Sri Lanka is massing troops in Trincomalee for a major ground offensive against the Liberation Tigers held parts of the district. The intense bombardment of the LTTE-controlled Eachchilampathu and Sampur in recent days are the opening phases of what Sri Lanka hopes will be a significant military victory.



The LTTE, whilst pointing out that a Sri Lankan offensive is in the works, have avoided commenting on what its response is likely to be. That the Tigers will resist fiercely is not in doubt. The question for many is how and whether the war will widen to engulf other parts of the island. Whilst various military analysts speculate, the LTTE itself is maintaining a studied silence.



But of one thing there can be no doubt. Sri Lanka’s return to violence was inevitable. The international community’s failure to disentangle their own ambitions from the peace process is largely to blame. Moreover, that it would erupt in Trincomalee was not only analytically predictable, the road to war was amply signposted by numerous developments over the past two years.



To being with, Trincomalee has always been a contested site. The Sri Lankan military has been seeking to drive the LTTE, if not the Tamils, from the eastern district for years. The strategic harbour, coveted by more than one geopolitical actor, its abundance of natural resources and its centrality to the Tamil national identity meant it had a special place in every one of a number of competing ambitions.



But that is not why the present confrontation was foreseeable. It was inevitable because Sri Lanka began to mobilise for war during the peace process with increasing brazenness and the international community simply ignored it.



A survey of key events over the past two years and the international community’s attendant acti-ons is in order to defend what might seem an outlandish claim.



A central actor in this regard is the international monitoring mission overseeing the February 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA). The CFA was drafted by the protagonists based on what (in their view) were necessary safeguards.



Whilst the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) was tasked with ensuring compliance, the mission quickly lost focus. It became preoccupied with details, with cataloguing individual incidents and investigating them to attribute blame.



This micro-focus meant the SLMM simply ignored the macro-breaches of the CFA. The focus on individual killings and attacks, combined with a predilection for amassing statistics, meant that manifest trends were simply ignored by the SLMM.



An example is the Sri Lankan military’s failure to vacate thousands of schools, places of worship and private homes. This macro-failure meant that hundreds of thousands of displaced were never settled. It is not that killings and individual incidents are not important, but rather that the SLMM was meant to ensure compliance with a wider normalisation process and not merely to count complaints.



It is in this context of a monitoring mission focussed on minutia - and an international community preoccupied with ‘containing’ the LTTE - that Sri Lanka’s military began its build up. Just as it had done during the ill-fated 1994-5 talks, the military simply ignor-ed obligations imposed by agreements reached by its political masters. Instead it concentrated single-mindedly on its war preparations.



The extensive purchases of weaponry over the 2002-4 by all three service arms are well documented now. The Navy and Air Force doubled their numerical strength. The Army tripled its tank strength and doubled its artillery power. Amid the handwringing over what the LTTE might or might not have acquired, the implications of Sri Lanka’s substantially ramping up of its military capability wasn’t even considered.



But it is in Trincomalee that Sri Lanka’s multiphased strategy for military capture was most clearly discernable - even to the point of brazenness.



Preparations for the present Sri Lankan offensive began a very long time ago. It even predates President Mahinda Rajapakse’s ascension to power.



Soon after the December 2004 tsunami smashed into the eastern coastline, the military reimposed an embargo on fuel, cement and other building materials from being taken into LTTE-controlled areas of Trincomalee particularly.



Even amid the ultimately futile discussions over the Post Tsunami Operational Management Structure (PTOMS), LTTE officials in the east were protesting that there was no point to the exercise as long as the embargo continued on the ground.



With regards to the present crisis, this is the first failure of the SLMM. Despite repeated complaints, the SLMM did nothing. Embargos are not easily catalogued. The mission monitored incidents but completely ignored the wider picture.



The sanctions on LTTE-controlled parts of Trincomalee have thus been in place for 20 months. They were imposed in complete violation of the CFA, but no SLMM report has covered their deleterious effects.



Over time, the Sri Lankan military also imposed an embargo on food and medical supplies entering LTTE-controlled areas, particularly in Trincomalee.



There were widespread protests by the Tamils. Even amid the controversy over the Buddha statue in Trincomalee central bus stand, the protestors were agitating over the embargo. But these were ignored as LTTE-inspired.



As long ago as last December, the Trincomalee District Tamil Peoples’ Consortium (TDTPC) appealed to newly elected President Mahinda Rajapskse “to take necessary steps in alleviating the hardships of the people living villages in the Muttur east and Eachchilampathu divisions by lifting the restriction on transport of essential food items and building materials through Kaddaiparichchan and Mahindapura SLA camps to their villages.”



No one paid any attention to the protests. But now both Kaddaiparichchan and Mahindapura have come to attention of the dimmest of analysts studying Sri Lanka.



This and numerous other appeals fellow on deaf ears. Not only in Temple Trees, where it might be expected to, but in the numerous diplomatic missions in Colombo and, in particularly, SLMM HQ.



This was the second strategic failure by the SLMM. Not only were the normalisation aspects of the CFA being ignored, the entire range of ‘goodwill measures’ put out by Ranil Wickremsinghe’s government had now been rolled back. Yet alarm bells failed to ring.



