COLOMBO -- My plane lands smoothly at Colombo's plush Bandaranaike International Airport, but beyond the runway lies the turbulence of ethnic strife that for 20 years has ravaged this hauntingly picturesque island nation.
In 2001, at the height of the war between Sri Lanka's Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority population and its Tamil Hindu-Christian minority community, the airport was attacked and one-third of Sri Lanka's commercial airline fleet was destroyed.
More than a major loss to the civil aviation industry, the assault was a blow to government pride. The airport attack was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a radically militant group headed by V. Prabhakaran. He has demanded a separate state for Tamils in the northeastern region of Sri Lanka and had waged a bloody guerrilla war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, for two decades -- until a ceasefire was declared in 2002. That ceasefire now appears to be breaking down.