Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers

What has happened to the rebels?

A year-long government offensive has pushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or "Tamil Tigers", into a shattered enclave in the northeast of the island. The last few hundred fighters are surrounded in a conflict zone of 12 square miles, the Indian Ocean at their back. Caught in-between are around 100,000 civilians trying to escape, of whom hundreds have died from disease or been killed in cross-fire.

Has it always been a violent land?

On the contrary, for centuries it was a byword for paradise. A stage on ancient trading routes with Asia, its beaches, spices and mountains acquired a mythic quality in travellers' tales. Taprobane, the Greeks and Romans called it, a place, wrote Pliny, "banished by nature outside the world... where nobody kept a slave". Its Arab name "Serendib", gave us the word "serendipity". Sri Lanka itself means - in Sinhala - "Resplendent Land". Its strategic position in the Indian Ocean, and the lure of its spices, brought the Portuguese as colonists in 1505, the Dutch in 1668 and the British in the late 18th century. The first to conquer the whole island, the British developed a thriving plantation economy based on tea, rubber and coconut. Ceylon, they called it, and when it gained independence in 1948 without any bloodshed, it was widely spoken of as "the best bet in Asia".

So what accounts for Sri Lanka's descent into violence?

Its tangled ethnic roots. The majority of the population (75%) are the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese, who see themselves as Indo-Aryans from north India, and are concentrated in the south and the centre. By contrast, the (mainly Hindu) Sri Lankan Tamils (12%) originate from south India; their ancestors set up a kingdom in the north (around Jaffna) and east of the island. They are not to be confused with the dirt-poor Indian Tamils (7%), descendants of labourers shipped in by the British in the 19th century, who work the tea plantations and have been a political football in the conflict; nor with the mainly Tamil-speaking Muslims (6%).

Have they ever been able to get along?

Both Sinhalese and Tamil identity has been moulded by a history of ancient wars between rival kingdoms. At independence, there was no great friction between the two: the Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, belonged to the United National Party (UNP) government, which took power after independence and promptly stripped Indian Tamils of the right to vote. But the question of how to share power between the two main groups was never far from the surface. Tamils increasingly came to see themselves as oppressed; the Sinhalese, who see themselves as an isolated people confronting South India's 60 million Tamils, resented the way Tamils had prospered under colonisation. When the British left, Tamils held 60% of all government jobs, secured most places at university and predominated in the professions.

How did the resentments grow?

Appeal to ethnic identity was always the easiest way for any new party to mobilise support against the established one (the UNP), and this was the tactic pursued by Solomon Bandaranaike, who became PM in 1956. He played up to the Buddhist monkhood; made Sinhala, rather than English, the official language; and used large-scale irrigation schemes to resettle Sinhalese villagers in the Tamil-dominated dry zones of the north and east. After he was assassinated, his widow, Sirimavo, the world's first female prime minister, enacted a "standardisation" policy, an aggressive form of positive discrimination. Tamil students had to score higher than Sinhalese to get into university; there were ethnic quotas for public service jobs. Outraged, Tamil political parties demanded a state of their own: "Tamil Eelam".

When did the violence start?

In the 1970s Tamil protests escalated, and extremist Sinhalese began attacking Tamil communities living in mainly Sinhalese areas. As tensions rose, violent Tamil groups formed, the Tigers emerging as the most fearsome. In 1975, it murdered the mayor of Jaffna; two years later, Velupillai Prabhakaran, its ruthless leader, killed a moderate Tamil MP. In 1981, a government-linked mob destroyed Jaffna's public library and collection of 97,000 Tamil books. A Tiger attack on government troops then provoked what is now seen as the start of the nightmare that followed – 1983's "Black July", when some 3,000 Tamils were killed and thousands more driven from the capital, Colombo.

Has the fighting gone on ever since?

No, it has been an intermittent saga of government offensives, guerrilla warfare and terrorist atrocities. But peace efforts have always failed. In 1987, India intervened, sending 60,000 Indian peacekeepers to police the Tamil north and east. But the Tigers broke the peace, killing more than 1,000 Indian soldiers and, in 1991, sending a suicide bomber to blow up the Indian PM, Rajiv Gandhi. In 2002, the government signed a ceasefire, under which the Tigers promised to drop their secessionist demands. It failed.

What went wrong on that occasion?

In 2003, Sri Lankan politics was plunged into crisis by a feud between the President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe. The Tigers were also split by the desertion of their eastern commander, Colonel Karuna. Weakened and hostile, the Tigers then enforced a Tamil boycott of the 2005 elections, a typically self-destructive thing to do, since the more moderate Wickremesinghe would probably have won with the Tamil vote and the peace process might have restarted. But the boycott gave victory to Mahinda Rajapaksa, the current, hard-line president, intent on the Tigers' total elimination. He launched the current offensive, which has been distinguished by new levels of violence. More than 11,000 people were killed since 2008, including 9,000 Tamil Tiger fighters, the bloodiest year since fighting began in 1983. ·