However earnest her intention to end the 17-year-old ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, President Chandrika Kumaratunga´s strategy of "war for peace" has backfired. Armed with a huge mandate for peace, she devised a political-military strategy designed at the very least to break the military stalemate and offer the LTTE a credible and promising package. Two things went wrong. Her choice of delegates for peace talks—all of them Sinhalese—and the inordinate delay in presenting the devolution package to the LTTE. The result was that the LTTE broke off the talks and started the "third Eelam war".
The cornerstone of the military strategy up till then had been effective command over the Eastern Province including Trincomalee and selective control in the northern peninsula, where the LTTE held Jaffna town while the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) occupied military bases around the Palaly airport, Kankesanthuri and Point Pedro harbours, as well as maintained offshore island garrisons. Neither side contested the unspoken demarcation of territory, and it was a live-and-let-live situation.
The government´s response to the declaration of war by the LTTE was the "war for peace" strategy: altering the balance of power in the north by capturing Jaffna in December 1995 and extending government control over the whole peninsula for the first time since the Indian Peace-Keeping Force left in 1990. In other words, the LTTE were banished from their heartland. While the SLA kept capturing more ground in the north (and losing some in the east), it got overstretched and ran out of steam. In late 1999, after four years of regrouping in the jungles, a revitalised LTTE struck back with vengeance. In six days it captured the central Wanni sector, territory the SLA had taken 18 months to occupy. By now, the LTTE was no longer the ragtag guerrilla group of the past but a seasoned conventional army equipped for the first time with tanks, artillery, and a naval force of Sea Tigers, which has become the scourge of the government´s navy. And of course, the Tigers have their human bomber force.
In sharp contrast to the energetic LTTE, the SLA was demoralised and wracked by desertions, mutinies and collapse of command and leadership. The government ignored the military debacles until the inevitable happened last month: Elephant Pass was captured and the 17,000 strong garrison forced to withdraw to Jaffna. The wily Tigers had been nibbling at this fortress since last December, and this was their first gold medal in the war. This was also the single biggest military catastrophe for the government, for the fall of Elephant Pass opened the floodgates to Jaffna.