Flying Tigers pose hard
questions By Kalinga
Seneviratne
COLOMBO - By successfully
carrying out air raids on military and economic
targets in and around the capital, separatist
rebels have demonstrated a new capacity to wage
"all-out" war in their fight to carve out a
separate state for the Tamil ethnic minority in
Sri Lanka.
But questions are being asked
as to how the fledgling Tamil Eelam Air Force
(TAF), the air wing of the militant Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has been able to
acquire planes and train pilots despite the
relatively small size of the land mass
available in the
Tamil-dominated north and east of the strife-torn
island.
By all estimates, the TAF is puny
and may consist of no more than five
propeller-driven Zlin Z-142, Czech-made planes
that seem to have been smuggled in as completely
knocked down kits and assembled locally. But given
the anti-terrorist atmosphere of the post
September 11, 2001, world, putting the TAF
together and actually carrying out bombing raids
is a feat that has startled intelligence
specialists.
This development is
particularly worrying for security experts in Sri
Lanka and neighboring India and is the closest
that a banned group has come to using aircraft to
strike against the establishment after September
11.
After the latest TAF raid on April 28,
the third since the first strike on March 26, Sri
Lankan authorities were forced to suspend night
operations at Colombo international airport. TAF
raids have also caused damage and deaths at an air
force base that shares a runway with the
international airport and destroyed an engineering
complex and ammunition dump at the Palaly military
base in Jaffna.
For its part, the LTTE -
which has for more than two decades been fighting
on behalf of minority ethnic Tamils seeking a
separate state in the north and east of the island
- has warned of more TAF air raids.
Retired Sri Lankan Air Force wing
commander C A O Direckze said that to maintain a
handful of light aircraft, the LTTE must possess
an efficient engineering facility, a limited
training facility and an improvised explosive
devices producing facility. "Utilizing light
aircraft brings in a new and very dangerous
dimension to the current hostilities," he argues.
"[But, it] does not constitute an air force,
rather an air threat," he told International Press
Service.
There is an emerging consensus
among defense and foreign-affairs experts in the
region that the formation of the TAF could not
have been possible without support from the large
Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. Ethnic Tamils, who
since the mid-1980s have been steadily emigrating
to Western countries claiming repression at home,
are known to contribute generously to the LTTE's
war chest.
"There was elation among the
Sri Lankan Tamils all over the world," observed B
Raman, an independent security specialist and
retired high-ranking Indian bureaucrat, commenting
on the air strikes carried out by TAF in Colombo
in the International Terrorism Monitor of March
27. "An added reason for this elation is stated to
be the fact that all the TAF pilots are from the
diaspora."
Raman says there are several
worrisome questions for the intelligence community
in both Sri Lanka and India. "Even professional
pilots of a state air force need regular flying
practice," he pointed out in his commentary. "You
can't just assemble or take out an aircraft from a
hideout and fly out on a bombing mission."
Other questions posed by Raman are: "Where
were the pilots doing their flying practice?" and
"How come the air force intelligence setups of Sri
Lanka as well as India missed detecting these
training flights?"
Responding to Raman in
the same publication, Prasun Sengupta, a Southeast
Asia security analyst, said that the LTTE may have
obtained the aircraft from a South African flying
club and paid for them through proxy bank accounts
in Europe and South Africa. "All aspects of
flying, training and attainment of pilot
proficiency levels were obtained from the same
South Africa-based flying club that ordered the
aircraft from the Czech Republic," he claimed.
Sengupta agrees with the view that this
type of aircraft is always delivered by its
manufacturer as knocked-down kits and could be
transported easily, disguised as car parts. "By
all accounts, the aircraft were ferried by sea
freight using forged bills of loading and false
declarations were made to the Colombo port-based
customs authorities to deliberately disguise the
nature of the consignment," he noted.
There are also questions as to how the
Tigers obtained aircraft fuel since fuel supplies
to rebel-held areas are restricted by the Sri
Lankan government. While some analysts fear that
these fuel supplies may be ferried across the Palk
Straits from the southern Indian state of Tamil
Nadu, where the state government there is known to
be sympathetic to the LTTE, others argue that the
aircraft engines may have been converted to run on
diesel fuel which is cheap and freely available in
Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, Singapore-based
international terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna has
slammed the Australian government for allowing
LTTE sympathizers resident there to raise funds
which, he claims, are used to procure aircraft,
arms, explosives and other equipment from
Australia itself.
Sri Lanka-born
Gunaratna, who heads the International Center for
Political Violence and Terrorism Research in
Singapore, that monitors terrorism groups and
their funding sources in the region, argues that
Australia may have been blind to LTTE fundraising
in Australia "because it has been more focused on
stopping Muslim extremists".
"Within the
intelligence community, now it's very
well-established that because governments turned a
blind eye to this, today there are light aircraft
the Tigers are using to mount attacks in Sri
Lanka," Gunaratna was quoted as saying in the
Daily News in Colombo.
Meanwhile, after
convening an emergency meeting last week on the
issue of the LTTE's air strikes, it was reported
in the media that the Indian government has
decided to engage the international community on
the issue of LTTE fund-raising activities,
especially to stop them acquiring more aircraft,
spare parts or fuel.
"If LTTE audacity is
not nipped in the bud the 'mosquito bite' that at
present only causes an irritation can develop into
deadly dengue fever," was how Direckze put it.
But more than LTTE audacity and the
willingness of foreign governments to look the
other way, analysts are hard-put to explain how
the TAF could fly several bombing sorties over
Colombo and return to their unknown bases safely.
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