The fact is the LTTE knew all along that they were not going to Tokyo. A separate interim administration and their handling the aid money could never be on the agenda of the Government of Sri Lanka or of the Donors, if that were a pre-condition to attend the Tokyo summit. The LTTE asked the impossible mainly to ensure that they could avoid Tokyo.

If and when peace dawns on this land, democracy and elections should happen in the North and the East as envisaged in our constitution. Is that not the last thing that Prabhakaran and his cohorts want? The elite, educated king makers of the North have always been in the Vellala caste. To them, the minority Karavas to which Prabhakaran belongs is a lower caste. Thus in a democratic scenario, Mr. Prabhakaran getting elected to lead the Tamils has the same chances as a snowball in hell.

The hierarchy of Tamil thinking is something akin to this: To the Jaffna Vellalas, they are the first class Tamils. In the Eastern Province, the Batticaloa are the outcasts i.e. Vellalas who marry into other castes in Jaffna are categorised as second class and estate Tamil as even lower.

With a smoking gun in hand LTTE rule is 'follow or perish'. And many perished starting with Alfred Duraiappah and what has happened ever since is history. The LTTE is nothing but a terrorist organisation as former foreign minister Lakshman Kadiragamar has put it.

No Sinhalese leader, irrespective of party colour would agree to a separate state. Prabhakaran cannot keep fighting for another twenty years. The devastation to the North and the East is colossal compared to the occasional bomb in Colombo. The hunger for uninterrupted peace is keenly felt by the Tamil people in particular and by the populace of the North and the East in particular much more than by the Sinhalese.

So where does Mr. Prabhakaran stand now? The Norwegian brokered MoU as well as the international community, especially the USA, UK and India will not subscribe to the idea of a separate state. In fact, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, when asked whether Asia remained vitally important to the Bush administration in a recent interview, assured that ‘the administration of George Bush is capable of doing more than one thing at the same time’.

Prabhakaran cannot settle for a peace accord on a federal basis, because with the first free polls he is very likely to be relegated to the dustbin of politics. Just imagin Prabhakaran without guns. not even the idiotically optimistic would claim that he will agree to such a settlements.

S. Mahendran

Colombo 5