Those meeting at the Rose Garden resort in Bangkok seem to be intoxicated by the sweet smell of success to judge by the comments of the principal protagonists to the second round of the Sri Lanka government- LTTE talks.

While the emerging bonhomie between the two sides appears genuine enough, one incident seems to have rattled Dr. Anton Balasingham and his Tiger colleagues as evidenced by their rather abrasive comments to the media.

That incident is the Colombo High Court's announcement of the verdict on the 1996 Central Bank bombing in which Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was also on trial, though in absentia.

The trial judge found Prabhakaran and several others guilty on a number of counts and gave them varying sentences. Prabhakaran who was found guilty on 10 counts was sentenced to life for each offence and received an accumulated sentence of 200 years.
There are those who find such a sentence laughable on the basis that a person can only serve one life sentence and it makes a mockery of justice to give several life sentences to the same convicted person.

Dr. Balasingham is one of those who found such a verdict absurd. Not only did he condemn it but was obviously riled at the timing of the announcement- on the eve of the second round of talks.

The learned doctor seemed to smell more than the scent of roses. He apparently thought that the verdict, coming as it did just prior to the talks, would serve as an obstacle to the peace process in the sense that it would stigmatise the LTTE leader in the eyes of the Sri Lankan people and harden the opposition to the negotiations.

If Dr. Balasingham thought that this verdict had suddenly awoken ignorant Sri Lankans and the world at large to Mr. Prabhakaran's activities, then he must surely have been living in a world cocooned from reality.

It was not so long ago that Mr. Prabhakaran emerged from the Wanni jungles in safari suit looking more like a South Asian businessman than the leader of a ruthless organisation, to face the media.

At that encounter at which his sidekick and leading negotiator was also present, Indian journalists in particular pressed him on the Rajiv Gandhi killing. The LTTE leaders tried to fob it off as something in the past and tended to minimise the whole affair.

But the Jain Commission had already pointed the finger very clearly at the LTTE and its leader for killing the former Indian prime minister. The Indian courts would like to see him produced in India and it is well known that the Indian authorities have asked the Sri Lanka government for his extradition.

The fact that India considers Mr Prabhakaran a wanted criminal in connection with the Gandhi assassination did not in any way stop Dr Balasingham and the LTTE from suggesting that the talks with the Sri Lanka government be held in India or requesting that the LTTE's chief negotiator be allowed access to medical facilities in Chennai.

Having killed a one-time leader and a person from a respected Indian family, how Balasingham and the LTTE could so blithely ask Indian assistance to satisfy the personal convenience of the LTTE shows the kind of morality that governs their actions.

Just as the LTTE dismissed the angry questioning of Indian journalists on the Gandhi killing as a thing of the past, Dr Balasingham and his negotiating colleagues want the people of Sri Lanka to forget the Central Bank bombing and other atrocities in which hundreds of innocent persons were killed, as actions committed during a state of war.

The learned doctor has argued, according to media reports, that these bombings etc were committed under different conditions-when the LTTE was at war with the Sri Lankan state.

By so arguing he is trying to minimise the enormity of the LTTE's crimes. But in doing so he is also conceding that the LTTE was responsible for them, which of course, the Tigers never admitted at the time.

But as Kishali Pinto Jayawardene rightly pointed out in her column last Sunday quoting the New York-based Human Rights Watch, suicide bombing is considered a war crime. Before Human Rights Watch claimed so in its latest report, Amnesty International had also sharply criticised the practice of suicide bombings calling it a crime against humanity.

These international bodies rightly believe that suicide bombings are generally indiscriminate in that the victims of such attacks are innocent civilians who are not active participants in the conflict.

Dr. Balasingham's defence of LTTE actions of the past might have some validity had the attacks been against military targets. In many cases they were not. How does the Pettah bus stand become a military target? How does a train transporting office workers from Colombo to the suburbs become a military target? How did the Buddhist worshippers at Anuradhapura or Muslims at prayer in a mosque in the eastern province become military objectives?

Is Dr. Balasingham then - even inadvertently- admitting that the LTTE has committed war crimes and are guilty of crimes against humanity?

Scoffing at the 200-year sentence passed on his leader, Dr. Balasingham argues that if the LTTE sat in judgement over Sri Lanka's leaders, they would receive 2000 year sentences.

It is surprising that the man who has been holed up in London does not seem to know that recently a British doctor, Harold Shipman, was given 15 death sentences for killing a number of his patients. The full extent of his crimes was not known then and today is believed to have killed well over 200.

As for the 2000-year sentences (even Hitler was more modest with a 1000-year Reich), Dr Balasingham is surely exaggerating. All those Tamil leaders across the northern political spectrum who were eliminated by the LTTE had their lives snuffed out in minutes, if not seconds.

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