First, the good news. Sri Lanka's Government, whose 26-year
war against the separatist Tamil Tigers ended in total
victory last May, is keeping its promise to let all of the
300,000 Tamil civilians who were captured in the final battle
go home again.
Not only that, but it is going to hold a free election next
month.
So free that the ruling party might even lose it.
The bad news is that it does not much matter who wins that
election.
Both the incumbent and the challenger are committed Sinhalese
nationalists whose policies towards the Tamil minority
militate against any reconciliation between the two groups.
Tamils are less than a fifth of the population, so if tough
treatment is enough to keep them quiet, then Sri Lanka faces
a peaceful future.
But repression has not worked in the past.
It's easy to understand why the Government, headed by
President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defence Minister
Gotabaya Rajapaksa, insisted on a decisive victory over the
Tamil Tigers, whose insurgency had caused 70,000 deaths over
the years.
There had been cease-fires and peace talks over the years,
but the Tigers never really abandoned their goal of total
independence for the Tamil majority-areas in northern and
eastern Sri Lanka.
That was utterly unacceptable to the Sinhala-speaking
majority, so the war was bound to end in a last stand by the
Tigers sooner or later.
They could have carried on with suicide bombings and
assassinations forever, but their territorial ambitions drove
them to seize and hold ground with a more or less
conventional military force. (They even had a navy and an air
force of sorts.) That made them vulnerable to military
defeat.
All it took to make that happen was a government willing to
devote all the resources of the state to building an army
able to defeat the Tigers in stand-up battle, and tough
enough to refuse all negotiations until the enemy was
completely destroyed.
The Rajapaksas provided that Government.
All the well-meaning foreign pleas last May for a ceasefire
to protect the Tamil civilians trapped with the Tigers were
quite rightly ignored by the Sri Lankan forces.
The Tigers always made sure they had lots of innocent
civilians around when they fought.
The civilians absorbed a lot of the enemy fire, their deaths
served to radicalise other Tamils and cease-fires to protect
civilians had frequently allowed the Tiger fighters to escape
in the past.
Nor was the Government wrong to round up all 300,000 Tamil
civilians who were caught up in the Tigers' last stand.
Any surviving fighters were bound to try to hide themselves
among the civilians, so a protracted sorting-out process was
needed.
But the Sri Lankan Government promised that everybody except
suspected fighters would be released within six months and it
has kept its word, more or less.
The camps have been emptying out fast over the past couple of
months, and the Government promises that everybody will have
gone home by the end of January.
There are justifiable complaints that not enough is being
done to help former detainees re-settle, but there have been
much uglier ends to long and brutal wars like this one.
The problem lies not in the past, but in the future.
The Tamils are always going to be there, and the prospect of
a peaceful future for Sri Lanka depends on reconciling them
to coexistence with the Sinhalese in a state that treats both
communities fairly.
They will probably never again create a semi-conventional
army like the Tigers, but it would be all too easy for them
to resort to terrorism again if they feel desperate enough.
And it would be almost impossible to stop it.
The trouble is that it took an ultra-nationalist Sinhalese
regime to create the army that defeated the Tigers, and it is
still in power.
It does not want to welcome the Tamils back into equal
citizenship, nor does it feel that it needs to.
The Rajapaksa Government has called an early election for
January 26 to exploit its victory and consolidate its hold on
power and if it should happen to lose the election, then
things may just get worse.
The Rajapaksas' challenger is none other than General Sarath
Fonseka, who commanded the army that finally defeated the
Tigers.
The main opposition group in the Sinhala community, the
United National Party, has banded together with nine smaller
parties and put Gen Fonseka up as their presidential
candidate.
Gen Fonseka could actually win, for his role in the defeat of
the Tigers was just as large as that of the Rajapaksas. He is
also as uncompromising a Sinhalese nationalist. That is the
attitude that drove the Tamils into insurrection in the first
place.
The next time it wouldn't take the same form, but it could
guarantee another generation of misery, insecurity (and
perhaps also tyranny) for the long-suffering people of Sri
Lanka.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
