COLOMBO, Sri Lanka  The frustrated shopkeeper, a middle-aged, ethnic Tamil man, surreptitiously dug into a stack of cricket shirts and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was yet another bag that held a folded-up Tamil-language newspaper  not forbidden, he said, but certain to raise suspicions among his Sinhalese neighbors and the authorities.

“This government, no one can speak against them,” said the shopkeeper, who was too fearful to give his name. “If I talk, maybe you will not see me here tomorrow. I can disappear.”

After more than 25 years of bloodletting, the government’s war with ethnic Tamil separatists may be in its final stages in the north of the country. This week, President Mahinda Rajapaksa predicted that the war was just days from ending, and one of his senior ministers said that the military campaign was in its “mopping up” stages.

But even with the end of conventional warfare, anger and resentment are likely to linger for many Tamils in the north  anger at what they call decades of official marginalization, and resentment over what they say are discriminatory education policies and the suppression of the Tamil language by administrations dominated by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.