Sri Lanka’s long and tortuous path toward peace has demonstrated that in the end negotiations, not violence, are the only way to bring a bitter conflict to an end. The 20-year strife between the Tamil minority and Sinhala majority in this beautiful island came to an end through the good offices of Norwegian negotiators.

Now the whole peace process appears to have been thrown into confusion by President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s declaration of a state of emergency, suspension of three ministers, including the minister of defense, and Parliament, and ordering troops onto the streets. The president claims that she is doing this because she believes that the Tamils have been given too much in the continuing negotiations to end the conflict. In particular, she is disturbed that the rebel Tamil Tigers have not yet put down their weapons. As she made her momentous move, a presidential spokesman insisted that the government had no intention of ending the truce with the Tamils. Unfortunately that is not the way that many Sri Lankans from both communities will see it. It is far more likely that it will be seen as a provocation to hard-line elements within the Tamil Tigers to resume the destructive struggle.

This high-risk strategy has almost certainly come about for the very worst of reasons, namely a bitter rivalry between the president and her prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose United National Party (UNP) trounced the president’s People’s Alliance in elections in 2001 by campaigning on a peace ticket. Though the Tamils withdrew from peace talks last April, this month they returned to the negotiating table with power-sharing proposals.

The path ahead is now hugely uncertain. If the president calls new elections, given the gratitude with which most Sri Lankans greeted the return of peace after a conflict which claimed 64,000 lives, it seems highly likely that the UNP will once again be returned. Unless she is prepared to face that humiliation, the president may seek to govern by decree. Encouraging her in this extremely dubious course of action are hard-line military men, who have never reconciled themselves to the inability of the Sri Lankan armed forces to defeat the Tamil Tigers.

It is hard to see what President Kumaratunga’s precipitous action is going to achieve. On the positive side, this may be the final fling of Sinhalese reactionaries whose position will be hereafter undermined. Unfortunately, it may also make the task of the peace negotiators even harder in coaxing the Tamil Tigers to go the last mile to peace. There can be no doubt that the president is right to complain that Tamil weapons have not yet been laid down. Unfortunately, by acting as she has she has given the Tamil hard-liners a perfect reason to hang on to them. Hers has been a serious political blunder.