Sri Lanka's bitter war of terror - one that practically invented the infamy of the suicide bomber - had been showing signs of abating of late. But a bitter power struggle between Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, and a schism among the rebel Tamil tigers, now threatens to reignite the violence. Their political duel was aggravated recently when the President, wary that her prime ministerial rival was "too soft" in dealing with the rebel Tamil Tigers, sacked three ministers and took over their portfolios. Now she has dissolved parliament and set new elections for April, three years before they are due.

Having lived through the Malayan war of 1947-1960, I often wonder why Sri Lanka's war has been so much more difficult to end. On the surface, much about those two wars seem similar. In Malaya, ethnic Chinese fought British and Malay regiments and police, which is roughly comparable to the Tamils' fight against the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Like the Tamil Tigers, the Malayan Communists were also damned as terrorists, but the casualties they inflicted were small compared to the mass killings caused by both sides in Sri Lanka's war.

Back then, Malaysia's ethnic tensions produced communal riots in which both Chinese and Malays were killed. These, however, were never allowed to degenerate into the outright communal slaughter that the war in Sri Lanka has often produced.

Could Sri Lanka have learned anything from the Malayan experience? Could the Malayan military strategy to contain the rebellion have been imported? British experts from the Malayan emergency tried to help the Americans in Vietnam - obviously without success. Of course, one reason for that failure is that the South Vietnamese were not different enough from the North Vietnamese for the Malayan formula of identifying and isolating rebel communities by race to work. But Sri Lanka's war, with its ethnic origins, is closer to the Malayan experience and so this strategy could, perhaps, have been tested.

A second similarity comes from the fact that the British were the imperial power in both countries. At independence, national leaders in both countries inherited similar sets of laws and administrative practices. Indeed, at the time Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) achieved independence, it was far more committed to democracy and the common-law legal system than Malaya.

So why did multi-communal politics ultimately work in Malaya, and then in both Malaysia and Singapore, and fail so badly in Ceylon? One key reason must be the historical experience of the Sinhalese. For two thousand years, they had to defend themselves against attacks by expansionist Tamil kingdoms from the Indian mainland. As I traveled around the island admiring its ancient capitals, notably the ones sacked by Tamil kings, and Buddhist shrines set up to counter the impact of Hinduism, I began to understand the traumas endured by the Sinhalese. Sadly, the Tamils now living in the Jaffna districts in the northern and eastern parts of the island are probably descended from Tamils who were also victims of the same external attacks.

Another factor arose from the fact that Tamils, on the whole, had been open to a succession of Portuguese, Dutch, and British administrations from the 16th century onwards, while most Sinhalese lived under their own king in the Kandyan kingdom until the 19th century. In particular, the Buddhist priests, who are the guardians of the faith and have wielded much influence in Sri Lanka politics since the mid-1950's, were the least touched by foreign rule. They are determined to limit Hindu Tamil power in Sri Lankan affairs and encourage the country's leaders to make few concessions to Tamil autonomy.

Furthermore, the degree of rigidity in inter-ethnic negotiations since the rise to power of the Bandaranaike family (of which the current President is a member) was accompanied by a series of ideological struggles among Sinhalese politicians, not least those led by various socialist and communist parties. This ongoing disunity among the Sinhalese contributed to making Sri Lanka's governments much more fragile than those that succeeded the British in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

What was decisively different between Ceylon and Malaya, however, is found in the fact that, in Ceylon, both major communities consider themselves to be natives, having both lived on the land they hold for over twenty centuries.

In contrast, the Malay Peninsula, including the island of Singapore, was the land of the Malays (Tanah Melayu) before the first Chinese and Indian immigrants came and settled there. The British, who did not depose the Malay rulers as they did the Singhalese king in Kandy, made sure that the native position of the Malays was constitutionally secure from the start.

Once the Chinese recognized their place as newcomers, they had to accept that becoming full nationals of the new nation state was a status that needed to be earned. Although most Chinese in Malaysia now feel that they deserve the full rights of citizenship, they have not insisted on absolute equality. In any case, they never claim to be indigenous to any particular locale, not even in Singapore, where ethnic Chinese make up three-quarters of the population.

Sri Lanka's tragedy reminds us how many things can go wrong when old Asian polities seek to establish modern nation states. It becomes even more difficult when the complex historical baggage calls for sensitivity and tolerance while the protagonists are determined to see every concession as surrender.