Left Flank

Oh, pity, Buddhists are unsavory bigots, too.

Seated in a wicker-chair, in view of the Indian Ocean, Mr Rathana also wears monk's cloth—in russet, where the Dalai Lama wears red. But he is cut from different stuff. A former communist, Mr Rathana entered parliament in 2004 as a member of the new and all-monk National Heritage Party (NHP). It now has nine MPs and provides majority-making support to the government of President Maninda Rajapakse.

One NHP monk, Chanapika Ranawaka, is Sri Lanka's environment minister. But Mr Rathana is the best known, on account of his noisy pronouncements on the dangers of global warming, alcohol and tobacco, and on the importance of waging war.

Purveyors of an extreme brand of Sinhalese nationalism, the NHP considers Sri Lanka Sinhalese and Buddhist; they believe that those of other faiths and ethnicities, while welcome, must behave like guests. In effect, this means a policy of zero tolerance towards the complaints of the country's Tamil minority and their self-proclaimed champions, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known as the Tamil Tigers.

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«Always the LTTE start discussions when they are weak, they use peace talks to gain strength, and then they return to bloodshed. It will not happen again,» he says. «If they give up their weapons, then they can talk. If they do not, we will control them by whatever means.»

I'm not passing judgment on the LTTE (a previous attempt to post on the Sri Lankan civil war got lost in a previous WP upgrade), but it's refreshing to know hardline sentiments are not limited to southern Christian preachers.

All that outrage last year about Myanmar, yet, in one sentence, what kind of moral indignation can one summon for Sri Lanka?

About 70,000 people have been killed since the war erupted in 1983.

Britain's Foreign Office advises tourists should vacation elsewhere, but others disagree.

No, I'm not talking about The Wire! The US District Court in Baltimore convicted a member of the Tamil Tigers, Thirunavukarasu Varatharasa, on conspiracy and attempted export of small arms.

Investigators posed as representatives of a defense company and lured a Singapore arms broker to Baltimore. In July 2006, they put Haniffa Bin Osman up at an Inner Harbor hotel and shuttled him to a shooting range in Harford County so that he could test-fire machine guns he wanted to buy. Bin Osman, who also pleaded guilty, was the one who brought in Varatharasa to inspect the arms before the deal was completed in Guam, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors say the arms dealers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to export firearms and ammunition, surface-to-air missiles, night-vision goggles and other military weapons and gear. Most were to benefit the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group seeking a homeland for ethnic Tamils on Sri Lanka, an island in the Indian Ocean.

Sri Lanka's government officially gave notice Thursday that it is pulling out of a 2002 cease-fire agreement with the Tamil Tigers that has failed to quell the violence.

More than 70,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed since the Tigers began fighting for an independent state for the ethnic Tamil minority in 1983, according to published reports. The Tamils claim that the Sinhalese majority discriminates against them. Despite the cease-fire, near- daily ambushes, assassinations and airstrikes have killed more than 5,000 people in the past two years.

In the Baltimore undercover operation, Varatharasa helped organize a plan to have at least part of the $900,000 worth of arms shipped to the Tamil Tigers by sea. Then, about 125 miles off the coast of Sri Lanka, the rebel group intended to send out its Sea Tigers naval force to pick up the weaponry, according to court papers.

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