The Sri Lankan government is about to liquidate the last remaining holdout of the Tamil Tigers. Their stalemate of a year ago has been broken, and the Tigers are down to apparently a mere four square miles on the coast of Sri Lanka. With fifty thousand civilian hostages being used as human shields, it’s hardly surprising that the Sri Lankan military has been (accidentally, almost certainly) inflicting mass casualties, who surely are both hoping and dreading the final closing of the pocket. While the Times says that it would represent the ending of the 25-year civil war, it would be a resolution with no solution. The Tigers were a group of very bad people fighting for a fairly sympathetic cause, Tamil self-determination, an alleged core principle of the US. Perhaps their end will clear the way for a peaceful reconciliation, or perhaps simply a repetition of the cycle of hostility.
Why is this significant? Because it’s one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time, and the United States isn’t even pretending to do anything beyond make sympathetic noises. Nor is at altogether clear that it could or should; it’s a complex problem with complex roots and no clear immediate solution, and the thinking that the US has the ability or moral authority to come in and clean it right up (either by military or diplomatic means) is the kind of thinking that got us into Iraq. But more fundamentally, there’s nothing of importance to the US in Sri Lanka. The United States has been so aggressive about tackling humanitarian crises in areas of strategic concern (or “humanitarian crises”), it’s easy to forget the hard truth that the true backwaters of the world will always be forgotten by our political leaders and foreign policy establishment.
If you’re wondering whence all the noise and fuss about Darfur, it ran into that simple and very unpleasant fact: Darfur is far away and strategically unimportant, and the US government will ignore it forever if there’s no clear reason it can’t.