Wednesday, January 25th, 2006
IPS / 25Jan2006
Analysis by Marwaan Macan-Markar
COLOMBO, Jan 25 (IPS) - A reluctance to eschew violence and a failure to grasp prevailing political currents have earned Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels a place in the world’s doghouse, rather than be accorded international legitimacy. Nothing conveys this better than a harsh statement this week, by a senior U.S. government official about where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the rebels are formally known, stand in the eyes of the world’s sole superpower.
”We hope that the LTTE will understand that they will have no relationship with my government and indeed no effective relationship with any country in this world as long as it seeks to redress its own grievances through the barrel of a gun,” Nicholas Burns, U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, told journalists in Colombo on Monday evening.
”The people of this country ought not to have to live for another 15 or 20 years with this reprehensible terrorist group keeping this country on the edge of war,” he added. ‘’Our major concern is with the LTTE. There is no moral comparison that we see between the government and the LTTE. And we think the major part of the burden for peace rests on that organization.”
Burns’ rebuke strengthens the noose placed around the neck of the Tigers by other international actors such as the European Union, India and the conservatives in Canada for the LTTE to give up its passion for violence or face more global censure.
In October last year, the LTTE received a harsh diplomatic blow when the EU imposed a travel ban on the leaders of the Tamil rebels visiting any of the 25 EU member states. A principal reason behind the ban was the LTTE’s involvement in political murders, including the assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar last August.
The Tamil rebels may have only themselves to blame for their current fate given their troubling record of human rights violations since a ceasefire agreement between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government was approved in February 2002.
Last Wednesday, the global rights defender Human Rights Watch (HRW) exposed the Tigers’ trail of death in its ‘2006 World Report’. Since the peace agreement four years ago, ”an estimated 200 Tamils have been killed for apparently political reasons. Most of the killings have been attributed to the LTTE,” declared the New York-based rights lobby.
As troubling, the report added, was the LTTE’s record of conscripting child soldiers, a habit that has not abated since the ceasefire. ‘’During the first nine months of 2005 UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) documented a total of 483 cases of child recruitment; the true total is believed to be higher, as many cases are never reported.”
And LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakharan wounded his organisation even further when he banned Tamils in the country’s northern provinces from voting in last November’s presidential election. That disenfranchisement by force removed all doubts about the LTTE’s commitments towards human rights, democracy and political pluralism.
Little wonder that analysts here feel that the LTTE’s standing on the international political stage today is far worse than what it was soon after the February 2004 ceasefire, which put a temporary halt on a two decade-long separatist struggle that had killed over 60,000 people.
‘’The LTTE is more condemned now internationally and that should hurt, since gaining international legitimacy was a very important reason for them to pursue peace,” says Ketheshweran Loganathan, a leading peace and conflict analyst at the Centre for Policy Analysis, a Colombo-based think tank. ‘’The LTTE has regarded international opinion as more important than local and national opinion of the Tamils.”
The assassination of Kadirgamar and the enforced boycott to prevent Tamil civilians from voting at the November presidential elections are key reasons for this sea change, he explained during an interview. ‘’These two actions have seriously eroded the LTTE’s quest for international legitimacy.”
But the current language of condemnation the Tigers face has echoes in the past. In November 2002, for instance, three countries that the LTTE had been courting for support — the United States, Britain and India — warned the Tigers that sympathy for their cause will not be forthcoming as long as they stick to ‘’terrorism and violence” to achieve their political goals.
What is more, Britain’s secretary of state for international development who participated in a donors’ conference that was held November, in Norway, snubbed the Tigers by refusing to address or acknowledge the LTTE representatives.
Then in April 2003, the U.S. government refused to invite an LTTE representative for the international donors meeting it hosted to attract aid to rebuild this war-ravaged South Asian island. Washington’s reason: the LTTE was on its list of foreign terrorist organisation, a status that would remain until the Tigers renounced resort to violence.
Adding weight to the international consensus against the LTTE’s reluctance to reform are Tamil voices from Sri Lanka. Most significant among them is V. Anandasangaree, president of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), the very political organisation that led the crusade for a separate Tamil state in the early 1970s and the one that helped give birth to the Tamil Tiger militancy.
”The time has now come to liberate the suffering Tamils from their so- called liberators,” Anandasangaree wrote recently in a letter to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. ‘’You will be doing a great service to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka who are living in total subjugation in areas under the control of the LTTE.”
http://www.lankalibrary.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=1518&sid=773fea8ef570d07a252942642a669160
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Thursday, January 19th, 2006
Daily News, 19-01-2006
Further to my letter dated April 4, 2005 and December 22, 2005 I once again appeal to you to intervene and help the Sri Lankans to solve their problem, solution to which although very much near now than ever before, is getting dragged on unnecessarily and unjustifiably.
What the Sri Lankan Tamils need today is liberation from the LTTE, the so-called liberators of the Tamils. It is very unfortunate that some leaders of Tamil Nadu without understanding the real problem fully and with hardly any knowledge of the ground situation in the North and the East of Sri Lanka, is trying to hold the Indian Government to ransom with its numerical strength in Parliament.
The Tamil Nadu Members of Parliament who have joined the alliance should stop their veiled threats to the Government. They should study the situation and either help to find a solution or leave the matter entirely in the hands of the Central Government to help the Sri Lankans to find a solution for their problem.
All efforts taken by the leaders of Tamil Nadu and New Delhi to solve the ethnic problem proved futile due to the irresponsible act of the LTTE leadership which made its first blunder by assassinating the ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu.
