killinochchi, and parts of Mannar. The LTTE held an area of about 15,000 sq km and ran a parallel government, complete with military, a judiciary, police and civil administration.
However, the LTTE’S statelet began to shatter as Rajapaksa started his military campaign around August 2006. He first evicted the LTTE from the small pockets it controlled in the Eastern Province. In January 2008, he called off the six-year-old ceasefire and initiated open war against the LTTE. Relentless attacks devastated the rebels, who began to retreat from town after town. The LTTE is now surrounded in an 8 sq km strip of coastal land in Mullaithivu and government troops are pushing forward to conquer the last patch of land from the rebels. Despite appeals from the international community, which has expressed concerns about the safety of the thousands of civilians trapped in the conflict zone, Sri Lanka has refused to halt operations. The army says that top rebel leaders, including LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabakaran, are holed up in this area.
…
In January, the LTTE lost its administrative capital, Kilinochchi. It then lost the strategic Elephant Pass and Mullaithivu. As the LTTE fell back, it took the people with them. “This was a poor strategy. The people became a burden for the LTTE, since it had to look after their needs,” says Col R Hariharan, a former Indian Military Intelligence official who has served in Sri Lanka. Col Hariharan feels that the LTTE should have adopted guerrilla tactics to counter the army, instead of fighting a conventional war. Several experts agree. Lieut Gen (retd) AS Kalkat, a former Indian Army commander who led IPKF operations in the 1980s, wrote in The Hindu, “Prabakaran thought that he had achieved Eelam in the North Eastern Province and the LTTE usurped the trappings of a sovereign state. He established the state ‘capital’ at Killinochchi, created ‘government departments’ and pretended that his armed cadres were a regular army, navy and air force. Then, either due to arrogance or overconfidence, Prabakaran made the blunder of taking on a regular army and tried to fight like one, with disastrous consequences. The LTTE was fighting outside its core competence.”
…
FOR THE LTTE, the post-9/11 scenario was detrimental,” says Hariharan. “Rajapaksa exploited the situation. He enlisted the support of the major world powers and presented his fight against the LTTE as part of the ‘Global War on Terror’. That the LTTE had been designated a terrorist outfit in nearly forty countries helped his cause.”
…
Tamil journalist Vithyatharan, who has a reputation for exposing army excesses, was detained for nearly two months on charges of having links with the LTTE. In January, senior journalist and vocal critic of the government Lasantha Wickramatunga wrote an editorial titled ‘And Then, They Came for Me’ in which he said, “When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.” In February, unknown assailants assassinated him.

Says Tamil MP MK Sivajilingam, “If the government has nothing to hide, why did it prevent international monitors or aid agencies from entering the war zone? The LTTE was willing to let independent observers into its area, but the government refused.” Though the Tamil diaspora has organised protests against the ‘genocidal war,’ their cries for global intervention have been fruitless.
Sri Lanka has received military support from China, Pakistan, and India. India, which had a score to settle with the LTTE for its involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, provided crucial intelligence inputs, radars and weapons. It is also believed that the Sri Lankan Navy was able to destroy seven LTTE ships due to Indian intelligence inputs. The Indian Navy and the Coast Guard have also sealed the entire Indian coast to block LTTE supply routes from Tamil Nadu.
…
If external actors were arrayed against the LTTE, the revolt of Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, alias Karuna, the LTTE’S former Eastern commander, was an internal catastrophe. Karuna, who has defected to the Lankans and has been made a Minister, provided vital intelligence about LTTE battle tactics during army operations in the Wanni, the Sri Lankan heartland. Colombo journalist Kusal Perara says that with the loss of Karuna, the LTTE lost its major recruitment base. “Most of the fighting LTTE cadres came from the East and not from the North,” he says.

