Sri Lanka the Terror Strikes Home

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

The workday was just an hour old. Nearly 200 employees in the red-tiled colonial building that houses Colombo's central telegraph offices were busy at their posts. Customers had begun to queue up to pay bills, make calls at the public phone booths and send telegrams. Suddenly the morning routine was shattered by an explosion that echoed throughout the downtown area of the capital. Two floors of the three-story structure collapsed. As rescue workers sifted through the wreckage for survivors, police commandeered cars to transport the wounded to hospitals. Twelve people died and more than 100 were injured in the bombing.

The blast came only four days after a bomb went off in the tail section of an Air Lanka Lockheed Tristar L-1011 minutes before a delayed takeoff from the Katunayake International Airport, 18 miles outside Colombo. Airline officials insisted that all luggage had been X-rayed, but the bomb is believed to have been hidden in a crate of vegetables, which apparently was not examined. The explosion snapped the plane in two as flames and debris shot from the broken fuselage. Passengers were hurriedly evacuated. Sixteen people died, most of them European and Japanese tourists on their way to beach holidays in the Maldive Islands, and 20 others were critically wounded.

Government officials blamed both attacks on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the most radical of the insurgent factions fighting to establish an independent state in the northern and eastern parts of the country. The two bombings suggest that the militant Tamil insurgents are willing to bring the fighting to the capital, a significant escalation of the bitter three-year civil war in which more than 3,000 people have been killed. "These attacks," said an official of the National Security Ministry on TV following the second bombing, "indicate the group is no longer interested in a peaceful settlement of the ethnic problem."

The Tamils, who are mainly Hindu, claim that over the past 38 years since the country, then known as Ceylon, won independence from Great Britain, their 2 million people have been discriminated against by the island's 11.8 million predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese majority. The rebels argue that they can achieve full rights to education and employment only by establishing a separate homeland, which they call Eelam.

Throughout the increasingly bloody conflict there have been charges that the separatists have been aided by India, which has a substantial Tamil population in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, 22 miles from Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait. But in the past ten months, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has tried to broker a peace agreement between the Sri Lanka government and the insurgents. Last year he helped arrange two ceasefires, only to see the fragile agreement crumble. Sri Lanka's President J.R. Jayewardene, for his part, has offered greater political autonomy to the Tamils but rejects the idea of an independent state. In March, Jayewardene for the first time launched air raids against Tamil strongholds in the northern Jaffna Peninsula, but by the end of last month had halted the bombings.

Last week's acts of sabotage followed bloody clashes between rival rebel factions over how to respond to a visit by an Indian peace delegation to Colombo. The attacks would seem to indicate that the militant Tigers have triumphed and are intent on thwarting any accord between the government and more moderate Tamils. The Colombo government has rebuked the rebels for engaging in terrorist acts and promised that it "will not allow such acts of terrorism to affect the peace efforts."

With reporting by Roland Edirisinghe/Colombo