This incident alone made the Indians to withdraw all support they gave to solve our problem. Killing of members of various Tamil armed groups and their leaders like TELO’s Sri Sabaratnam, PLOTE’s Uma Maheswaran and EPRLF’s Pathma Naba and moderate Tamil leaders like A. Amirthalingam, V. Yogeswaren, A. Thangathurai, Dr. Neelan Thiruchelvam, Mayoress of Jaffna Mrs. Sarojini Yogeswaran, Mayor P. Sivapalan and Pon Mathimugarajah, secretary of the All India Anna DMK and several others made Tamil Nadu to give up all their interest in the Sri Lankan ethnic problem.
What puzzles me is as to why Tamil Nadu leaders are trying to reactivate the LTTE in Tamil Nadu. The recent visit of some Tamil Nadu leaders to Thailand to meet some LTTE leaders is distressing and creates a lot of suspicion.
I know the serious consequences that I will have to face due to my stand in this issue. I assure you that I am not acting as a stooge of anybody - neither as a paid agent nor acting under anybody’s threat. I have a sacred duty to speak on behalf of our people until I breathe my last.
In my appeal dated October 8, 2005 to Dr. Kalaignar M. Karunanithy, under the caption ‘The pathetic plight of the Tamils’ I wrote:
“In the interest of the Tamils of Sri Lanka the leaders of Tamil Nadu should forget all their political differences and get together to find a solution to their ethnic problem. I have had discussions with a number of Sinhalese leaders and leaders of political parties, most of whom are agreeable to accept a solution based on the Indian pattern of devolution. I am confident that there will be hardly any opposition to this proposal.
We Tamils in Sri Lanka cannot expect any more than that, since we know the Indian attitude towards the creation of a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka. Successive Governments of India had clearly spelt out that they cannot support separation. The Tamils of Sri Lanka cannot confront India on this issue.
You will be doing a great service to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka who are living in total subjugation in areas under the control of the LTTE. I am confident that you have the capacity to convince leaders like Vaiko and Mr. Nedumaran of the need for an early solution based on the Indian model.
It will be acceptable to a larger section of the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims as well. Having convinced the leaders of Tamil Nadu, you should take up this issue with New Delhi and through New Delhi with the Sri Lankan Government. Your facilitation for talks on this basis will certainly bear fruit and will also be welcomed by the international community. It will not be rejected by anybody. The leaders of Tamil Nadu too should feel glad to play a role in finding a solution to a long standing problem.”
In the same appeal I briefed him of the ground situation prevailing in the North and the East of Sri Lanka as follows:
“What I state in this letter may not be surprising to you but it will be shocking to many who do not know what is happening in the areas under the control of the LTTE. What is stated here is all true and forms only a small fraction of the activities of the LTTE in the Tamil areas. The LTTE under threat had succeeded in controlling majority of the Tamil media both print and electronic in Europe and Canada.
Whoever dares to start one independently, such people too are brought under their control either by offer of financial assistance or by intimidation. The LTTE expects everyone to publicly glorify them. In Sri Lanka except the government media all the others are either pro LTTE or dare not write or say one word against them.
The Tamils in the North and the East have lost all the rights they enjoy before the Tamil armed groups started their struggle. They live under the subjugation of the LTTE with no guts to protest against any action of theirs and are weeping in silence. The irony is that the Tamils living in Sinhalese dominated areas enjoy all democratic rights.
The area controlled by the LTTE is described as Iron Curtain area into which no one has access, including the Norwegian facilitators. Recruitment of children as child soldiers, abductions, extortions and killings go on unabated.
There are detention and torture camps in their areas. People are heavily taxed on so many items. Those who come from abroad to see their kith and kin are compelled to pay at the rate of one pound per day for the number of days such persons lived in a foreign country.
Hardly one day passes without one or two persons getting killed by the LTTE. Most of such victims are those who had left their movements long ago, married and having children. Men are killed right in front of their wives and children.
Last week a Brahmin youth who conducts pooja in a temple in Jaffna was shot and killed by two LTTE girls. He leaves behind his wife and twins just one month old. This type of killings was never heard of in Jaffna. The Tamils had a culture of which we were proud of. The Hindu temples will have to give the LTTE a share of the offerings made by the devotees. Elderly people are compelled to take part in demonstrations, processions and also to take military training.
All what are stated here although appear to be unbelievable they are all true. Sri Lankan Tamils now expect the leaders of Tamil Nadu to come to their rescue. The time has now come to liberate the suffering Tamils from their so called liberators. The Tamils are so unfortunate that all 22 elected Members of Parliament who act as their proxies, have no say in any of these matters as they have become LTTE’s puppets.
The LTTE has agreed to give up their demand for separation under the Oslo Agreement. Two main political parties the UNP and the SLFP are agreeable for a federal solution in a United Sri Lanka. The left parties are all agreeable to this proposal. The JVP too had declared that if the LTTE gives up its demand for separation, they will be prepared to agree for a solution. The JHU party also can be persuaded to accept this.
What is now required is a senior person of your calibre to coordinate to achieve what had been hitherto considered as something impossible. The involvement of the leftist parties based in Chennai and New Delhi will make matters easy for you.”
I hope everybody including the Tamil Nadu leaders will agree that conscription of children as child soldiers, abduction, extortion, torture, killings of political rivals and illegal taxation are all opposed to the Indian democracy and therefore should be condemned.
A similar letter was sent on the same day to the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Dr. Selvi Jeyalalitha Jeyaraman. I also requested Vaiko to have a frank discussion on this matter with the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse during his visit to New Delhi.
I appeal to you to seek the cooperation of all political parties both in Sri Lanka and India to solve the problem based on the Indian model as the minimum. Also please let all of them know that there is no way other than this to solve the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka.
http://www.srilanka-botschaft.de/NEWSupdates_neu/pp/pp_anandasangaree060119E.htm
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