Meanwhile, Rajapaksa is already talking about how he has set an example for all nations in handling the war on terror….
But many Sri Lankans do not think the Tamil question has been resolved or will be resolved even if Prabakaran is eliminated. Rohana Gamage, a former navy officer turned politician, insists that the LTTE will re-emerge in another form. “There can be no military solution to the Tamil conflict,” he says. Rohana belongs to the opposition United National Party and is a member of the North Central Provincial Council. Adds Tasha Manoranjan, a US-based Tamil, “Rajapaksa’s inhumane military offensive will only breed further enmity between the Tamils and Sinhalas.” The unity and integrity of Sri Lanka continues to hang in the balance.

vinoj@tehelka.com

Tehelka

Now in his eighties, A Sivanandan remains an important figure in the politics of race and class, maintaining his long-held insistence that only in the symbiosis of the two struggles can a genuinely radical politics be found. By Arun Kundnani
‘In a sense, before I became black, I became white.’ It is a surprising comment from someone who has been widely regarded as among the fiercest of black radical thinkers in Britain. A Sivanandan (he has long used only the initial of his forename), director of the Institute of Race Relations and founding editor of the journal Race and Class, is sitting at his desk at home surrounded by handwritten drafts of his second novel. Now in his eighties, for much of the past 40 years Sivanandan (‘Siva’ to his friends) has been one of the major influences on black political thinking in Britain.
A pamphleteer and an organiser, rather than a writer of books of theory, he is best known for a series of trenchant essays published from the early 1970s onwards, each focused on the immediate political priorities of the day. But implicit in all of his work has been a set of coherent and powerful ideas on culture, imperialism and political change.
Sivanandan has been receiving renewed attention since the recent publication of a collection of his non-fiction writing, Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation (Pluto). At the heart of it is a visceral sense of the painful experience of racism and imperialism.
‘There is all sorts of personal pain in a colonial society,’ he says. ‘Especially when you have an English education and you come from a poor village where hardly anybody speaks English.’ Yet the absorption into European culture that at first alienated him from his people also provided the basis for his political activism. ‘I was able to articulate the pain of imperialism with the language that the Englishman gave me. I have taken the tool from the system to fight the system with.’
Sivanandan was born to a Tamil family in a small village in the north of Sri Lanka, then a British colony and known as Ceylon. His father had risen from a poor, tenant farmer background to become first a postal clerk and then a postmaster. But his Gandhian politics got him into trouble with his British bosses, who punished him by assigning him to one malaria-infested country post office after another.
To avoid this disruption, Sivanandan, the eldest of five children, was sent off to stay with his uncle in the capital Colombo, where he was able to enrol at a top Catholic school on discounted fees. ‘My uncle lived very close to the school but in a more or less slum area. So I played around with the slum boys and went to school with the petty bourgeoisie.’
Encountering Marxism as a student in 1940s Colombo, Sivanandan felt a resonance with some of the things that his father used to say. ‘Anything that is bad has a good side. Anything that is good has a bad side. In other words, there are contradictions. Nonetheless, life moves in terms of those contradictions. Life examines you and that is how knowledge grows.’
Still, activism with any of the Marxist sects did not appeal and Sivanandan was soon working as the manager of a large bank, firmly ensconced in the elite society of newly independent Ceylon and somewhat notorious for marrying across ethnic and religious lines – he was a Hindu from the minority Tamil community, his wife a Catholic from the majority Sinhalese. Then, in 1958, state communalism led to an eruption of anti-Tamil pogroms – the first salvo in the civil war that has continued on and off to the present day (see pages 43-47).
Disillusioned, he came to London. Soon afterwards, his marriage fell apart. And racial discrimination relegated the former bank manager to the lowly status of a tea-boy at a north-west London public library. Double baptism of fire
These two experiences – of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and racism in Britain – became the twin poles of his politics, his ‘double baptism of fire’. One inscribed in his soul the dangers of ethnic separatism, the other brought home the need for a black politics autonomous from the established left.
It was these, potentially conflicting, demands that drove his political creativity in the following decades. A perennial question would be how to steer a course between an inward-looking separatism on the one hand and oppressive absorption into another political culture on the other. Because that same question lies behind current debates on multiculturalism and globalisation, even his early work still has continued relevance.
For Sivanandan, culture is a vehicle for political and personal growth and ‘no culture grows except through bastardisation – a pure culture is a dead culture’. As he says of himself, ‘I am a bastard – culturally!’ Through colonialism, ‘the Portuguese have messed me up, the Sinhalese have messed me up, and so have the Dutch and the British. And I find myself a rich man because all these cultures are sitting inside of me.’
Coming from the north of Sri Lanka, where, as he puts it, ‘nothing grew, except children’, he has made ‘organic’ growth the touchstone of his thinking. He introduced the idea of ‘disorganic development’ to refer to the imposition of a capitalist economy on a feudal society, which is thus unable to produce the kinds of ameliorating social democratic tendencies that emerged with European capitalism. Breaking with the left dogma that took the western class struggle as the sole, legitimate progressive politics, he argued that, in conditions of disorganic development, political struggles emerge that take the form of mass resistance to the state and to imperialism with culture and religion rather than class as the rallying cries. Moreover, new technology had dispersed the hard edge of capitalist contradiction from the European factory floor to the imperial periphery.
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By Meenakshi Ganguli

