It would be premature to assert that the final chapter has been written in a conflict that has claimed over 70,000 lives in nearly three decades of resistance and all-out war. Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers surrendered on Sunday and their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has apparently been killed along with other commanders.
Yet, the Sri Lankans who are celebrating these days must be aware that a rout of the LTTE fighters does not necessarily signal the end of Tamil resistance. There is every possibility that remnants of the Tigers or their sympathisers, now deprived of an army, will shift their focus to more terrorist attacks and perhaps even sporadic guerrilla combat. The grudge, to put it mildly, runs deep and only the brazenly partisan can deny the institutional discrimination that Sri Lanka’s Tamils have faced for decades. Their rights have been denied and it must be recognised that the LTTE, for all its atrocities, was a reaction to the politics of ethnicity — if not outright racism — practised by many Sinhalese and their leaders.
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