The LTTE continues to cling on to its last patch of slowly shrinking turf as the army sets about the task of ending the Tigers’ conventional military capability along a narrow stretch of land on the Mullaitivu coast. But the all-but-finished Prabhakaran continues to hold out tenaciously for reasons that are surely connected to the final phase of the Indian election that is now reaching its closing stages. Significantly, Tamil Nadu is due to commence polling on May 13 and the various noises emerging from the State makes it clear that rightly or wrongly politicians there believe that the situation in the Vanni can influence the result. No wonder then Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha are trying to outdo each other on whose heart bleeds most for the Vanni Tamils.

Our special correspondent in New Delhi reported in The Island yesterday that both the ruling Congress and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party have also joined the Eelam chorus. We here in Sri Lanka cannot take offence at the latest Congress statement on the subject – that the party favours a ``permanent peaceful solution’’ to the Sri Lankan Tamil issue. But, as our correspondent had noted, it had remained silent on whether such a solution should be within or outside the framework of a united Sri Lanka. India, regardless of who is at its helm, has long been clear that she did not favour a separate state here and apart from election rhetoric, there is no good reason to believe that this consistent stance has changed. Nevertheless Prabhakaran would live in hope. While knowing that India would not willingly tickle his belly, the little comfort he may take today must flow from the expectation that the imperatives of coalition politics may win him a respite.

As we have reported in this issue of our newspaper today, the western pressure to end the fighting continues. Three European foreign ministers are due to address a press conference at UN Headquarters in Manhattan tomorrow with Austria’s Federal Minister for European and International Affairs joining Britain’s David Miliband and France’s Bernard Kouchner at a ``joint press encounter on Sri Lanka’’ once the Security Council meeting on the Middle East is concluded. The Security Council agenda does not include Sri Lanka but anybody can say anything under `any other business.’ Obviously Miliband and Kouchner who showed their hand in Colombo a few days ago have found a new ally in Austria’ s Spindelegger to create some embarrassment for Colombo. What will emerge at Monday’s ``encounter’’ remains to be seen. Full tosses, no doubt, will be bowled with the British batsman particularly trying his best to score some runs for his party colleagues back home with Diaspora voters in their constituencies.

We will also be having what has been described as a European troika here later this week and they will no doubt be flown to Vavuniya to visit the IDP camps there. While there has been some negative spin from media visits to these camps after the influx of the surge of refugees, the general impression of our foreign visitors have been that while conditions are far from ideal, given Sri Lanka’s resources we are not doing all that badly. And most refugees know that they are better off in these camps than under the LTTE jackboot. They’ve known the worst. Just like after the tsunami, we will need a great deal of international assistance to properly care for the large number of IDPs already in these camps and those that will add to the numbers when the war reaches its inevitable conclusion. That is why we must not indulge in abrasive rhetoric and alienate likely sources of future assistance. Remember that many of our harshest critics came round in good time to publicly agree that the LTTE were in fact holding a human shield of civilians who desperately wanted to get out of harm’s way.

Sri Lanka has been fortunate that there have been many friends like China and Russia that prevented the situation here being drawn into the UN Security Council agenda despite the best efforts of some European powers and the US. India too, despite many domestic compulsions, has not tried to make things harder for us; in fact her behaviour was quite to the contrary. We cannot also forget Pakistan whose assistance throughout the long years of the conflict was of great comfort. In the economic sphere too we have not been lacking in friends like Iran and now Libya. Hopefully the first tranche of the USD 1.9 billion IMF assistance we have sought will soon be disbursed. There were reports of some spanners being thrown into the works but officials in Colombo are confident that the staff of the fund will make their recommendation to the board which can approve or reject it. There is reason for optimism that the final outcome will not be unfavourable.