Ending Sri Lanka’s civil war

last updated 8 January 2015

Sri Lanka’s 25-year-old civil war ended Sunday, said Britain’s The Independent in an editorial, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) agreed to “silence our guns.” They had little choice, as the Sri Lankan army had them surrounded on a 1.2-mile spit of land. But “the Tigers should not be mourned,” as their bloody fight for an ethnic Tamil homeland killed many civilians and used others as “human shields.”

The end of the “once-fercious” Tamil Tigers army was “as bitter and bloody as everyone had feared,” said Britain’s The Guardian in an editorial, but the civil war will continue unless the government can make peace with the Tamil minority, instead of acting “vengeful in its triumphalism.” The international community “put pressure on Colombo too late to stop a bloodbath,” but it must insist on accountability now.

Sri Lanka’s leaders don’t care what the West has to say, said Richard Fernandez in Pajamas Media, because they have China. As the West and India ceased arming Colombo in the 1990s, China's “money and political clout” became key to the Tamil Tigers' defeat. In return, China gets a strategic naval base. Perhaps the Western diplomatic model has "gone down in defeat together with the Tigers.”