[Huffington Post]

Sri Lanka’s postwar policies are a hindrance to reconciliation between the country’s embittered ethnic communities, two years after the end of a civil war, an international think tank has said.

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[ AFP ]

Japan, Sri Lanka’s top donor, was cautious on Monday after the Tamil Tiger rebels’ capital fell, with an official saying that only a political solution could resolve the island’s ethnic war. Sri Lanka’s army last week captured the de facto rebel capital Kilinochchi and said it was now closing in on the headquarters of the Tigers, who have been fighting since 1972 to set up an independent homeland for the Tamil minority. Japan provides nearly two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s international aid and has sent its special envoy four times in the past three years to try to broker an end to the conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

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[BBC]

In Kilinochchi there was hardly a building with a roof. Shops were in ruins or pockmarked with bullets, a huge water tower was lying on its side. The Peace Secretariat, where the Tigers met visiting diplomats and journalists during the failed 2002 ceasefire, was a shell. The windows and furniture had gone, the paving stones in the car park had been torn up. A commando armed with rocket-propelled grenades guarded the gate. Nobody is talking peace now. Kilinochchi was a potent symbol of the Tigers’ separatist aspirations. There they had established the trappings of the state for the Tamil minority for which they have fought for a generation.

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