The end of the 30-year Sri Lankan kill-a-thon, howsoever brutally it might have been at the end, is a blessing, if an ugly one.
It is possible to have a just cause and still in the end not deserve to prevail in struggle, and the case of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) illustrates this, as does the experience in Ireland, which has more or less successfully emerged from decades of murderous civil conflict. Taking up arms against oppression carries extreme moral risk. As happened with the IRA, the longer one is forced to continue to conduct armed conflict, the more likely one is to attract, in addition to those committed to the cause, those merely committed to the criminal and homicidal. The Tigers earned a reputation for a particularly sick version of ruthlessness, visited upon vast numbers of even their own community, drafting the entire population at gunpoint into their war, kidnapping children to turn them into soldiers, itself a crime against humanity, and training cadres of suicide bombers (something for which you never saw the leadership volunteering). They crossed irretrievably into the irredeemable when one of their suiciders assassinated then-Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi in the early 90s, because he had the gall to send peacekeepers to Sri Lanka.
This is not to diminish the culpability of the Sinhalese, who have their own atrocities to account for, going back decades. In a perfect world, there will be a war crimes trial for all those who participated in massacres of Tamils in the early 80s, which lit the fuse on this conflict, as well as for those Tigers responsible for forcing children to fight, and for waging suicide terror, to list only two. The Sri Lankan government are victorious, but victorious like the Russians, who "won" their war in Chechnya by utterly destroying it, thus ensuring that down the road we will be treated to a comeback performance.
In the end, history will look upon the Tigers not so much as freedom fighters, but as the Sri Lankan version of the Khmer Rouge.
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