Both places have experienced long-running ethnically-based civil
wars that were recently ended by peace deals brokered by
Scandinavian governments. Both countries were also devastated by
the tsunami disaster and have since been the target of massive
international relief operations. However, while the response to
the tsunami brought the two sides together in Aceh, it seems to
have set back the peace process in Sri Lanka. I was in Sri Lanka
a few weeks after the tsunami and it was already clear that the
aid relief mechanisms had become the subject of political
wrangling. The government complained that front organisations
for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had hijacked the
distribution of relief in Tamil areas, while Tamils countered
that they were being discriminated against in the allocation of
official relief. The peace deal had been reached in Oslo two
years beforehand and an international Sri Lanka Monitoring
Mission (SLMM) had already been deployed before the tsunami
struck. Unfortunately, the