If there were a chessboard to demonstrate the war between Sri Lankan forces and the LTTE, the pawns would be wearing sarongs and saris. These individuals — civilians, not soldiers — are the war’s ‘collateral damage’. Human rights groups are despised by both for they don’t understand this mathematics and mourn over the increasing number of corpses.
The LTTE is responsible for human rights abuses — forcibly recruiting people, turning schoolchildren into combatants, indiscriminate killings, using landmines and human bombs. Successive Sri Lankan governments, in order to appease the Sinhalese population, have failed to address the grievances of the Tamils, thus, building support for the Tigers.
To ensure its success, the government has chosen to silence the dissidents. Those who criticise its actions or policies are accused of being closet LTTE supporters; they are either shot down by unknown gunmen or men in vans prowling the streets of Colombo makes them ‘disappear’. Journalists and human rights defenders live in constant fear.
The military has made gains in reclaiming virtually all of northern Sri Lanka previously under the LTTE. The withdrawing Tigers have taken with them civilians to be used as combatants, provide labour to build trenches or serve as human shields. These are the people that the LTTE claims to represent and protect, and yet, it is deliberately putting them in danger.
For over two years, the Sri Lankan government knew that civilians were being forced to accompany the retreating Tigers, yet it did nothing about their safety. Instead, the detention camps house around 60,000 of those who managed to escape the
LTTE’s writ. They now feel that they will be persecuted when the war is over.
Even with reports of civilian casualties pouring in, the government has denied that it is targeting civilians. Credible reports, however, prove it’s a lie. The military says that those killed are not necessarily civilians. A senior Sri Lankan diplomat has reportedly said, “A fighter doesn’t become a civilian when he dons a sarong.” Health Secretary Athula Kahandaliyanage had stated, “It’s been found that terrorists fight in civil clothes and when they get wounded they can be mistakenly considered as civilians”. He added that there could be accidental injuries to non-combatants if they were in the line of fire.
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By B. Muralidhar Reddy

No political solution is in sight even as the prolonged war spells misery to hapless citizens caught in the crossfire.
Reuters

An injured Tamil girl at a temporary hospital in Trincomalee on March 28.

