Hope Rises Among Weary Sri Lankans for Civil War’s End : Asia: Even in district where 57 were killed in attack by suspected suicide bomber, ‘a good time has come.’ Credit for optimism goes to new president.

On the streets of Grandpass, the scruffy district where vendors hawk wriggling fish plucked from the Indian Ocean and boys square off in the hot sun for a pickup game of cricket, hope has come again.

It hasn’t been a frequent visitor of late. This is the working-class neighborhood of Colombo, after all, where a few weeks ago, as best the police can determine, a woman strapped explosives tightly to her body and detonated them at a nighttime political rally. She snuffed out 57 lives, blowing off her own head in the process.

But that was then, and this, people in Grandpass tell you, is now.

“A good time has come,” plump, white-haired Narayani Gopalan, 71 and missing her two front teeth, said one recent morning with total and simple conviction. “God has opened his eyes.”

Members of Sri Lanka’s educated, ruling elite use more complex explanations. But, in general, they concur: Their island, whose ancient name of Serendip was refashioned by a whimsical 18th-Century Englishman to denote the facility of stumbling across something wonderful by chance--”serendipity”--may be having a run of luck itself.

Yes, reasons for caution remain, the politicians, observers and journalists note. But at no time over the past 11 years have hopes been so high that a peaceful end could be brought to one of the world’s longest-running civil wars, the armed struggle by some of Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils for a homeland of their own.

An obscure, exotic conflict for the rest of the world, the ethnic dispute has traumatized this lushly beautiful land that unfurls across the dark waters to the southeast of India like an emerald leaf.

The country’s integrity has been broken, with the rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam controlling tracts of the north and east. A quarter of revenue collected by the Colombo government is expended on fighting them, one minister says. The belligerents have battled to a stalemate, and the population as a whole appears to have had enough.

“We’re now in a situation where the vast majority of the people in Sri Lanka--Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim--are looking for peace,” said Jayadeva Uyangoda, senior lecturer in political science at Colombo University. “It wasn’t so a year ago.”

Proof incarnate of this change, as well as one of the causes, is the ascension of a dark-eyed widow and single mother to the highest office in the land. Shattering a political taboo, Chandrika Kumaratunga declared that the use of force to suppress the insurgency has failed and that it is time to negotiate.

To the astonishment of many, such frankness struck a chord with most Sri Lankans, including members of the Sinhalese majority, who have grown increasingly impatient to see an end to the bloodshed in which, by varying estimates, 30,000 to 50,000 people have died.

On Nov. 9, just 1 1/2 years after Kumaratunga first stood as a candidate in a provincial election, her people made her the country’s president by a historic majority.

The day she took office, she mixed what sounded like Kennedyesque New Frontier rhetoric with lyrics from the old Broadway musical “Man of La Mancha” to hold out the possibility of a brighter tomorrow. “Let us together climb those unreachable heights, let us realize that difficult but beautiful dream,” she said.

Neelan Tiruchelvam, a lawyer and human rights activist who represents a moderate Tamil party in Parliament, observed of Kumaratunga, “She believes very much that this is her moment in history and that it needs to be grasped with firmness and resolution.”

But such sunny optimism could vanish as quickly as the southwest monsoon blows in each May to blanket the sky with rain clouds, because the new president is dealing with an uncertain interlocutor.

She wants to end the war. The goals of the Tigers, who are led by a ruthless guerrilla and Clint Eastwood fan who just turned 40, are still a matter of speculation.

Radio intercepts indicated that after Kumaratunga’s election, Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran ordered his units to observe a weeklong truce unless attacked. But he and his men have generally kept their opinion of the island’s new leader to themselves.

“My feeling is that the Tigers don’t want peace,” said Regi Siriwardena, a veteran Colombo journalist. “After all, they now have a de facto state. Why give it up?”

This modern-day parable of the lady and the Tigers is especially dangerous for the lady. If Kumaratunga doesn’t make significant concessions, the Tigers will dismiss her promise of “peace and prosperity” as campaign rhetoric.

If she seems too conciliatory, or the Tigers give nothing in return, she risks a backlash among the Sri Lankan people and the army.

And if she can’t deliver the improvement in the situation that people throughout the island are intensely hoping for, she will see public support melt away.

“When you have large expectations, you have to fulfill them quickly or there will be a reverse movement fairly rapidly,” said Ajith Samaranayake, editor of the state-run Observer and Sunday Observer newspapers.

The bloody events of Oct. 24 in Grandpass underline the need for caution. The suicide bomber, a young woman in her mid-20s who most Sri Lankans believe was an agent of the Tigers, wiped out the main opposition candidate for president and other leaders of his United National Party. Significantly, this massacre came after, and not before, preliminary talks had begun between envoys sent by Kumaratunga, who was then prime minister, and the rebels.

“They came, they talked, and they killed,” Uyangoda of Colombo University summed up.

