Sri Lanka, March 11 -- The ethnic problem seems to have been forgotten even by the Tamils of Northern and Eastern Provinces. Tamils have apparently been left to themselves. Political disunity seems to have been the order of the day.

There was a time when they had a strong bargaining power, the armed struggle of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that sometimes ran their own administration directly in some areas and indirectly in others, despite depriving the political rights of other Tamil political entities.

The LTTE had their own administration, courts of law with their own laws independent of the Justice Ministry of the central government. They ran banks independent of the Central Bank in Colombo. Tamil media had given an i...