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In the run up to the World Cup finals, the international media had run stories representing the hopes, and the bewilderment, of the world community concerning the mutually destructive war in Sri Lanka. The media wrongly assumed that the positive social and cultural relationships that bind ethnic communities in Sri Lanka together could translate into a political vision and a power-sharing formula to resolve the ethnic conflict.
The decision of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to use their limited air power to bomb Colombo on the night of the World Cup finals was undoubtedly a carefully calculated one. There was a possibility that the Sri Lankan armed forces would be more focused on the performance of the country's cricket team that night than on the strategies of the LTTE. The eyes of virtually all Sri Lankans were glued to the television screen.
The bombing raid on Colombo was unsuccessful in destroying its targets. However, the LTTE were once again successful in demonstrating their ability to engage in unconventional warfare. The chaos in Colombo on the night of the attack and the massive international media coverage of the event did much to harm the country's prospects. Neither tourists nor foreign investors are likely to visit the country in the current circumstances.
No government or society can tolerate a situation where its capital city is subjected to periodic bombing raids by an enemy force. There is no question that such threats have to be neutralized. The manner in which the government has handled this task over the past year and a half of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's rule is primarily, if not solely, through its military.
The government's immediate response of sending its own air force to heavily pound LTTE-controlled areas might have satisfied government leaders and nationalist sections of the population. They would wish the LTTE to be severely punished for the unexpected exercise of bombing Colombo on the night of the World Cup finals, which had united the multiethnic population behind the multiethnic cricket team.
On the other hand, most of the people living in LTTE-controlled areas would not have been able to watch the cricket match in any event. The war-related destruction of infrastructure in those areas is such that the people there live from fifty to several hundred years in the past in relation to economic facilities and political democracy.
The regular bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force to which those areas have been subjected is of a different order of magnitude compared to the few small bombs dropped by the LTTE air force. At least 300,000 people have been displaced from their homes and live in the most wretched conditions since the commencement of hostilities between the government and LTTE in April last year.
On each of the occasions that the LTTE has acknowledged its air raids, it has sought to justify them by claiming they are in retaliation for the air bombing of their areas by the government. It is this type of logic that India's revered political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi totally rejected. He famously said that if everyone took the attitude of "an eye for an eye," the whole world would go blind. Unfortunately the militarists on either side of the divide tend to get stronger when equivalent, if not greater, retaliation is seen as the appropriate mode of response.
The past two decades have shown that the human costs of continued confrontation between the government and LTTE are very high. The escalation of the war into the north would add significantly to those human costs. There is a desperate need for an alternative path to conflict resolution, but at the present time neither the government nor the LTTE appear to have either the political vision or commitment to carve out that path
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(Jehan Perera is presently the executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, an independent advocacy organization. He studied economics at Harvard College and holds a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School.)
