The greatest mistakes are made on the morrow of the greatest victories. Sri Lanka is nearing a decisive victory in its 26-year war against Tamil separatism and it is about to make a big mistake.
"While separatist terrorism must be eradicated," wrote Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday
Leader, "it is important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urge government to view Sri Lanka's ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism.
"We have agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens."
Wickrematunge left that on his computer, to be published if he was murdered, which he duly was last month. He knew it was going to happen, and he believed that he knew who would be responsible: the government. Which is why he addressed President Mahinda Rajapaksa directly in his post-mortem article.
"In the wake of my death," Wickrematunge wrote, "I know you [President Rajapaksa] will make all the usual sanctimonious noises but like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. [Almost certainly Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother.] Not just my life but yours too depends on it."
Like the United States under President Bush, Sri Lanka has ceased to respect the law in its fight against "terrorism". Since the Tamil minority began fighting for a separate state in 1983, over 70,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka, the majority of them civilians - and since President Rajapaksa took power in 2004, 14 journalists have been murdered by unknown assailants.
Rajapaksa is now on the brink of destroying the rebel army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers). Even one year ago they still controlled some 15,000sq km in the north and north-east of the island.
But the Sri Lankan Army has reduced them to only a couple of hundred square kilometres of territory.
Within a week or two, that will be gone too, and what remains of the Tamil Tigers will no longer control a pseudo-state.
Good riddance, for they were brutal extremists who killed their own people just as readily as their suicide bombers killed the majority Sinhalese. But that doesn't mean Sri Lanka can just go back to the kind of country it was before the fighting began in 1983. The Tamils had a reason to revolt.
Tamil-speaking Hindus have been part of Sri Lanka for centuries, but they are only 12 per cent of the population. They got along well with the Sinhalese-speaking, Buddhist majority when the island was first united under British imperial rule in the early 19th century, but after that the relationship went rapidly downhill.
The British favoured the Tamil minority in education and in civil service jobs. Sinhalese resentment grew and the first Sinhalese-Tamil riots were in 1939.
As in the subsequent bouts of killing, most of the victims were Tamils. After independence in 1948, the Sinhalese used their majority to pass laws giving Sinhalese preference for university entrance and government jobs, and Sinhala was declared the sole national language.
As Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic nationalism grew more extreme, some of the riots in the 1960s and 1970s verged on anti-Tamil pogroms. By the late 1970s the process of setting up a shadow Tamil state in the north and north-east had begun.
Open war broke out in 1983, with the Tamil Tigers rapidly eliminating the rival Tamil separatist groups and establishing totalitarian control over the population under their rule. Twenty-six years later, the Tamil Tigers have been crushed and the Sri Lankan state is triumphant. But the 12 per cent of the population who are Tamils will still not accept unequal status, and they are not going away.
This is the time when a peace that gives the Tamils equal rights and autonomous local governments in the areas where they are a majority could secure the country's future, but it is most unlikely to happen.
Sinhalese nationalism is as intolerant as ever, and now it is triumphalist to boot. Moreover, the rapid growth of a "national security state" under President Rajapaksa has undermined democracy and largely silenced criticism of government policies.
The forecast, therefore, is for a reversion to guerilla war in the north, and continuing campaigns of murder by both the Government and Tamil extremists in the rest of the country.
* Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London.
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