For weeks, the talk at the UN Security Council has been about Lebanon, where civilians are overwhelmingly the victims of fighting between the Israeli military and Hezbollah guerillas. Rarely mentioned, though, is the equally long-running conflict between Sri Lanka's government and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, which has claimed the lives of more than 460 civilians among at least 800 people killed so far this year.
There is nothing unusual about the near-silence: during the three decades that minority Tamils have been pushing for a northern homeland in Sri Lanka, more than 60,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless. Yet the council has not even been moved to consider a resolution of concern, let alone condemnation or an effort to bring the sides together.
Lebanon, meanwhile, has taken up months of debate over that time. As the wording is concluded on yet another resolution, there seems to be agreement among council members of the need for a ceasefire there and additional peacekeepers to those in place since 1978.
The security council is, rightly, paying close attention to the crisis in Lebanon. But at the same time, it should also be turning its focus to Sri Lanka's conflict, which is equally deserving of action. Peace efforts have, after all, faltered. A ceasefire brokered by Norway in 2002 is a truce in name only. Initial mediation efforts in Thailand achieved hope, but subsequent talks collapsed. The latest discussions were in June. Peace envoys from Norway and Japan have recently met both sides, although they have received no assurances and have been criticised for showing perceived favouritism to one or the other rival.
There have been assassinations of senior figures from the military, police and Tamil leadership. Most disturbingly, though, has been the civilian toll among the island's ethnic Sinhalese majority and minority Tamil and Muslim communities. The incidents have included a massacre in a church, bombing of a navy ship, air force bombardment of villages and, worryingly, the murder at the weekend of 15 Tamil workers with a French aid agency. These are crimes deserving of the same international concern and condemnation as that being expressed about attacks on civilians in Israel and Lebanon.
Sri Lanka's government has long rejected the idea of peacekeepers, contending that the struggle is an internal affair. The rebels, branded a terrorist group by the US and European Union, reject mediation without a third party.