Lanka should guarantee rights of Tamils: US daily

Washington: Stating that LTTE which killed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was "rightly" branded as a terror outfit by the US and India, a leading US daily has asked President Mahinda Rajapaksa to guarantee the rights of Tamils for lasting peace in the country after the defeat of the rebels.

"If he (Rajapaksa) is to ensure that Sri Lanka leaves behind the violence that has plagued it for so long, he will have to sponsor a political process that is fully inclusive and democratic and that guarantees the rights of Tamils under a peaceful rule of law," The Washington Post said in an editorial.

The devolution of power, already undertaken in the country's Eastern Province, has been mostly nominal and marred by continued abuses by security forces, the newspaper claimed.

Now that his forces have won, Rajapaksa will have the opportunity and the political capital to remedy the trouble that caused the war, which is the absence of Tamil self-government, it observed.

Commenting on the defeat of the LTTE, the Post said rarely in the contemporary world has a domestic insurgency been as decisively crushed by military means as the Tamil Tiger rebels of Sri Lanka have been -- and arguably not in recent times has a reversal of fortunes been so dramatic.

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The paper said there can be little doubt that the calamity that befell on the Tigers as well as those trapped with them was caused by the LTTE's own depravity.

"Prabhakaran, as much a cult leader as an insurgent commander, did much to establish suicide bombing as a tactic for extremists around the world. He orchestrated the assassination of a Sri Lankan president (Ranasinghe Premdasa) and an Indian (former) prime minister (Rajiv Gandhi); he enslaved and systematically brainwashed children," the editorial said.

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"He refused to accept compromise proposals that would have granted the Tamils autonomy, and he triggered the government's final offensive by cutting off the water supply to eastern Sri Lanka. The Tigers were rightly branded a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and India," it said.