Sri Lanka may be world champions at cricket but are failures at running the human race...
I'm responsible for the Natal Newspapers Internet site, and as a result, a lot of junk mail from the outside world ends up in my electronic mailbox.
This week, I received a letter from the Citizens Committee of Yalppanam which is the Tamil name for Jaffna, the city to the north of Sri Lanka which is home base for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The letter was addressed to Nelson Mandela and was a plea on behalf of the Tamilians for Madiba to take up their demand for an independent Tamil state on the north of the island.
This is one of those interesting coincidences that seem to plague my life.
I happen to be a Tamilian. My father's father, Veloo Pillay, was born at Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin) on the southern tip of India, just a monkey's leap across from Jafna.
Veloo Pillay was a bit of a casanova as far as I can tell. He left India in the last century and hopped across to Durban where he married my grandmother and fathered 11 children by her.
But he also had illicit liaisons around this country leaving a trail of offspring. His green eyes -- unusual in an Indian -- supposedly made him irresistible to the uneducated impressionable women of my grandmother's generation.
One of those illegitimate offspring, an uncle whom I was quite fond off, visited the Pillay ancestral homestead in Kanyakumari and discovered that Veloo Pillay had left quite a large family behind to be never heard of again.
The leader of the Liberation Tigers is named Veloo Pillay Prabakaran. By all accounts, he too inspires intense devotion in women who have no hesitation in strapping bombs to their bodies and blowing themselves and their children and anyone else in the vicinity to smithereens.
Charming...
Tamils are a minority in Sri Lanka, but then again, the same holds true for Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa or any other country where Tamils have gathered in large numbers, including India.
So what's so different about what's happening to Tamils in Sri Lanka?
Nothing really. The bilateral genocide taking place in Sri Lanka is no different from that being played out in Bosnia, Rwanda, and KwaZulu Natal.
Ceylon became independent in 1948. The first (socialist) government promptly disenfranchised 800 000 Tamil plantation workers in the hill country.
In 1956, Sinhalese nationalists pushed a "Sinhala Only" law through parliament making Sinhalese the national language and effectively reserving the best jobs and most powerful positions for the Sinhalese.
The 1972 constitution made Buddhism the state's religion, and Tamil academics were eased out of their jobs. Civil unrest led to a state of emergency in Tamil areas, which led to clashes between Tamil youths and Sinhalese security forces. In 1977, there were some attempts at reforms, but violence and reprisals between the security forces and Tamil youths were already out of control.
Sound familiar?
In the case of the followers of the Tamil Tigers, they've been suckered into a level of fanaticism that has only been matched by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana and by those idiots who believe that assassinating Salman Rushdie will guarantee a place in heaven.
In the past week, Tiger guerrillas attacked Colombo harbour with explosive-laden barges while frogmen swam into the port to do something similar. At least one part of their mission succeeded. They're all dead. Shot to hell by Sri Lankan forces. That's what suicide squads are for.
About 80 people were killed and 1000 injured when the Tigers used this method to blow up Colombo's Central Bank in January. This was how they assasinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and former Sri Lankan prime minister Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.
And in their own interpretation of the time-honoured philosophy of "women and children first", guess who gets to go to the front lines?
There's nothing clean about the Sri Lankan government's role. Premadasa's death squads specialised in killing anti-government suspects and dumping their bodies in rivers. Body count: at least 30 000. And reports of atrocities perpetrated by government forces in the wake of the recapture of Jaffna continue to trickle in.
But there's something particularly distasteful about the way in which the Tigers have used their people as cannon fodder. The lack of tangible gains for all that loss of life is even more depressing.
There's still a bit of black humour that creeps through. If the Tigers do eventually realise their dream of an independent Tamil nation, which country in their right mind would welcome an ambassador willing to blow himself up?