	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Mar-07
Tamil Tiger rebel aircraft bomb government airfields, escalating Sri Lanka civil war

Web Log - March, 2007

Tamil Tiger rebel aircraft bomb government airfields, escalating Sri Lanka civil war

Sri Lanka may soon join Darfur as another generational crisis war.

Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.

Indian subcontinent, with the island of Sri Lanka off the southern tip of India.

In a new escalation of the Sri Lanka civil war, Tamil Tiger rebels flying two aircraft bombed the government's main air force base near the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital.

According to a story on TamilNet, the Tamil Tigers' web site, the purpose of the bombing was to prevent the government Sri Lankan air force from bombing Tamil civilians.

Recently, thousands of Tamil men, women and children have been forced to flee shelling and bombing by government forces.

As I've been been describing for the last year, fighting has been increasing, following the collapse of a 2002 cease fire.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the Sri Lanka war is following a familiar pattern for a civil war in a country in a generational Crisis era.

This war is fought between two ancient races: The Sinhalese (Buddhist) and the Tamils (Hindu). WW II was a crisis war for India and for Ceylon, the former name of Sri Lanka. There was relative peace on the island until 1976, when the Tamils began demanding a separate Tamil state, and formed a separatist group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or just "Tamil Tigers."

A non-crisis civil war began in 1983, and the low-level violence continued until a peace treaty was signed in 2002. In the last few months, the peace treaty has been unraveling, and in the last year it appears to be approaching a full scale genocidal crisis civil war.

As the violence continues to increase, at some point it will reach a tipping point. This point is known as "the regeneracy" in generational theory, because this is the point where the unity and identity of each group completely "regenerates." The people in each group put aside all internal political disagreements aside and unify to utilize any means necessary to defeat the enemy. Once the regeneracy is reached, the war becomes a full-scale genocidal crisis war. The fighting will continue to escalate until an explosive climax occurs, and a resolution is reached.

The only crisis war going on in the world today is the war in Darfur. The Darfur war began in the 1970s as simple clashes between farmers and camel herders competing for land, much as the farmers and cowboys did in the American prairies in the 1800s. But the violence in Darfur has grown intermittently since the 1970s. The regeneracy occurred in 2002-3, and widespread killing and raping began in earnest.

The Darfur problem first began to get worldwide attention in 2004, shortly after the 10-year commemoration of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. At that time there were big get-togethers of high-level officials from the U.N. and from various countries, making official pronouncements that the violence must stop. At the commemoration, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan promised "Never again." I wrote at the time that the U.N. is completely irrelevant to the Darfur genocide, and that it would not be stopped until it's run its course.

My prediction that the U.N. would be able to do nothing to stop the Darfur genocide has been shown to be completely true, one of the many predictions on this web site that have been shown to be true.

Now we see the Sri Lankan war approaching the same situation.

Conflict risk level for next 6-12 months as of: 9-Feb-2006

W. Europe 1 Arab Israeli 3

Russia Caucasus 2 Kashmir 2

China 2 North Korea 2

Financial 3 Bird flu 3

Key: 1=green 1=Low risk 2=yellow 2=Med 3=red 3=High 4=black 4=Active

I haven't included the Sri Lanka situation on my conflict risk graphic because I'm assuming that a genocidal Sri Lankan civil war will not automatically trigger a world war, the way a Chinese civil war would, for example. Nonetheless, a full-scale war in Sri Lanka could spread to India, and from there to Kashmir, for example, or into northeast India, where Maoist rebels have increased fighting. Thus, it is possible that in some scenarios a Sri Lanka civil war could trigger the "clash of civilizations" world war which Generational Dynamics predicts will be coming in the near future. (26-Mar-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Mar-07 Tamil Tiger rebel aircraft bomb government airfields, escalating Sri Lanka civil war

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Mar-07
Tamil Tiger rebel aircraft bomb government airfields, escalating Sri Lanka civil war