One war down, a hundred to go

The New York Times has a longer article (click the post title for the rest) by Somini Sengupta and Seth Mydans (son of Carl) about the end of the Tamil Tigers in Ceylon:

The Sri Lankan authorities declared a final victory in their 26-year war with the Tamil Tigers on Monday, saying in a state television broadcast that the leader of the insurgents was among 250 fighters killed in a final, bloody battle for the last sliver of rebel-held territory.
The government account appeared to mean that Asia’s longest civil war, and one of the world’s most enduring insurgencies, ended in the battlefield defeat of rebels who once controlled a quarter of Sri Lanka’s territory as they pressed their campaign for an independent homeland for the country’s Tamil minority.
Acknowledging their impending defeat, and encircled by government forces, the Tamil Tigers said on Sunday that their quarter-century struggle had “reached its bitter end”. On Monday, the Sri Lankan military said it had crushed the rebels as government troops advanced into an ever-narrowing strip of land measuring no more than half a square mile in the northeast of the country.
“We have liberated the entire country by completely liberating the north from the terrorists,” Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, Sri Lanka’s army commander, said Monday, according to Reuters.

Rico says that (though he refuses to use the indigenous name for Ceylon) it's an amazing thing; these insurgencies don't normally get 'won'...