Colombo: Sri Lanka has been invaded by Greek seafarers, Arab merchants and ambitious Asians and Europeans, all shedding blood for the island's spices, but the past three decades have been the most violent.

The British were only the last in a long line of travellers who put down roots in the island, strategically located along the spice route. But with their departure in 1948, Sri Lanka plunged into internal strife.

Many Sri Lankans blame the "divide and rule" policy of the British for the widening ethnic differences which took on a new militancy in the early 1970's and escalated into a full-scale guerrilla war after 1983.

If it had not been for the 1802 treaty of Amiens by which Britain, France, Spain and Holland carved up the colonies, Sri Lanka would have been a French colony rather than a British subject.

French seafarers were already at Sri Lanka's North Eastern port of Trincomalee when the Amiens treaty was concluded. The French got their marching orders after the treaty and the British tightened their grip.

Sri Lanka's native Sinhalese, spoken by a majority of the people, was not an official language till 1956 when the then Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike changed the rules overnight.

English was the official language under the British. With Sinhalese replacing English, many minority Tamil civil servants lost their jobs.

Many argue that the language policy of 1956 was probably the fatal mistake that fuelled ethnic tensions and made the Tamils feel alienated.

Bandaranaike tried to make amends by introducing a Bill for the "reasonable use of Tamil" but he was assassinated in 1959 before the Law could be fully implemented.

The main Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), came into being in 1972 at the time when Bandaranaike's widow, Sirimavo was Prime Minister.

What seemed to be a law and order problem turned into a full-scale guerrilla war after the anti-Tamil riot of 1983 in which an estimated 400 to 600 people, mostly Tamils, died.

Unofficial figures suggest up to 60,000 people may have been killed in the past three decades in bitter ethnic clashes, more than at any time of its history.

Another 60,000 people, mostly members of the majority Sinhalese community, were killed or disappeared during a three-year period when the government put down a Marxist uprising, which erupted in 1987.

Known for its rich stores of spices and gems, Sri Lanka has emerged as South Asia's killing fields with ethnic differences in sharp relief.

The Sinhalese trace their origins back to a North Indian prince, Vijaya, whose father banished him for disobedience.

He and 700 followers set sail and landed in Sri Lanka, according to the Mahavamsa, the 5th or 6th century AD Pali language text written by Buddhist monks, which records the island's history.

Vijaya took a native princess of the yaksha or demon tribe as his wife and fathered the Sinhalese race.

The Arabs, who controlled the old trade routes between the East and West, came to the teardrop-shaped island at the Southern tip of the Indian subcontinent in search of cinnamon and married local women.

By the 8th century AD, the Arabs were firmly entrenched as a separate community whose descendants are the Muslims of today. They constitute 7.5 per cent of the 18.66 million population and are the second largest minority after Tamils who are 12.5 per cent of the population.

Earlier in the 5th and 6th Centuries AD Tamils from neighbouring India arrived in Sri Lanka, but their visits led to wars with the kings who ruled the island's different provinces.

The "Sri Lankan Tamils" are distinct from the indentured Tamil labourers imported much later from the sub-continent by the British in the 19th Century to work on their plantations and who still sweat on tea estates.

The British left Ceylon in 1948, a year after dividing the subcontinent and granting Independence to India and Pakistan. But a legacy of ethnic conflict lives on.