That the Vanni was not as badly affected is partly due to other mitigating circumstances - including the goods flow to Jaffna - but mainly due to Sri Lanka’s particular focus on Trincomalee.



The SLMM thus failed to appreciate the emergent crisis and invoke international pressure to reverse what was now clearly taking pace.



Whether this failure stemmed from an inability to grasp the complex dynamics of Sri Lanka or a deliberate focus on the LTTE’s violations over Sri Lanka’s is a matter of conjecture. In either case, it failed if its intent was to prevent a return to war.



Amid the rapid escalation since December of the long running ‘shadow war’ into a ‘low-intensity war’ the SLMM became prolific note takers and data collectors. But yet it missed the big picture: LTTE-controlled Eachchilampathu and Sampur were being starved and subject to systematic deprivation.



Even the much-vaunted report compiled by the SLMM between Geneva 1 (in February) and the abortive Geneva 2 focussed, as ever, on killings, claymores, abdu-ctions and other individual incidents. There was still no interest in the strategic picture.



It was in late April that Sri Lanka’s military showed its cards. Within hours of the attempted suicide bombing of Army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, the military launched air and artillery strikes against Sampur and Eachchilampathu. There were attacks against elsewhere too, but these were sideshows. LTTE areas in Trincomalee bore the brunt.



This was the third failure of international monitoring. The details of destruction and casualties inflicted were duly noted.



But the SLMM did nothing to put the pieces together, even when LTTE officials warned of a resumption of war by Colombo. LTTE protests were dismissed as inevitable complaints of one party to a conflict against the other.



But something important had begun to happen on the ground. Civilian casualties in the late April were light - certainly in comparison to the dozens of civilians killed by rockets and shells in the past few weeks.



But the purpose of the Sri Lankan bombardment was primarily to create a humanitarian crisis which, coupled with the now year-long embargo, would begin to rapidly deplete any remaining stockpiles of food and medicine in LTTE-controlled areas.



The massive displacement did trigger international concern and occasionally even anger. But, as past experience has shown the Sri Lankan state, these sentiments dissipate as quickly as they emerge. Once relief is pledged and NGOs tasked to begin rehabilitation, things return to normal in international capitals.



Between April and July, Sampur and Eachchilampathu were regularly hammered by Sri Lankan air and artillery strikes. In the first three weeks of July there was near daily shelling of Muttur East and Sampur. MBRL and artillery fire was directed on July 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16 and 18.



All of these produced further waves of displacement, adding to the forty thousand people displaced in April. The significance of the massive humanitarian requirement this imposed on a region which had been subject to embargo since early 2005 was completely lost on the SLMM.



It was on July 20 that the Maavil Aru sluice gates were closed and the present crisis is said to have started. This is probably the first time the SLMM (and the international community it reports to) began to take a close interest in events in the Trincomalee district.



But it was certainly not the beginning of the crisis. Rather it was the opening phase of confrontation.



For Sri Lanka’s military, confident it had weakened the LTTE’s ability to withstand a major offensive by depleting its stockpiles of food and medicine, began to scout around for a suitable reason to initiate a shooting war.



The closing of the sluice gates provided just such an opportunity. Which is why within two days, Colombo launched airstrikes and vowed a military offensive. For all the proclamations about ‘humanitarian war’ this was about something much bigger: a project to destroy the LTTE in Trincomalee.



But things went wrong when the Tigers put up unexpected resistance. Despite fighting in a awkward corner of Trincomalee’s variegated geography, the Tigers stalled the Army advance and inflicted casualties.



What should have been a short sharp clash, which would have drawn more LTTE cadres into suicidal open confrontation before the Army’s massed heavy weapons, became the reverse: the SLA found itself committing more and more troops to overrun a relatively minor target.



Then last Tuesday the LTTE struck back with a ferocity that took the Sri Lankan military by surprise. The Tigers took Muttur town with little effort having bypassed a number of SLA camps whose outer defences had been quickly overrun and whose central positions remained under siege.



When the LTTE suddenly withdrew from a devastated Muttur three days later, it declared its mission over. It said it had pre-empted a major offensive by the SLA against its controlled areas.



This claim has been misunderstood. The LTTE did not expect to permanently thwart a Sri Lankan onslaught, but to create specific difficulties for Colombo. In particular, the LTTE sought to demonstrate that there would be no quick victory in Sampur and Eachchilampathu and that its defence of Maavil Aru was no fluke.



In short, there will be no short, sharp war, but a grinding mess.



The immediate implication of that is the Sri Lankan military’s change in strategy.



In the past week, Colombo has unleashed a torrent of rockets and shells on the two LTTE controlled areas, destroying roads, bridges and major buildings. Colombo intends therefore a ‘broad-front’ onslaught as it did in Jaffna in 1995, Kilinochchi in 1996, Mankulum in 1998 and Elephant Pass in 2001.



Yet when the SLMM chief, Ulf Henricsson, fled to an LTTE bunker on Sunday to escape the dozens of Sri Lankan shells fired at him he had no idea what was happening. Even though the SLMM has been taking notes in Trincomalee every day for the past two years.