China and the Sri Lankan civil war

a href="http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005844.html" This article on Sepia Mutiny /a looks at Robert Kaplan's idea that the Sri Lankan government was able to win their civil war against the Tamil Tigers because of Chinese help. I am not convinced by this - the Sri Lankan Army apparently bought T-56 rifles from China, but I am sure that they could have got other weapons elsewhere at not much more of a price if they had wanted. Also, it says that China gave Sri Lanka diplomatic cover at the UN. I am not sure this is the sole reason why the Sri Lankan government had support from other member-states of the UN. After all, the Tigers burned their bridges with Congress after they assassinated Rajiv Gandhi. As such, the Congress-led government in India is likely to have been sympathetic to the Sri Lankan government as well.br /br /Incidentally, in my article a href="http://vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-on-bulgarian-election-results.html" below on the Bulgarian election results /a I commented that the existence of a PR system in the election stopped the result being polarised between ethnic Bulgarian-majority seats won by the GERB and Turkish or Pomak-majority seats won by the MRF. The a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_parliamentary_election,_1977" Sri Lankan elections of 1977 /a, the last ones held before the civil war and the last ones held by first-past-the-post illustrate this danger. As can be seen, the UNP won virtually all Sinhala-majority seats and the TULF won virtually all Tamil-majority seats - thus contributing to sharp ethnic and political polarisation.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/38622711-7077610855651491647?l=vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com'//div

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