FOR the Sri Lankan government, the final phase of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is proving to be tougher, trickier and nastier than anticipated. None had thought the Tigers would last long after the fall of their main garrison town, Mullaithivu, on January 25. But 10 weeks later, they are still fighting, much to the agony of the civilians trapped in the war zone, and the rest of the world.
The presence of a large number of civilians in the war zone is one of the main reasons for the prolonged war. Estimates of their number vary from 70,000 to 150,000. Besides, it reflects the bravado of the Tigers, which has meant unimaginable consequences for the hapless citizens caught in the crossfire. According to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, between January and March more than 57,394 civilians, including women, children and the elderly, had fled the LTTE area to the safety of government-held areas.
The LTTE is now boxed into an area of one and a half square kilometres in addition to the 20 sq km demarcated as no-fire zone (NFZ) by the government. It is a precarious situation as the military believes that the Tigers are not only hiding among the civilians in the safe zone but have also set up gun positions in the NFZ.
The consequences of the delay in the complete defeat of the Tigers as a conventional force are felt in different quarters in and outside Sri Lanka. The immediate victims are the trapped civilians, whose unending plight is pricking the conscience of the world community, particularly the Tamil diaspora. A section of political parties in Tamil Nadu are attempting to make political capital out of the miseries of the people in Sri Lanka’s war theatre.
The concerns, and pulls and pressures at various levels have had an impact on Colombo from time to time. In an obvious bid to address these concerns, President Mahinda Rajapaksa convened a meeting of all Tamil and Muslim parties on March 26.
The invitees to the interactive session included the representatives of the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance (TNA). However, the TNA boycotted the meeting, citing the humanitarian crisis triggered by the war as reason. In a letter sent to Rajapaksa hours before the meeting, it maintained that utmost priority must be given to the resolution of the humanitarian crisis before it assumed catastrophic proportions and that such action was necessary for any political discussions to be purposeful and meaningful. “Since you have hitherto consistently followed a policy of ignoring the TNA in regard to all political issues in the north-east, we are glad that you now wish to engage in discussions with us, recognising, even though belatedly, that we represent the Tamil people. We will extend our cooperation to any credible political process that seeks to evolve an adequate, acceptable and durable political solution to the Tamil question. We would strongly urge that you take necessary steps to address forthwith the grave humanitarian crisis pertaining to the displaced Tamil civilian population,” the letter said.
The invitation was a first of its kind by the President to the TNA after the abrogation of the Norwegian-brokered 2002 Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) in January 2008 and the imposition of a ban on the Tigers in January this year. Ironically, the TNA’s stand is in contrast to the LTTE’s repeated assertions in recent months about its willingness for unconditional talks with the government. Signs of differences among pro-LTTE outfits over the ongoing war recently had given rise to speculation that a section of the TNA might respond to the presidential invitation.
In the second week of March, Vinodharadhalingam, a Member of Parliament of the TNA, had surprised everyone with his comments in support of the government’s efforts towards the welfare of the displaced in areas that had come under military control in recent weeks. He told Parliament that he had visited the Kadiragamapuram welfare camp and had seen the manner in which the government was taking care of the displaced persons. His absence at the presidential meeting showed that the TNA had either won him back into its fold or had silenced him effectively.
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London (IANS) The Sri Lankan government has been able to disregard international concern over its civil war with Tamils because of financial and military backing by China, a senior former Indian intelligence official was quoted saying on Saturday.
The Times newspaper said China has replaced Japan as Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign donor giving the island-nation nearly a billion US dollars last year.
By comparison, the US gave $7.4 million last year, and Britain 1.25 million pounds.
“That’s why Sri Lanka has been so dismissive of international criticism,” B. Raman of the Chennai Centre for China Studies, a former additional secretary in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s external intelligence agency.
“It knows it can rely on support from China,” he added.
The Times said strategic experts believe a billion dollar commercial port that the Chinese are building in the southern Sri Lankan town of Hambantota will eventually become a base for its navy.
“Ever since Sri Lanka agreed to the [port construction] plan, in March 2007, China has given it all the aid, arms and diplomatic support it needs to defeat the Tigers, without worrying about the West,” the paper reported.
“China has cultivated ties with Sri Lanka for decades and became its biggest arms supplier in the 1990s, when India and Western governments refused to sell weapons to Colombo for use in the civil war. Beijing appears to have increased arms sales significantly to Sri Lanka since 2007, when the US suspended military aid over human rights issues,” it paper said.
The Times said many US and Indian military planners regard the port as part of a “string of pearls” strategy under which China is also building or upgrading ports at Gwadar in Pakistan, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Myanmar.
The strategy was outlined in a paper by Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher J. Pehrson, of the Pentagon’s Air Staff, in 2006, and again in a report by the US Joint Forces Command in November.
Stepping in after India’s insistence on selling only defensive weapons to Sri Lanka, the Chinese gave six F7 fighter aircraft to Sri Lanka last year – apparently free of charge.
The paper quoted unnamed Indian security sources as saying China has encouraged Pakistan to sell weapons to Sri Lanka and to train Sri Lankan pilots to fly the Chinese fighters.

