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2 Sri Lanka's Tigers in
crisis By G H Peiris
In the past few weeks there have been many
media reports that point to the prevalence of
confusion and disarray among the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the face of heavy losses
inflicted by the armed forces of the government of
Sri Lanka.
Apart from many references to
the injury sustained by the LTTE leader Velupillai
Prabhakaran in the course of an aerial bombardment
in November 2007, there was some speculation that
he may even have died. (Claims of Prabhakaran's
death may be set to rest after Prabhakaran's
"public appearance" at the funeral of the pro-LTTE
Tamil National Alliance member of parliament, P
Sivanesan, in the rebel-held Wanni area, of which
the
LTTE released photographs on March 9).
The
details that embellish these reports, though
ignored by spokesmen for the LTTE, have been
refuted with disdain by several pro-LTTE writers.
Given the questionable credibility of "news"
originating from either side of the great divide,
it has seldom been possible to sort out the truth
from fiction in the stories on the Sri Lankan
conflict.
What can, consequently, be
attempted is to contextualize the recent surge of
media attention on turbulence in the shrinking
Tiger habitat of the "Vanni" in northern Sri
Lanka, without speculating on whether its leader
is dead or dying or hibernating prior to a deadly
leap at the jugular. Then, the information must be
synthesized into the situation that prevails at
present, and taken from sources uncontaminated by
propaganda.
In the checkered history of
the LTTE, spanning the past three decades during
which Prabhakaran has held sway as its supreme
leader, there have been several spells during
which its insurrectionary capacity suffered
serious setbacks.
Prominent among such
recessions were: the brief eclipse of the LTTE in
the aftermath of the Indian peacekeeping
intervention in 1987; the worldwide anti-Tiger
sentiment evoked by the assassination of former
Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991; the
strategic losses stemming from its expulsion by
the Sri Lankan armed forces from the Jaffna
peninsula in 1995; the constraining effects on its
international operations generated by the global
tide of hostility towards terrorism following the
al-Qaeda attack on the United States in 2001; and,
more far-reaching in impact than any other, the
internal revolt led by "Colonel Karuna" in March
2004.
The impression conveyed by the
experiences in each of these episodes, however, is
that the LTTE possessed the inner resilience and
the external support required for recovery, if not
entirely unscathed, at least with sufficient
strength to persist with its campaign of warfare
and terror. By contrast, the losses suffered in
the more recent past appear to constitute an
irreversible and aggravating trend featured by
indications that could well portend a final
collapse.
Despite the weakening of its
grip on the eastern lowlands that resulted from
the calamitous breakaway of the Karuna group, the
LTTE leadership persisted with unswerving
commitment to its goal of establishing a sovereign
Tamil nation-state - Eelam - encompassing the
entire northeast of Sri Lanka, the pledges of the
ceasefire agreement of February 2000
notwithstanding.
As in earlier times, its
efforts were directed mainly at enhancement of
military strength, expanding the territory under
its control in the Northern and Eastern provinces
and eliminating its rivals in that part of the
country, mobilizing international support for its
cause, and destabilizing the government of Sri
Lanka through carefully regulated intimidation and
terror. Instigating a Sinhalese backlash of
violence against the Tamils living outside the
northeast - a re-enactment of 1983 - also remained
a prime objective as was underscored by the
assassination of Sri Lanka's charismatic foreign
minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, a provocative
outrage committed in the final days of Chandrika
Kumaratunga's presidential tenure.
Colombo-based politics of the country
during this period remained in a state of flux,
featured by both frequent changes of the power
configuration as well as intense electoral
rivalry. Given the fact that the release of the
foreign aid pledged by the donors remained
conditional on progress being made towards a
negotiated settlement of the conflict, government
policy had to accommodate two mutually conflicting
needs - that of strengthening security and defense
in the face of the mounting Tiger threat, and
persistence with credible peace overtures to the
LTTE. The latter encountered the almost
insurmountable problem of fierce inter-party
dissension on what could be offered to the Tigers
without endangering the sovereignty and
territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.
On the
eve of the presidential election of November 2005,
Prabhakaran enforced a boycott of the polls in the
north and parts of the eastern lowlands where
Ranil Wickremasinghe, former prime minister and a
frontrunner of the presidential stakes, would have
attracted substantially more support than his
rival, Mahinda Rajapakse. This decision appears,
in retrospect, to have been a monumental blunder
that marks the onset of a drastic change in the
fortunes of Prabhakaran's Eelam campaign. The
boycott decision was evidently based on the
premise that Wickremasinghe, hailed
internationally as the "peace candidate", would,
with his commitment to power-sharing under a
federal system of government, place in serious
jeopardy the case for a secessionist campaign.
Prabhakaran's expectation was that
Rajapakse, backed as he was by electoral allies
vehemently opposed to a political compromise
involving devolution of power to the northeast,
would actually attempt to implement his campaign
pledges to jettison the ceasefire agreement, to
evict the "White Tigers" (Norwegians) from their
role as facilitators of peace negotiations, and to
discard the notion of the LTTE being the sole
representative of the Tamils. Such a hawkish
approach, the LTTE leadership believed, would pave
the way for a resumption of military
confrontations in earnest, backed by vastly
enhanced international sympathy and support for
the rebels' cause.
Having contributed to
Rajapakse's victory at the election, the LTTE
leaders began to test the resolve of the new
president. Thus, while articulating with greater
vehemence than ever before their earlier demands
for government intervention in disarming the
Karuna group, and for constitutional power over
the northeast pending a final resolution of the
conflict, they launched a series of guerrilla
attacks and acts of terrorism which, in April
2006, reached the heart of Colombo's defense
establishment in the near-successful attempt to
assassinate the Commander of the Sri Lanka Army,
Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka.
The
sharply escalating level of violence did not evoke
a retaliatory response from the government, at
least for some time. Rajapakse persisted with his
pursuit of peace, risking, in the process, the
support of some of his parliamentary allies. He
established an "All-Party Representative
Committee" tasked with formulating constitutional
reforms based on the axiom of devolution. He
backed the Norwegian efforts at facilitating fresh
peace negotiations, expressing a solemn hope that
the brief meeting between delegates of the
government and the LTTE, staged at Geneva in
February 2006, would mark the resumption of a
continuing dialogue with the Tiger leadership.
Rajapakse was also reported to have made a
"secret" attempt to establish direct contact with
the LTTE high command, knowing full well that the
attempt would not be concealed from Sri Lanka's
friends abroad. The intensifying LTTE violence,
however, could not be ignored indefinitely.
From the commencement of Rajapakse's
presidency up to the bomb attack on the army
commander (approximately 150 days later), 150
armed services personnel, in addition to about 150
civilians, had been killed by the LTTE. The
animosity between the LTTE and the security forces
had reached such a fever pitch, and the
nationalists' pressure for some retaliation had
become so intense, that the president was
eventually compelled to initiate a series of air
strikes on identified LTTE bases.
Nevertheless, as the president had
surmised, the continuing belligerence of the LTTE,
on the one hand, and the show of restraint by the
government, on the other, did resonate in the
policy stances, vis-a-vis Sri Lanka, of several
Western governments, both in a substantially
enhanced flow of aid as well as in the imposition
of sanctions on the LTTE, in member-states of the
EU and in Canada in May-June 2006.
The
repercussions of Prabhakaran's capricious gamble
at the presidential polls soon instilled into his
strategy a sense of desperation. This found
expression in a series of "Sea Tiger"
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