At the end of December 2007, the Rajapakse government in Sri Lanka announced the termination of the five-year old Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) with the Tamil militant group LTTE. According to the government the CFA was virtually defunct and served no purpose any more.

The announcement of the abrogation of the CFA is not unexpected. Since the government of Mahinda Rajapakse came to power, it has made no secret of its opposition to CFA which was worked out by its predecessor government from the rival UNP party. Moreover, while still claiming that it was committed to finding a peaceful solution to the civil war that has been raging in Sri Lanka for the last two decades, it embarked on an offensive military strategy. First, it broke the stronghold of the LTTE in the eastern region of the country. Currently, it is bombing and attacking LTTE-controlled territory in its main base in the northern region. It has also said that it will not talk with the LTTE until it lays down its arms.

The military offensive of the government has resulted in a great increase in the suffering and casualties suffered by the people in Sri Lanka. Thousands of people have died just since April 2006, when the offensive began. Sri Lankan and international organisations have estimated that at least half a million people are refugees in the country or “internally displaced persons”. Flagrant abuses of human rights at the hands of the government and military forces have been documented. At one point, the government even began to round up and interrogate thousands of Tamil Sri Lankans living in the capital Colombo as potential “terrorists”.

The rulers of Sri Lanka continue to plunge the country into deepening disaster through their sectarian and arrogant policies. In the early decades after the end of British colonial rule, the ruling parties encouraged a chauvinist and discriminatory attitude towards minority groups like the Tamils and even instigated murderous pogroms against them. Once the civil war had progressed beyond a certain point, the governments, both of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP), followed the dangerous course of inviting foreign intervention in the affairs of the country, first from India, and then from the European Union and the United States. Now Rajapakse is posing as if he is standing up to foreign intervention and as if he is a champion of Sri Lankans finding their own solution to the crisis. But in fact he is exacerbating the crisis with his ruthless offensive. His policies are serving to further polarise the society and deepen the general insecurity. The working people of Sri Lanka must rise above such divisive and dangerous politics, get together and find a political solution to the problems facing them.