Thanks, Tigerquoll, for an helpful, informative and timely article on this conflict.
For my own part, I have not kept myself sufficiently informed as to be able to be able to offer useful comments on conflicts such as this.
I remember back in the early 1980's, when the Tamil insurgency was launched. I viewed the Tamil struggle through the prism of the world view of a far left wing socialist organisation to which I belonged a the time. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) were considered to be one of a large number of armed progressive movements that would help liberate the people of the Third World from the shackles of colonialism and neo-colonialism and bring about justice, harmony and prosperity.
Other movements were the South African African National Congress (ANC), the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO), The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), The Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TPLF), various Latin American movements, etc.
However, few of these movements have lived up to the hopes that we had held in them (with the possible exception of SWAPO, which appears to have very capably governed the nation now named Namibia after it gained independence from South Africa).
The EPLF and the TPLF became the respective governments of the newly independent Eritrea and the part of Ethiopia that remained after Eritrea had broken away and have since engaged in pointless border wars with each other. I remember that at least one of those conflicts was deliberately started by the EPLF, flying flat in the face of assurances, made by EPLF political representatives in Australia at a public meeting in support of the EPLF in the early 1980's, that an independent Eritrea would do its utmost to get along with its former coloniser. In fact, even before the TPLF overthrew the former Ethiopian dictatorship, there were clashes between the two movements, even though both were supposedly fighting the same common enemy.
Naomi Klein has shown in the chapter on South Africa in "The Shock Doctrine" how the ANC negotiators betrayed nearly all of the principles for which the ANC supposedly stood making circumstances for many blacks (as well as whites) in the supposedly liberated South Africa even worse than they were under the Apartheid system.
In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers were themselves accused on at least one occasion of engaging in their own Zionist style ethnic cleansing in order to drive non-Tamils including Muslims from the areas of Sri Lanka that they laid claim to. In 2002 they were reported as having unilaterally broken the peace negotiations that were underway and launched military attacks. If this is true, then the Tamil Tiger leadership would themselves have to be held partly responsible for the calamity that has befallen their people. (However, I would hesitate to make an absolute pronouncement on this until I can be more certain that the version of events that depicts the LTTE as having caused the breakdown in peace negotiations was not simply yet another example of misreporting of these conflicts by the Western newmedia.)
A Chapter in "The Shock Doctrine" tells how the Sri Lankan government cynically exploited the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami to steal coastal land from fishing villagers in order to give it to resort developers. They also exploited the crisis engaged in an extensive program of neo-liberal economic prescriptions including privatisation, completely contrary to the platform upon which that government was elected. No doubt this would have had some bearing on the Tamil/Sinahalese conflict.
Our native animals and plants are not considered as important until their numbers are so low that they need to be listed as rare or threatened.
Nightcap Village - better than what was there......