The United States is finally paying attention to the massive humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka.

The civil war that has raged for a quarter-century and has claimed more than 70,000 lives in this South Asian island country may be entering its death throes. But the final stage of this bloody, vicious conflict is claiming a massive toll.

Both the sides in the war have again and again displayed a callous disregard for human lives and suffering.

The Tamil Tiger rebels—which claim to represent the interests of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority—are among the most dreaded terrorist organizations in the world. They have perfected the art of suicide bombings (successfully killing a Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, in 1993), and Al Qaeda is said to have studied their methods.

But successive Sri Lankan governments are also to blame for the war and the current catastrophe. Sri Lankan leaders practiced from the onset of independence in 1948 the most cynical brand of politics, favoring the Sinhalese Buddhist majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. The current regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is even more hardline, and has decided to fight the war to the ultimate end to drive the rebels out of their base in Northern Sri Lanka, regardless of the consequences.

“Tens of thousands of civilians were trapped in a situation the International Committee of the Red Cross called ‘nothing short of catastrophic,’ ” the New York Times recently reported. “The Red Cross said in a statement that hundreds of people had been killed or wounded in the fighting. At least 4,500 have been killed since mid-January, a senior United Nations official said.”

The Obama administration has condemned the Sri Lankan government for its callous attitude toward the civilians.

“I think that the Sri Lankan government knows that the entire world is very disappointed that in its efforts to end what it sees as twenty-five years of conflict, it is causing such untold suffering,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an astonishingly frank statement.

In the past, the United States has enjoyed good relations with the Sri Lankan government. The Tamil Tigers are on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, and Washington has provided some military training and aid to Sri Lanka, downplaying in the process human rights abuses by Sri Lankan security forces. But in recent months, as the contours of the human disaster caused by the government’s final offensive have become clearer, U.S. criticism has grown louder, along with human rights groups and many others in the international community.

Certainly, the Tamil Tigers bear a good share of the responsibility, too. They have been holding many civilians hostage to use them as human shields. U.N. appeals to the government to allow aid to the trapped civilians have been coupled with pleas to the rebels to lay down their arms (who are aiming for a cease-fire instead). So far, neither side has listened.

The real tragedy here is that even with the cessation of conventional hostilities, the violence will probably not end. The Tigers will reconfigure themselves and retreat to jungles to compensate for their loss of territory.

In a superb recent cover package in Himal magazine, the one publication that covers South Asia as a region, various analysts conclude that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers will be meaningless unless the government takes concrete steps to tackle the alienation and suffering of the Tamil minority.

“Today, most reasonable people in Sri Lanka would agree that the Tigers and the war with them arose as a consequence of a long-unresolved ethnic conflict,” writes activist and intellectual Jehan Perera. “As such, the Tigers are clearly but a symptom of a deeper problem. … Eliminating the Tigers will not terminate the ethnic conflict.”

But the rule of President Rajapaksa and his coterie (which includes two of his brothers!) has been thuggish and intolerant, and it is too much to expect him to be charitable in victory. January alone saw the ransacking of an MTV station and the assassination of a top editor, Lasantha Wickrematunga, whom the president had earlier called a “terrorist journalist.” Indeed, the situation for independent-minded media in the country is so precarious that a contributor to Himal, writing about human rights in Sri Lanka, preferred to remain anonymous.

The agony isn’t over for the people of this beautiful island nation.