Two decades of bloodshed between Sri Lankan security forces and Tamil rebels fighting for a separate homeland ended with a ceasefire in 2002, but a surge of violence has raised fears the island could be sliding back into war.

About 64,000 people were killed during the conflict. Another 800,000 were displaced and 200,000 fled to southern India.

The violence is rooted in ethnic divisions between the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the mainly Hindu Tamil minority, who say they have suffered decades of discrimination at the hands of the politically and economically dominant Sinhalese.

The growth of Sinhalese nationalism in the decades after Sri Lanka's independence from Britain in 1948 alienated many Tamils, eventually spurring calls for a separate homeland or "Eelam" in the north and east of the country.

The biggest of the rebel groups to emerge was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), founded in 1976.

War broke out in 1983 when the Tigers ambushed and killed an army patrol, sparking anti-Tamil riots. Hundreds of Tamils were killed and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes.

The conflict saw massacres, abductions and torture by both sides and thousands of child soldiers were recruited by the rebels. About 1 million landmines were planted by both sides.

India tried to intervene but ended up regretting it. In 1987 the Sri Lankan and Indian governments signed a pact giving limited autonomy to Tamil majority areas in the north and east. India sent peacekeepers to guarantee the agreement and disarm the rebels.

But widespread opposition to their presence and fighting with the Tigers led India to pull the last of its troops out in 1990. A year later, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a woman suicide bomber. The Tigers were blamed but denied involvement.

The rebels were also blamed for the assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

Peace talks opened in 1994 after President Chandrika Kumaratunga came to power, but they collapsed shortly afterwards.

The late 1990s was marked by aerial bombings, suicide bombings, the killing of both Sinhala and Tamil civilians, attacks on economic targets and face to face battles between government and rebel forces.

Tamil bombers targeted Sri Lanka's financial institutions, its holiest Buddhist site, the international airport and politicians. Kumaratunga narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in 1999, losing an eye.

Ceasefire

The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the election of a new Sri Lankan prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, provided the impetus for peace talks.

The Tigers were keen to shed the "terrorist" label given to them by members of the international community.

A ceasefire was agreed in 2002 and the rebels dropped their demand for an independent state, settling for regional autonomy. But they withdrew from Norwegian-brokered peace talks a year later, saying not enough was being done to improve conditions for Tamils.

The government currently controls the Jaffna peninsula at the far northern tip of the island. Below that, the Tigers run a de facto state in large chunks of the north and east. They have their own flag, police, banks, courts and defence units including a naval wing, the Sea Tigers, and are believed to have smuggled up to four light aircraft into the country in pieces.

Nearly four years after the peace deal many Sri Lankans are still waiting to go home.

Some of the 1 million forced to flee during the war have moved repeatedly. At the height of the fighting for Jaffna in 1995, just 400 of the original population of 140,000 remained in the city.

By late 2003 many internally displaced people (IDPs) had returned to their often destroyed towns and villages. However, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 uprooted another million Sri Lankans, compounding the crisis.

A deal proposed by Kumaratunga to share $3 billion of international tsunami aid with the Tigers is in limbo after the supreme court ruled it unconstitutional.

As of Sept 2005, nearly 800,000 people remained displaced, 457,576 from the tsunami and 341,175 from the conflict, according to the UNHCR. Another 124,800 Sri Lankan refugees are abroad, 68,000 of them in camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

For the past year aid agencies have mainly focussed efforts on tsunami relief. The majority of survivors who were in tents have now been offered transitional shelters while they wait for permanent homes to be built - a task that will take several years. Many other survivors are living with host families.

The worst off are the tens of thousands of conflict IDPs still living in what are known as welfare centres. Some of these are very basic concrete barrack-style communal shelters housing 200 people and divided internally with corrugated iron. Some people have been in welfare centres for 10 years.

The war also laid waste large tracts of agricultural land, which has made malnutrition a problem. At the time of the ceasefire, more than a quarter of children in the north and east were stunted and about half of under-fives were underweight, twice the national rate.

The World Food Programme says renewed violence is already making it more difficult to persuade truck firms to take food to conflict-hit areas and that a return to war could have more impact on malnutrition than the tsunami.

Internal divisions on both sides have stymied negotiations. After the ceasefire Kumaratunga fell out with her government over the peace process and a renegade eastern Tiger commander known as Karuna split from the rebel movement in 2004.

Clashes between the two factions have killed dozens. The Tigers say Karuna's fighters have become government-backed paramilitaries. The government denies this.

Tensions have risen since presidential elections in November 2005 won by Mahinda Rajapakse. Allied to the Marxist JVP and Buddhist JHU parties, he promised to take a hard line with the Tigers.

Both sides say they are keen on peace talks, but cannot agree a venue. The government wants them in an Asian country while the rebels want them in Norway.

A surge in violence since the end of 2005 has inflamed the situation. The government blames the rebels for mine attacks on its forces and the suspected suicide sinking of a naval boat. The Tigers deny this and accuse the military of abuses against civilians.

Most troops patrolling Jaffna say they expect war sooner or later. A Tiger commander has warned that rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is at the edge of his patience and will resort to Black Tiger suicide bombers if the ceasefire breaks down.

Aid workers say they have heard of hundreds of families who have left Jaffna fearing new fighting, while more have fled in the east. Small numbers of Sri Lankans have also begun arriving in India.