I did it?

the tuktuks rejoice.

"Farther away were the wars of terror, the gunmen in love with the sound of their shells, where the main purpose of war had become war."– Michael Ondaajte, again.

The Sri Lankan government has been fighting the Tamil Tigers for 26 years. I'm 26, and showed up in Colombo last week. The war ended Sunday. I'm just saying...

But no really—what a wonderful and terrible time to be there.

In reality, wars don't truly end until power incentives dictate that peace deals are signed, and this government military victory has done nothing to ease ethnic tensions. The Tigers who escaped the war zone will still probably carry out a protracted terrorism and guerrilla warfare campaign (see the angry reaction from Tamils all over the world—also check out M.I.A.'s happy twitter stream).

And this victory cost of thousands and thousands of innocent lives, and highlighted the dangers of an administration unwilling to work with NGOs and the press (notice the non-Sri Lanka datelines on all NY Times stories, and the non-byline at the bottom of this one). Most of the aid workers I talked to think the island has bigger problems still ahead, and war crimes investigations might re-inflame tensions as atrocities are exposed.

But the end of fighting is good for everyone for now, and more than 60,000 innocents can finally stagger out of the war zone. I think that's worth celebrating.


On Saturday, the president declared victory on Saturday, but things in Colombo still just seemed more tense than anything. I think a lot of people were probably expecting reprisal suicide attacks.

But, on Sunday, when the Tigers announced that they were "laying down our guns," the city erupted into street celebrations. And by Monday and Tuesday, when the rumor that Tigers leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran had been killed had fully spread, things really got fun. Flags on every bus and tuk tuk. Fireworks stopping traffic right and left. Choppers and fighter jets buzzing my 16th floor hotel room.



This sort of tiered unfolding of relief makes sense. A huge part of every war is a protracted propaganda fight, and the Tigers admitting even limited defeat (without threatening immediate retaliation) prolly had a much bigger impact than anything the president declared.

But more so, while war affects everyone in a nation, conventional fighting never took place in the capital. So the main fear was terrorism and assassination, with which the Tigers had given Colombo a lion's share (get the pun?!!). So winning a conventional war in a more distant place itself was probably less important than crippling the terror capabilities of the Tigers and knocking off their messiah-like leader.


Today was declared a national holiday. I wish I could've stayed one more day to see it, even if celebrating a war won with atrocity and a victory that will do little to win peace seems uneasy at best—even if the purpose of celebrating war is to ignore it.

Here's a timeline and a Q&A about it all.