COLOMBO: An eye for an eye. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers may well get even for the assassination of a top rebel leader they blame on the military, but chances of an all-out return to bloody civil war are remote.
The fury was palpable at Thursday's funeral for eastern political wing leader E. Kousalyan, the most senior rebel assassinated since a 2002 cease fire shunted the Tigers' war for autonomy into limbo, and four other slain cadres.
Mothers and wives wailed, Tiger leaders lobbying for autonomy warned that their patience with Sri Lanka's government was strained to breaking point and pro-rebel parliamentarians in the eastern stronghold of Batticaloa talked of war. But while the Tigers have a long tradition of tit-for-tat strikes, they have also invested a great deal in efforts to win self-rule via politics instead of the gun and are extremely conscious of their image among the international community.
"Certainly the killing of Kousalyan ... will not be taken too lightly by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)," said Kethesh Loganathan, an analyst for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent think tank in Colombo.
"Certainly, given its character, one has to expect the LTTE to respond or retaliate," he added. "It does not mean the LTTE would go back to war over one comrade, the LTTE is much more mature than that."
While the three-year cease fire is holding, dozens of rebels and rebel foes have been gunned down in the restive east in a silent war between the Tigers and a breakaway faction led by Karuna, a renegade commander they accuse the military of aiding.
Antagonism reached fever pitch late last year, but Asia's tsunami came as a sudden tension-breaker with both sides turning to safeguard and rebuild their coastal communities, and raised hopes of new era of cooperation.
GOVT REACHES OUT: The government and military deny any hand in the attack, and are trying to build bridges to the rebels to avoid a return to a war that has already killed more than 64,000 people on both sides of the ethnic divide - and choked the economy.
"The government condemns strongly the assassination," said government spokesman Mangala Samaraweera. "(It) must be the work of factions working to sabotage the cease fire agreement."
"From the information we have gathered, the LTTE has been behaving extremely well and in a very matured manner in the face of the recent killing," he added. Nordic truce monitors can never find proof to pin attacks on one side or the other, because most happen deep in rebel-held territory where their access is limited.
Iqbal Athas, a defence analyst for Jane's Defence Weekly, expects the rebels to use the assassination as leverage to push their political demands rather than strike back militarily.
"My own feeling is they may try to give some ultimatum to the government of Sri Lanka ... that will include a request to disband paramilitary groups and also give them aid for development of tsunami-damaged areas," Athas said.
"They are being heard, they are being understood and they are also being acknowledged. So they're not going to undo all that," he added. "So possibly an ultimatum listing their demands, saying (otherwise) this is all we are left with."
Peace talks have been deadlocked for nearly two years over the Tigers' central demand for interim self-rule. The rebels want the right to govern what they regard as their homeland of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka's north and east - where they already have de facto self-rule - to be enshrined in the constitution before they will discuss lasting peace.
The government says the rebels must agree to discuss long-term peace first - a "Catch-22" neither side is willing to budge on. "Our leader and our people have shown unlimited patience," Tiger political chief S.P. Thamilselvan said in an emotionally charged speech as the rebels buried their "martyrs". "This patience, this peace, is not an easy one."
"Our people are very determined," he added, as heavily armed cadres on high alert fanned out around the remote graveyard. "They will never let our motherland, our nation be destroyed." -Reuters
