By insisting on the withdrawal of the Serbian troops from the Albanian homeland as a prerequisite to settling the issue of self-government for the Albanians, NATO has demonstrated that political solutions to such conflicts can only be arrived at in the absence of an armed conflict.

This decisive action by NATO shows that the international community could well end similar conflicts by pursuing such a course of action.-direct diplomacy as opposed to the quiet diplomacy employed in such situations.

After all, most of toaday's wars are "internal wars". Most of the casualties are civilians, sometimes "caught in the cross fire", but most often victims of governments' efforts to suppress the rebellions through the use of unbridled terror.

According to the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute the overwhelming number of these "internal wars" are fought in pursuit of self-determination by smaller nations like the Albanians of Kosova within states dominated by larger nations like Serbia.

Perhaps one of the bloodiest conflicts (much bloodier than the Serbian-Albanian conflict in Yugoslavia) underway is the one between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka.

This war not only pre-dates the Kosova conflict by more than a decade but has claimed many more lives-well over 75,000.

It is a conflict where the Sinhala Government is fighting a Tamil "separatist" movement.

The parallel does not stop at that. Just like the Albanians fleeing the Serbian onslaught, over 400,000 Tamils fled into the northern hinterland when the Sinhala army occupied their major city (Jaffna) in late 1995. This fear was proved to be well founded when young Tamils who stayed back began to "disappear" in their hundreds .

In November 1997 Amnesty International concluded that over 600 Tamils had, in fact, been tortured and killed while in the Sri Lankan army's custody in Jaffna.

Many International Non Governmental Organizations over the years have insisted that the situation in Sri Lanka is genocidal and have called for the withdrawal of the Sri Lankan army from the Tamil Homeland.

In March 1997, the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, (whose patrons include Noam Chomsky and whose President is Nobel Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel) appealed to the members of UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) at its 53rd Sessions to take urgent measures to end what it called the genocidal situation in Sri Lanka.

Likewise in April 1998, 54 International NGO's with consultative status with the UNHCR referred to the increasingly genocidal dimension of the war at the 54th Session.

This joint statement by the NGOs called on the Sri Lankan Government to withdraw all its armed forces from the Tamil Homeland.

In September 1997, the Australian Human Rights Foundation, in a press release issued following the murder of a Christian Tamil priest by Sri Lankan troops, called it a war of genocide.

Unlike the Kosovo situation, the international governments and media have been indifferent to the plight of the Tamils notwithstanding that over 500,000 Tamils in the last 15 years have fled Sri Lanka and are now in the West, almost a million people are internally displaced and 95% of the civilian death toll has been that of Tamils.

The response to the latest atrocity in Sri Lanka is a good indication of this mindset. On 13 July 1998 Reuters reported of mass graves in Jaffna where it was alleged that over 400 bodies were buried.

There was hardly an outcry or a clamour by any of the Governments despite the High Commissioner of the UNHCR Ms Mary Robinson and Amnesty International expressing concern and calling for independent investigations.

The question is will the International Community having now witnessed the effectiveness of direct diplomacy, apply the same principle to end the conflict in Sri Lanka?

Or is it too much to expect?

The danger in allowing such conflicts to proceed is the exponential escalation of the violence.between 1983 and 1996 there has been an eleven fold increase in the Sri Lankan Governmnet's military expenditure.

Not surprisingly, this exponential growth in the military expenditure of the Sri Lankan Government was accompanied by a growth in the size of its armed forces.

The combined armed forces of the Sri Lankan Government which stood at 15,000 in 1983 now stands at well over 106,000. Similarly in 1983, the Tamil guerillas were an extremely small outfit.

In July 1983, it took the guerillas almost all of their cadres to mount what was then regarded as a major operation in ambushing a Sri Lankan army convoy and killing 13 Sri Lankan soldiers.

Now, fifteen years later, the Tamil rebel army is a conventional force in that it is reported to number between 10,000 and 15,000 and has shown itself capable of set piece battles.