After a quarter century of bloodshed and somewhere over 80,000 deaths, Sri Lanka's civil war didn't really settle anything. It began in 1983 in a flawed-but-functioning postcolonial democracy whose leaders never seemed quite up to the task of integrating different ethnicities into one nation. It apparently ended on Sunday, in a still-flawed, newly-swaggering postwar democracy where that basic task of integration remains even more elusive.
Fittingly, the last act of the island tragedy took place off-stage, at least as far as the world's attention was concerned. Ordinarily, an epic battle like the one between Sri Lanka's army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam would be broadcast around the globe, with cameras focusing on the desperate civilians trapped in the Tigers' shrinking fiefdom. But with many foreign reporters banned from the country, and domestic ones increasingly menaced by their own government, the climactic final engagement with the legendarily bloody terror group drew relatively little coverage.
Of course, the conflict was little-watched well before the Sri Lankan government decided to make it intentionally opaque. When it began, back in the Cold War, the strife didn't fit into the sort of left-right framework that drew attention to Angola or El Salvador. Other than during the especially gruesome moments, like the infamous government-abetted 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, the conflict didn't make headlines. India's bungled efforts to inject itself as a peacekeeper led a Sinhalese soldier to bean Rajiv Gandhi with a rifle butt and a female Tiger cadre to eventually assassinate him, but that was minor stuff in the age of the Superpowers.
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