So it would seem. And good riddance.
The Sri Lankan ambassador in Washington credits Barack Obama for blaming the bloodshed among Tamil civilians on the Tigers. Apparently the Tigers had been counting on getting the international community to pressure the Sri Lankan government to back off in the face of the humanitarian disaster created by the army’s push against the Tigers and the Tigers’ decision to, in effect, hold the local population hostage. When that didn’t work, the Tigers folded.
Obama’s support, and the Sri Lankan government’s recognition of it, ought to give Obama some chits. And he needs to use them to get the government — now that the war is over — to stop treating its Tamil citizens as enemies. The army is in effect a Sinhalese communal enterprise rather than a truly national one, and the Tamils have lots of real grievances. Some of the well-documented atrocity stories coming out of Sri Lanka have been pretty stomach-churning.