In V V Ganeshananthan’s thought-provoking and moving first novel Love Marriage, Kumaran, a dying former Tamil Tiger, triggers a series of reactions in his last days that provoke some people close to him to examine their political and family heritage.

Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lanka [Images]n immigrants who left their war-torn country and married in America, is caught between the history of her ancestors and her own little world. As she looks after Kumaran in Toronto, she begins to see that the violence that has been consuming Sri Lanka for over two decades is very much a part of her present. Slowly, she traces her family’s roots and the conflicts facing them through a series of marriages. Adding tension to her investigation is the impending politically motivated wedding in the family.

As the British newspaper The Independent pointed our recently, Michael Ondaatje visited Sri Lankan brutality in Anil’s Ghost, a story about a forensic pathologist returning home to investigate abuses. Romesh Gunesekera dealt with its pain obliquely in Reef and The Sandglass. And Ganeshananthan focuses on the journey of one family, in the process painting a broader truth.

A 2002 graduate of Harvard College, Ganeshananthan, who was born and raised in America, received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2007, she graduated from the new master’s programme at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is the vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association.

She spoke to rediff India Abroad Managing Editor (Features) Arthur J Pais.

What are some of the things that the world does not understand about the war in Sri Lanka?
I don’t know if people understand how hard it is to have a conversation about Sri Lanka, which has a complicated population and history. If you don’t acknowledge those nuances, the conversation isn’t inclusive and can’t move forward.

What are some of the most important things you are conveying through this novel?
I intended to write about the love of families, morality, and how war affects civil life. We reduce things: Arranged marriage versus love marriage, good versus evil. Very little actually works that way.

What kind of stories about the Sri Lankan civil war did you grow up listening to?
It’s hard to remember. The war technically started after my parents were in the United States, so I suspect that a lot of what I originally heard was from the news. It wasn’t something relatives would have offered to me directly — I was young. Of course, I heard people’s various stories of immigration after 1983, and eventually I was able to put those into context.

You wrote the novel over a period of several years. How did it change from the first draft to the last?
The version I turned in as my Harvard thesis was missing a character, Kumaran. He showed up the year after I graduated. The book became more political as the world did.

