Sri Lanka Bearing Gifts

After a week of fighting, Sri Lankan troops had battled their way up Jaffna Peninsula, ousting ethnic Tamil separatists from a number of strongholds in the northern tip of the island nation. The cost was high: as many as 200 civilians believed dead and thousands more left without food. But, said a high-ranking official in Colombo, the capital, "we were winning."

Suddenly, in an unambiguous show of support for the rebels, the Indian government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, which up until then had been trying to mediate the civil war, dispatched 19 fishing boats laden with food and medical supplies across the Palk Strait to the battle zone. Condemning the shipment as interference in its internal affairs, Sri Lanka sent naval vessels to interdict the convoy, which was turned back after a tense confrontation in mid-strait.

Undeterred, Gandhi ordered five of the Indian air force's Soviet-built An- 32 transports, escorted by four French-built Mirage-2000 fighter jets, into Sri Lankan airspace to drop 25 tons of "humanitarian relief supplies" onto Jaffna. Colombo immediately charged that the airlift was a "naked violation of Sri Lanka's sovereignty and independence." India insisted that the move was needed to meet the "continuing deterioration" of Sri Lanka's Tamils, a condition Colombo denies.

India's decision to intervene so visibly in the civil war apparently slowed the Sri Lankan government's military campaign. Though Tamils make up only 18% of the island's 16 million people, the separatist guerrillas have found support and safe haven among the 50 million Tamils living across the strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Last week's airlift seemed to indicate that Gandhi was giving in to pressure from Indian Tamils to intervene more actively in Sri Lanka. Said an official in Colombo: "Whatever India may say about humanitarian aid, what they actually wanted was a halt to the offensive. They have done that."

Unable to provide the swift military victory demanded by the island's Buddhist Sinhalese majority, Sri Lankan President Junius Jayewardene may now try to appease that constituency by continuing to stand up to India, though he will surely try to avoid provoking a military response that would topple him from power. He also faces the problem of preventing Sinhalese anger from erupting into bloody race riots, such as those in which an estimated 1,000 Tamils were massacred in 1983. "Rajiv Gandhi may have acted out of domestic compulsion," said a Sri Lankan official, "but he doesn't seem to realize that he has taken this country to the brink of disaster."