A suicide attack that sank a Sri Lankan Navy gunboat has cast a new shadow over the island’s fading peace hopes but an immediate return to war is unlikely, analysts and diplomats said.
Sri Lanka has blamed Tamil Tigers for Saturday’s spectacular ramming of an Israeli-built Dvora craft by a vessel laden with explosives that killed 15 sailors.
The navy said the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) deployed a woman cadre to carry out the worst attack against the military since an Oslo-brokered truce four years ago.
Analysts fear that the security situation could deteriorate further in the embattled northern and eastern regions where at least 115 people, including 67 security personnel, have been killed in a month of bloodshed.
Harry Gunatillake, a former air force chief, believes the rebels are mounting pressure on Colombo to ensure they enter peace talks from a position of military strength.
“The attack on the gunboat is only a small stone the Tigers have thrown,” he said. “The big ones will come later, but I still think we won’t see a return to full-scale war anytime soon.”
Gunatillake, who had also been a political adviser to former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, said the seaborne attack could be a retaliatory strike against the military’s alleged execution-style killing of five students in the northeastern port town of Trincomalee last week.
“This sinking could be a backlash for the killing of the students. It is also to send a message to the government not to delay talks,” he said.
Western diplomats here broadly agree. “The violence could even get worse before we see the two sides sitting down across a table,” a diplomat close to the peace process said. “But, neither side wants to be the one to break off the process and go back to war.”
The private Center for Policy Alternatives think tank here, however, said the attack against the navy was a major blow to peace broker Norway’s attempts to salvage the process.
“This is a big setback,” said the center’s director Sunanda Deshapriya. “The Tigers want to drag the army into fighting and there are some in the defense establishment who may want just that.”
Deshapriya said he feared the middle ground was rapidly being lost and both parties were responsible for escalating a shadow war and violating the spirit of the cease-fire that has been in place since Feb. 23, 2002.
The most serious warning came from Scandinavian truce monitors themselves who on Dec. 29 cautioned that war may not be too far away in Sri Lanka where more than 60,000 people have been killed in ethnic bloodshed since 1972. “This spiral of violence is not conducive to a badly needed high-level meeting between the parties,” truce monitoring chief Hagrup Haukland said. “If the trend of violence is allowed to continue, war may not be far away.”
Diplomats close to the peace process said Norway’s International Development Minister Erik Solheim who is expected here on Jan. 23 will try to jump-start talks.
The attack against the military came a day after the United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice voiced concern over a flare-up of violence in the Indian Ocean island republic.
Rice told the visiting Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera in Washington last week that Undersecretary Nicholas Burns will travel to Sri Lanka to discuss prospects of restoring peace.
Gunatillake said Colombo should climb down from its opposition to using Oslo as a venue for an ice-breaking round of talks between the Tigers and the new Colombo government which came to power in November promising a brand new peace process.
Since assuming office, President Mahinda Rajapakse has taken a dramatic U-turn and invited Norway to continue its peace efforts despite strong opposition from his key allies in the government.
The Tigers dubbed Rajapakse a “war candidate” in the run-up to the Nov. 17 polls, but aides said the president was committed to a negotiated peace and was responsible for keeping the military on a short leash despite provocation.
There was no immediate comment from the guerrillas on the violence, but the Tigers have blamed the military and a break-away rebel faction for instigating unrest.
