Sri Lanka! A second innings.

A few years ago I spent a couple on months at Colombo,with my wife. My ship was under repair at the Colombo Shipyard and it allowed us to explore Sri Lanka to a fair extent. The hospitality was magnificent and on occasions left us embarrassed.
We made a few friends along the way. Jayalath and his wife Shyamali, were in touch with us for many years and have since moved to Canada.
One historical site, of great antiquity, that left a lasting impression on me was the fort at Sigiriya, built on a steep hill.
While in Sri Lanka, the subject of the LTTE came up on occasion and views were rigid and polarized. As a neutral observer, I always felt sad that a wonderful community and peace loving people, had brought the dogs of war, on to themselves. I felt more sad that India was looked upon by many in Sri Lanka as the chief architect of the LTTE.
With the LTTE vanquished, let us hope that the Sri Lankans, pick up the pieces, integrate the Tamils and get on with life.
Sri Lanka is too good a country to be wasted on terror. They have been willed a second innings and I hope they bat better for themselves, both the Sinhalese & Tamils. Thankfully the majority Sinhala community seems to have learnt their lesson and there is a spirit of reconciliation. Only time will tell, but if this is true and the peace lasts, Prabhakaran would have done his duty for his fellow Tamils.
The following is a short piece on Prabhakaran, that appeared in Time magazine a few days ago.

The rest of the world might never understand the violence Velupillai Prabhakaran stood for, but its imprint on Sri Lanka is wide and deep. For 26 years, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had waged war with the government to win an independent homeland, or eelam, for the island's Tamil minority. The struggle claimed more than 70,000 lives--including, on May 18, Prabhakaran's. The government says he was killed, along with 17 of his trusted lieutenants, while fleeing an army ambush.
Prabhakaran, 54, was born to a middle-class family on the Jaffna Peninsula. Incensed by discrimination against Tamils and radicalized by a militant grade-school teacher, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE in 1976, a year after a group he headed claimed responsibility for killing Jaffna's mayor. By 1983 the guerrilla movement--which pioneered suicide bombings and the recruitment of child soldiers--escalated the fighting into a civil war.
At the height of his power earlier this decade, Prabhakaran led a de facto government that controlled vast swaths of territory and boasted its own systems of taxes, roads and courts. As the army closed in, he allegedly used thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields. By the final days, just 250 LTTE members remained. They died too, along with the dream of eelam.