Page 2 of 2 Sri Lanka's Tigers in
crisis By G H Peiris
attacks (including
an act of piracy) that evoked strictures from
several quarters including the secretary general
of the UN and the head of the Scandinavian
"Ceasefire Monitoring Mission" stationed in Sri
Lanka.
Prabhakaran retaliated by demanding
the removal of all non-Norwegian members of the
Monitoring Mission from the northeast. The tempo
of violence was increased further with a spate of
attacks on military and civilian targets in all
parts of the country. Then came the major military
showdown in the eastern lowlands that began on
July 20, 2006, in the form of a "riparian"
confrontation in the irrigation channel system of
Mavil Aru (south of Trincomalee) which compelled
the government to retaliate in
earnest, with a nod of
approval from the US. Thereafter, following a
series of bloody battles that lasted up until
mid-2007 - in the course of which the LTTE
incurred heavy losses - the rebels were finally
evicted from the entire Eastern Province.
Throughout this period of intense military
activity in the east, confrontations between the
security forces and the LTTE elsewhere in the
country took various forms. The Forward Defense
Lines (FDL) of the government-controlled areas in
the Jaffna peninsula and in the hinterland of
Mannar continued to be venues of low intensity
clashes, with occasional flare-ups.
In
localities adjacent to the FDL in Vavuniya
District, army killings of suspected insurgents
and LTTE claymore-mine attacks and ambushes of
army patrols occurred in routine fashion. The
severe maritime losses suffered by the LTTE during
these months included the sinking of 11 of its
vessels off the east coast. Most significant, as
an ingredient of the LTTE military debacle, was
the destruction caused by the constant aerial
bombardments in which Thamilchelvan, head of the
LTTE's political wing, perished on November 3,
2007, and Prabhakaran suffered injury on November
27, 2007.
These military defeats
constitute only one (albeit the key) component of
the current LTTE crisis. The mutually interacting
"external" misfortunes of the Tigers in the recent
past include the death in December 2006 of Anton
Balasingham, who had served for well over two
decades as by far the most effective international
spokesman and propagandist for the secessionist
campaign.
The impact of the loss of its
carefully nurtured image of invincibility has been
even more profound, especially on the support from
the expatriate Sri Lankan Tamil communities whose
responses to fluctuating fortunes of the LTTE have
never been devoid of elements typical of
"cheer-squad" reactions.
Recent reports
also indicate that the increasingly stringent
enforcement of anti-terrorism regulations in some
Western countries has curtailed both diaspora
funding as well as other operations of LTTE agents
and "front" outfits abroad. The crescendo of their
desperate campaign for UN "humanitarian
intervention" against the alleged proliferation of
human rights violations in Sri Lanka has achieved
a measure of success in generating external
pressures against the country's war effort, but
has had no mitigating effect on the pariah status
of the Tigers.
Foremost among the internal
causes for the present LTTE crisis is the
prevailing trend towards factional disintegration
of its leadership which, as the related evidence
suggests, could well represent the emergence
subterranean rivalries that had been in existence
all along.
It may be recalled that the
departure of Karuna caused a mini-purge in the
Tiger leadership. Thereafter, when Thamilchelvan
was killed in November 2007, certain critics
(among them, S R Balasubramaniam, Congress Party
leader in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu), cast
doubt on the "official" explanation of the death,
and pointed to the possibility of Thamilchelvan
having been killed by Prabhakaran in the same way
he had liquidated other potential rivals in the
past.
In addition, throughout recent
years, there has been the barely concealed
animosity between two of the highest-ranking Tiger
leaders - "Pottu Amman" (aka Shanmuganathan
Sivasankaran, the feared head of the Tiger
intelligence network whose spectacular "hits"
include the masterminding of the Rajiv Gandhi
assassination) and "Soosai" (aka Thillaiyampalan
Sivanesan), the charismatic "Sea Tiger" admiral.
According to an analysis of this rivalry
by the journalist D B S Jeyaraj, when Soosai (who
had been accused by Pottu Amman of connivance with
the renegade Karuna and the Indian external
intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing -
RAW)suffered serious injury in 2004 while engaged
in a speed-boat maneuver (though the injury was
officially attributed to an accident) the
widespread and lingering belief within the LTTE
that it was the consequence of an attempt by Pottu
to murder Soosai had given rise to clashes among
its rank and file which took a long time to
subside.
Factional rivalries of this type
in the Vanni and their repercussions outside the
country are likely to intensify if, indeed, the
reported weakening of Prabhakaran's grip over the
LTTE is true.
Yet another internal
dimension of the crisis is seen in the recent
resurgence of several anti-LTTE political
organizations among the Tamil community of Sri
Lanka, most of which were reconciled to a shadowy
existence in the heyday of the Tigers in the past.
Tamil critics of the LTTE have become
bolder in expressing their views than ever before.
Some among them repeatedly announced that the
"Eelam" campaign is doomed. A distinction between
the LTTE interests and those of the Tamils of Sri
Lanka is being drawn with clarity and vehemence.
There is also a publicly expressed suspicion that
the recent spate of murders of several pro-LTTE
activists operating outside the northeast
represents the work of such organizations, the
members of which rank among the innumerable
victims of LTTE terror.
As a barrier to
statutory recognition of the entire northeast as a
ethnically distinctive entity (which, of course,
constitutes the conceptual basis of the
secessionist campaign), the Supreme Court
announced on October 16, 2006, that the
then-existing amalgamation of the Northern and
Eastern provinces as a single unit of Provincial
Government (a sequel to the Indo-Lanka Accord of
1987) had all along been constitutionally ultra
vires. This is an even more insurmountable
measure than the military eviction of the LTTE
from the east.
The cumulative impact of
these complex military and political defeats on
the LTTE has been devastating, producing the most
acute crisis of the group's existence. Sustained
government operations in the north now have the
capacity to inflict progressive damage on the
rebel infrastructure and support base,
increasingly undermining any residual potential
for recovery and consolidation.
G H
Peiris, professor emeritus of the University
of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
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