To what extent did your perspective change following the research?
I became more aware of the complexity of Sri Lanka’s population, history and politics. The standard line about Sri Lanka says simply that the Tamil Tigers are fighting the Sinhalese-dominated government. But that leaves out the histories of both groups — not to mention the other people who are involved, including civilians. In recent years, I have read a lot about Tamil civilians, journalists and aid workers disappearing. Investigations of these disappearances are never concluded. The people who are left live with a high degree of uncertainty. What could happen to them? Who would be responsible? How is this happening in areas under government control? The Tigers and the Sri Lankan government have both been criticised for human rights violations.
I also began to learn how the war had affected other minority populations. For example, in 1990, the Tigers expelled some Muslims in the northern areas from their homes. That displaced group has suffered tremendously. And I started to understand more about upcountry Tamils, whom the British brought from India to work on tea plantations. This population’s history is different from that of the Tamils who were there before them. I also learned more about how caste functions in Sri Lanka. It’s different than it is in India. I’m still studying all these things now. Not all of them ended up in the book, but it’s important for me to know.
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(Reuters) – The foreign ministers of Britain and France urged Sri Lanka on Wednesday to implement a humanitarian cease-fire with Tamil Tiger rebels in order to allow tens of thousands of trapped civilians to escape the battle zone.
Sri Lanka earlier in the week promised to stop using heavy weapons in its fight to finish off the rebels and to concentrate its military efforts on freeing the civilians, but both sides report continued fighting and casualties.
Following are some key events in the 25-year conflict between Tamil separatist rebels and the Sri Lankan government.
1983 – Tiger attack in north kills 13 soldiers, triggering anti-Tamil riots in capital, Colombo. Hundreds die, thousands flee. Start of what Tigers call “First Eelam War.”
1987 – Having earlier armed Tigers, India sends troops to enforce truce it brokered. Tigers renege, refuse to disarm and begin three years of fighting that kills 1,000 Indian soldiers.
1990 – India withdraws. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) control northern city of Jaffna. “Second Eelam War” begins.
1991 – Suspected Tiger suicide bomber kills former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in southern India. Two years later, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa assassinated in separate suicide attack. LTTE blamed in both.
1995 – President Chandrika Kumaratunga agrees to truce with rebels. “Eelam War 3” begins when rebels sink naval craft. Tigers lose Jaffna to government forces.
1995-2001 – War rages across north and east. Suicide attack on central bank in Colombo kills around 100. Kumaratunga wounded in another attack.
2002 – Landmark cease-fire signed after Norwegian mediation.
2003 – Tigers pull out of peace talks, cease-fire holds.
2004-2005 – Tamil Tiger eastern commander Colonel Karuna Amman breaks away from LTTE and takes 6,000 fighters with him Suspected Tiger assassin kills foreign minister. Anti-Tiger hardliner Mahinda Rajapaksa wins presidency.
2006 – Fighting flares in April-July, raising fears of start of “Eelam War 4.” New talks fail in Geneva in October.
2007 – Government captures Tiger’s eastern strongholds.
2008 – Government annuls cease-fire in early January and launches massive offensive.
January 2, 2009 – Troops seize Tiger’s de facto capital, Kilinochchi.
April 5 – Military says it has confined the rebels to a no-fire zone measuring just 17 square km (6.5 sq miles).
April 17 – Rebels call for a truce after two-day government fighting pause expires. Government rejects the call as a ruse.
April 20 – Sri Lanka gives the rebels 24 hours to surrender as tens of thousands of civilians flee battle zone.
April 26 – Tigers declare a unilateral cease-fire. Sri Lankan government dismisses cease-fire and says they must surrender.
April 27 – Sri Lankan government says it ceases combat operations with heavy weapons and operations will be confined to using only small arms and rescuing civilians trapped in the war zone.
April 29 – British and French foreign ministers urge government to implement a humanitarian cease-fire, as both sides in the war report continued fighting and casualties.
(Writing by Ranga Sirilal; Editing by Jerry Norton)
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By Koththa-Malli

My dear Mahinda Aiya,

Ayubowan, vanakkam and assalamu alaikkum as we enter May with the once vibrant May Day being downgraded or degraded while ‘May day, May day’ alerts are ringing loud on several fronts. The ruling UPFA, this year, did not hold the May Day rally but instead there was a meeting of political and trade union leaders at Temple Trees. Analysts say the rally was called off apparently because of physical exhaustion after the long campaign for the Western Provincial Council elections or perhaps because the government feels there is no need to rally the people any more with millions already whipped up by the war mentality if not hysteria.

The main opposition UNP also did not hold a May Day procession or rally. Instead we saw a front page picture of party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe with Ranil the worker acting as a May Day painter at a Children’s Home in Kotte. The JVP was the only major party that conducted a rally at Campbell Place but there was no procession. JVP leaders, charged at the rally,that the UNP was now so bankrupt or broken down that it would never be able to draw a large crowd for a May Day rally. But party politics like all factors in life is transient and impermanent. Within months the balance of power or public support could swing dramatically.

With May Day going to the back pages like an obituary notice, the news headlines were again dominated by what is happening or not happening on the northern battle front. Though battles in the five-kilometre conflict zone appeared to be less intense than in the weeks before, Sri Lanka last week came under its heaviest political bombardment from the international community. Sri Lanka’s giant neighbour or big brother India harbouring dreams or aims of becoming the super power of the continent, continued to play a double or treble game on the Sri Lankan crisis while Tamil Nadu blew hot and cold with a fast on one side and a farce on the other. The Congress government’s position was also muddled in a political mystery.

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