Kumaratunga and her government avoided pinning the blame on the Tigers as the election approached. But if a police investigation finds that the rebels were responsible, or if more bombing and terrorist attacks occur, she will face mounting doubt and hostility among the Sinhalese, the predominantly Buddhist group to which she and nearly three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s 17.2 million people belong. Some are already downright suspicious of her “peace process.”

“Tamils have absolutely no right here as a separate entity or group,” said Sinhalese hard-liner Harishchandra Wijayatunga, who ran in the presidential election as candidate of the nativist Sons of the Soil. “If any Indian wants to go home, fine. If he wants to stay, he has to be part and parcel of our culture.”

Kumaratunga has held out the carrot of “extensive devolution” of power and the possible redrawing of provincial borders to tempt the Tamil rebels to lay down their arms and accept something less than Tamil eelam-- a Tamil nation. In light of her country’s long history, those are weighty concessions.

“Federalism in Sri Lanka is a political four-letter word,” Uyangoda said.

One reason, perhaps the main one, lies in the national mythology. Throughout the centuries, Buddhist monks doubling as historians portrayed Sri Lanka as the last bulwark of Buddhism against the rising tide of Hinduism.

Although the Sinhalese were transplants from India themselves and the Tamils are believed to have begun arriving no later than the 3rd Century BC, or about the same time that Buddhism reached these shores, they went down in the chronicles, still used in classrooms today, as invaders and profaners.

British authorities further muddied the demographic picture of the tea-growing colony they called Ceylon by importing even more Tamils from India in the late 19th Century to work the plantations in the central highlands. Today, Tamils make up about 18% of the population.

Arabs, Malays, Muslims from India and Portuguese and Dutch colonists also arrived over the centuries and put down roots. The desires of the Muslims, 7% of the population, also must be part of Kumaratunga’s calculations, because many of them live in the eastern lands where the Tigers operate.

Unlike many other ethnic protest movements, the Tigers actually hold territory that they have transformed into an economic and military power base. On the northern Jaffna peninsula, they effectively control administration, courts and taxation. They may be the only guerrilla force in the world to boast a navy. In their prisons, they hold an estimated 4,000 prisoners.

“This is not a guerrilla force in mountains somewhere,” human rights activist Tiruchelvam said. “This is a de facto state.”

Little wonder, then, that Kumaratunga’s proposal of a more federalist Sri Lanka has elicited no ringing public endorsement from the Tigers’ Prabhakaran and his subordinates. “They’re already in power,” said Siriwardena, the Colombo journalist.

Moreover, unlike the Irish Republican Army or the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Tigers have not yet made any dramatic gestures to open the door to peace. It is true that they might have, had talks about a cease-fire gone ahead as scheduled. Kumaratunga broke off those contacts within hours of the Grandpass explosion.

Last Monday, Sri Lankan officials said Kumaratunga sent a message to the Tigers regarding a new date to resume peace talks. The guerrillas offered a new truce in exchange for an inquiry into the mutilation of one of their top intelligence agents, who was beheaded after being shot by security forces.

Government troops also went on red alert as the Tigers launched “Heroes’ Week,” the annual commemoration of their thousands of comrades in arms slain in the protracted battle for independence.

While the hesitation waltz toward the negotiating table continues, Kumaratunga’s intention seems to be the winning of the hearts and minds of the civilian population. Her government has already softened an economic embargo of Jaffna to allow shipments of milk, food, gasoline, cement and other commodities to reach the Tigers’ beleaguered haven. The electricity grid is being repaired.

Some observers scoff at the apparent naivete of attempting an end run around the Tigers. The joke has been that civilians in Jaffna are allowed by the tough, disciplined rebels to open their mouths for only two reasons: to brush their teeth or yawn.

“The Tamil people want peace. But they can’t be allowed to have it by the Tigers,” said Daham Wimalasena, an official in the United National Party.

The last time the government and rebels held serious peace talks, ending in 1991, the Tigers used the 14-month lull to rearm and regroup. When the peace talks collapsed, they went back to fighting.

The country’s president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, was blown to bits on May Day of last year in a bombing much like the Grandpass attack. The Indian prime minister who dispatched a peacekeeping force here, Rajiv Gandhi, was also killed by a woman wearing a concealed explosive charge as he campaigned in 1991. The Tigers are blamed for both assassinations, but deny responsibility.

Kumaratunga and her supporters are clearly betting that on the other side of the lines in Jaffna, there are many people who share their desire for peace.

“It will take a long time,” Tiruchelvam predicted. “But we believe that there is probably a new generation emerging in Sri Lanka who want to look at problems differently, who feel the previous government made mistakes and who--dare I say?--are more tolerant of diversity. They don’t feel diversity is an impediment to nationhood, and I think Chandrika (Kumaratunga) symbolizes that new generation.”