Tigers renounce violence

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After a week without terrorist attacks and the rebel Tamil Tigers finally acknowledging the death of their leader, a tense and highly guarded Sri Lanka dared to imagine that its quarter-century of violence might have come to a lasting end.

Substance was added to that hope Sunday when the last surviving major figure from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, their de facto foreign minister Selvarasa Pathmanathan, ordered supporters of the Tigers in Sri Lanka and around the world to give up violence permanently.

In a statement issued on an LTTE website Sunday, he admitted, after a week of denials from the organization, that Tigers founder and leader Velupillai Prabhakaran had been killed in the final hours of battle last weekend. And he instructed Tamils everywhere to "restrain from harmful acts to themselves or anyone else in this hour of extreme grief."

Then, in an interview with the BBC, he declared that "we have given up violence and agreed to enter a democratic process to achieve the rights for the Tamil determination of our people."

If the Tamil militants of northern Sri Lanka and their supporters abroad follow this message, the island nation's 26-year civil war could end like those in Northern Ireland or in India's Punjab, with an armed secessionist struggle transforming itself quickly into a parliamentary debate.

But another, darker possibility loomed as United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ended a visit to Sri Lanka: that the Tamils of the country's embattled north, freed from the LTTE but denied full access to mainstream society and abused by the military, might turn to the sort of large-scale guerrilla violence that Iraq experienced after the military defeat of its ruling regime in 2003.

Mr. Ban, speaking in the Buddhist temple-city of Kandy in the island's mountainous centre, issued a grave warning that if Colombo does not make a major gesture of magnanimity toward the minority Tamils, extend them genuine rights and end a containment-camp system that is widely considered inhumane, then they could turn to guerrilla violence on a large scale.

"If issues of reconciliation and social inclusion are not dealt with, history could repeat itself," Mr. Ban said Saturday. "There is danger of social disruption and even renewed violence."

But Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa turned down Mr. Ban's request to open the camps to humanitarian and aid workers, and to "initiate a political process of accommodation, dialogue and reconciliation" with the Tamils.

The camps, which hold almost 300,000 northern Tamils behind barbed-wire fences and ranks of armed guards, are intended to hold and "process" the entire civilian population of the northeast.

Mr. Rajapaksa said that aid groups will have access only after all Tamils have been "screened" so that LTTE leaders, fighters and trained terrorists have been weeded out from the civilians - a process that Colombo has estimated, in various statements during the past week, as taking between six months and two years.

This also risks alienating the majority of Sri Lanka's two million Tamils who live in the country's non-conflicted south, but who feel a strong connection, and often have family relations, to the Tamils who lived in the LTTE-controlled proto-state of "Tamil Eelam" in the north.

Mr. Rajapaksa did reassure the UN that his government would quickly reintegrate the LTTE's many child soldiers, many of them raised in special military schools, into broader Tamil society.

Officials from Unicef told The Globe and Mail that they have had full access to northern Tamil children, who make up 40 per cent of the population of the camps, and that they are reasonably satisfied that all are with their parents and any unaccompanied children have been reunited with family members in the south.

Unicef's conclusion casts doubt on the credibility of rumours, printed in the British press and elsewhere, that children had been snatched from the camps by militia groups.

However, Unicef officials said that the extremely long periods of incarceration could be damaging for children.

Mr. Rajapaksa's sharp refusal to listen to widespread international calls to open up the camps seems to be part of a growing, angry alienation from the West on behalf of his party, which is heavily dominated by Sinhalese-speaking Buddhists.

In his statements and in the newspapers that are loyal to his party, the President has condemned the United States and Europe and repeatedly praised Russia, Japan, Iran and China, which armed the Sri Lankan military in the final years of its conflict.

When the conflict became so ruthless and violent this year, with an estimated 8,000 Tamil civilians killed in bombings that may have struck shelters and hospitals indiscriminately, the United States and other countries dropped their support for Sri Lanka and issued calls for a tribunal to look into allegations of war crimes.

On Friday, Mr. Rajapaksa held a huge rally in Colombo, attended by at least 100,000 followers bedecked in Buddhist colours, in which he ridiculed the UN, the European Union and national leaders for calling for an inquest into humanitarian abuses in the war's final months.

"There are some who tried to stop our military campaign by threatening to haul us before war crimes tribunals," he said. "They are still trying to do that, but I am not afraid."

He issued a statement yesterday saying he would "take measures to address those grievances," but offered no other details.