Whether or not the Sri Lankan Army Chief, Lt-Gen Sarath Fonseka, was the intended target of the suicide-attack on the Army Headquarters in Colombo on Tuesday, 25 April 2006, the LTTE may have won the 'psychological war', one more time. The death of 10 persons, and injury to the Army Chief, has provoked the Sri Lankan Government into ordering retaliatory, but 'containment' strikes at LTTE positions in the East - the first major military action by the Government since the two sides to the two decades of ethnic war signed a Cease-fire Agreement (CFA) in February 2002 despite overcoming similar temptation in the past. <br /> <br /> On earlier occasions, including the brutal killing of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in August last, the Sri Lankan Government, then of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, had refused to be 'provoked'. If anything, the 'Kadirgamar assassination' displayed the emerging 'Sri Lankan resilience' to such provocations that had triggered the ethnic war in the early Eighties. On the occasion, the nation's Tamil minority joined the Sinhala majority on the streets of Colombo, to pay homage to Kadirgamar. Such resilience, at times interpreted as indifference bordering on inaction, could not be the answer when the Army Chief is made the target. <br /> <br /> The choice of Colombo for the more recent LTTE attack has greater political significance in a nation that is already divided as much on political lines as on ethnic lines. If the 'LTTE boycott' of the November presidential polls ensured the defeat of the projected peacenik in the Opposition UNP nominee, Ranil Wickremesinghe, the current attacks are aimed at destroying the 'peace-lover' image that President Mahinda Rajapakse has acquired since assuming office - and more so after the ruling SLFP-PA combine had swept the local government polls across the country, barring the 'Tamil areas'. <br /> <br /> Already, Tuesday's attack may have brought back the fear of war back to the streets of Colombo after a break, and could thus weaken the confidence that the Capital's elite population was beginning to repose in the new dispensation with Rajapakse's verifiable commitment to the recommencement of the peace process, this time at Geneva, in February. The second round, from which the LTTE walked away recently after seeking a postponement, now stands suspended for good - and the peace process will have to start from the scratch as and when the international community, starting with talks-facilitator Norway, is able to bring both sides back to the negotiations table. They can now expect a hardened Government wanting them to call a spade a spade, and act accordingly. The initial reaction of the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) to Tuesday's attack is indicative of what the international community was expecting to address. <br /> <br /> The Sri Lankan military's choice of the Eastern Province for a retaliatory strike clearly displays preparedness-in-anticipation, and also a tactic to try contain the LTTE military might to a sector where they are seen as weak, thanks both to the traditional ethnic-mix as also to the 'Karuna rebellion'. Even while committing the Government to disarming the 'para-militaries', including the 'Karuna faction' at Geneva I, the LTTE had consistently displayed a command of the eastern seas, by repeatedly targeting the Sri Lankan navy in the past months. <br /> <br /> Yet, for the Wanni leadership of the LTTE, a war for the northern Jaffna town, which it had lost to the Government control in the Nineties, could not be put off for long, whether it is to restore cadre-credibility in full or for negotiating peace from a position of strategic and psychological strength, or both. While triggering national attention immediately after the presidential polls and leading to the Geneva process, the LTTE did demonstrate that the 'innocent youth' of Jaffna would take arms, if commanded - thus indicating a house-to-house, hand-to-hand battle, where civilian casualties would be naturally high and for which the military would have to beart the brunt of international criticism after a time. That would go beyond the LTTE's initial aim of obliterating the 'poll boycott' from the memory of the Tamil community across the country, which had not approved of the decision that had come too late for them even to fumble a protest. <br /> <br /> For India, the fresh bout of violence in Sri Lanka comes at a time when New Delhi was beginning to breathe easy on developments in the Nepalese neighbourhood. New Delhi joined the SLMM and the four-nation Sri Lanka Donors' Conference, of which the US and the European Union are part, to separately but rightly condemn Tuesday's attack. Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, standing in for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was away on a foreign tour, lost no time in speaking to President Rajapakse. Only a day earlier, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had issued a comprehensive, yet cautious statement, communicating to the rest of the world the Sri Lankan Government's commitment to a 'policy of restraint' and calling upon the "parties concerned to scrupulously adhere to the letter and spirit of the Cease-fire Agreement (CFA)". <br /> <br /> Any return of war to the island-neighbour, particularly in the East, could lead to a fresh influx of Tamil refugees to Tamil Nadu, thus testing the moral fibre of a great nation when the State is preparing for Assembly polls on May 8 and memories of the 'Rajiv Gandhi assassination' are fresh in the minds. There are also hardliners on either side of the ethnic-divide in Sri Lanka who would not mind another round of war to clear the 'CFA haze' of the past years, for the peace process could begin on a clean slate all over again. That could prove to be one more round, and nothing more, and the efforts of the international community should be to stall precisely that, and revive the existing process, by beginning to introduce substantive issues in the peace talks, aimed at permanent peace on an early date. The Geneva Process, while creating the environment for further negotiations, ended up addressing peripheral issues, which in turn only stalled and slowed down the peace process as a whole. Sri Lanka cannot afford either war, or unfocussed negotiations not aimed at addressing 'power devolution' -- and the international community, including India, and starting with India, could not allow it, either. <br /> <br /> <em>* Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Observer Research Foundation.</em> <br />
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