"Tiger Terror"! "Ruthless Tamil Separatists"!

"Remorseless megalomaniac"! -Tamil hit Squads"!

"Bloodthirsty Chieftain"! "Army of fanatics"!

"Evil grip of one man"!

What a strain on the Queen's English! What vituperation! What demonic departure from journalistic propriety! What colossal ignorance of Sri Lankan political history! What messianic zeal in upholding injustice and Sri Lankan state terrorism! What lightning and thunder on a London summer morning!

THE TIMES editorial writer was talking of a country in which the government is waging war against what it claims are its own people; and engaged in aerial bombing over what it claims is its own territory.

It is a country in which successive Sinhala governments have failed to crush the spirit of the Tamils despite over 40 years of discrimination, oppression, mob rioting and State terrorism. It is a country where effective power has remained not in the hands of Prime Ministers and Presidents, but under the yellow robes of Buddhist Ayatollahs who think they owe it to the supreme being to preserve the island as an exclusive Arya Sinhala-Buddhist dhammadvipa.

If it was President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's father, the late Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaiake, who let the genie out of the bottle and stoked the fires of racism and religious bigotry in 1956. it was also a Buddhist monk who shot him dead at point blank range in 1959.

Sri Lanka is a country where ethnic cleansing began in the northeast of the island thirty years before Bosnia. where whole Tamil villages were uprooted to make way for State-imposed Sinhala colonisation.

Sri Lanka, which was a prosperous island when the British rulers left its shores in 1948. is today a poor country which spends a disproportionate share of its annual budget on arms expenditure. not for defence against external threat, but to subjugate its own citizens. the Tamils. who constitute less than 20 percent of the population; for which purpose it goes on an annual pilgrimage to Paris with a begging bowl.

Sri Lanka is a country. which in proportion to its population. has one of the highest ratios of refugees. both within the country as well as outside, in India and in several European and Western countries.

This is the country where THE TIMES wants the Tamils liberated. "Liberated" is right. But liberated from whom? From whom does one liberate a people? From their saviours, or from their oppressors? That is the fundamental distinction that THE TIMES editorial writer was unable to grasp.

Says THE TIMES: "The elimination of one man, Prabakaran could fashion a miraculous change is the
island's politics of conflict". A newspaper could be excused for ignorance. prejudice. partisan feelings.
vested interest, even vilification. But murderous intent? Oh no. Sirs. Hardly cricket eh?

Tiger Terror - Sri Lanka is being mauled by its ruthless Tamil separatists

There is no democratically elected leader anywhere in the world who has a less enviable task than Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. The President of Sri Lanka governs a country that has been torn to ribbons by a venomous 11-year old civil war: more than 30,000 people are estimated to have perished so far. 20 of of whom died on Tuesday in the heart of Colombo, victims of a suicide-bomber from the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The explosion occurred soon after Mrs Kumaratunga had announced a courageous political package designed to devolve to the Tamils a substantial degree of autonomy — and to return her crippled island to peace.

Mrs Kumaratunga's proposals. which would transform Sri Lanka in a "union of regions". and give to her country's provinces a status akin to that of the German Lander, have been welcomed by observers and moderate politicians of all hues. She was elected in August last year by a war-worn electorate on a mandate to treat with the Tamil Tigers. In January this year she signed a truce with the Tigers: it was not the first cessation of hostilities since the civil war began, but it promised to be what Mrs Kumaratunga herself described as "the dawn of a new era". Yet true to ruthless form the Tigers violated the peace accord 100 days later, marking the breach by a massacre of 42 unarmed Sinhalese villagers. This was not the first breach of a truce by the Tigers: they have consistently used ceasefires as a feint, silencing their arms momentarily only to regroup, refreshed, at a later date.

The leader of the Tigers Velupillai Prabhakaran, is a remorseless megalomaniac. On his orders, Tamil "hit squads" have murdered the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. the late Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa and the opposition presidential candidate Gamini Dissanayake. The Tigers are fearsome adversaries, whose messianic zeal in the cause of an independent Tamil state is fuelled by Prabhakaran's careful cultivation of his own mythic status. Answerable to no one but their bloodthirsty chieftain, they balk neither at butchering innocent Sinhalese civilians nor at losing their own fighters in large numbers. Parallels might be drawn between the Tigers and the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, the difference being that Prabhakaran is in pursuit of an ethnically defined state which bows to the cult of his personality.

Mrs Kumaratunga faces an adversary with whom little rational dialogue is possible. Commendably, that has not stopped her from continuing to search for a political solution, even at the risk of alienating those dinosaurs in the Sinhalese Buddhist clergy to whom a federal political structure is anathema. She has not made the mistake, however, of calling her army off from its pursuit of Prabhakaran in the north of Sri Lanka. Operation Leap Forward, currently in progress is a necessary stick to accompany the carrot of constitutional reform.

What hope there is resides, paradoxically, with Prabhakaran himself. Unlike in the Balkans divisions in Sri Lanka although widened by years of civil war, are neither visceral nor atavistic. The elimination of one man. Prabhakaran could fashion a miraculous change in the island's politics of conflict. An exhausted Tamil population. in the north and east of Sri Lanka, is in the evil grip of one man and his army of fanatics. Mrs Kumaratunga must  continue to try to liberate them both by the force of arms and by the strength of her political logic.