Seven months after Sri Lanka’s long and bitter civil war was brought to an end by a withering government assault, the political coalition that supported the Tamil Tigers has thrown its support behind the former army chief who crushed them.
In an ironic twist to the presidential election campaign being fought on the island, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) announced yesterday that it was supporting General Sarath Fonseka in his bid to defeat President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
At a press conference in the capital, Colombo, the leader of the TNA parliamentary group, Rajavarothayam Sambanthan, said his group had decided to support Mr Fonseka’s candidacy to prevent another victory by Mr Rajapaksa, whose poor record on human rights and law and order made it vital that he be beaten. More:
In the Independent, Peter Popham on Velupillai Prabhakaran, chief of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE):
But “thambi”, “little brother” as he was known to his supporters (he was the youngest of four brothers), was taking no chances. He was not going to set foot outside the jungle for our benefit: we would have to find our way to him. And to minimise the chances of his being killed by a suicide bomb, the terrorist device he had invented and used to kill two South Asian heads of state and hundreds of other people, the security was meticulous. We were ordered to arrive in Kilinochchi, the rebel-held town closest to his hideout, a full 24 hours before the event. No indication was given of when the great man might show up. After hanging around in sticky heat for half a day, finally vans arrived to ferry us to the venue, a tin-roofed hall open to the jungle in the LTTE’s Political Academy deep in the jungle. We were obliged to leave anything that might contain a nasty surprise, including satellite dishes, computer bags and even wallets, back at base. Ears, mouths and socks had all been minutely inspected.
More hours of waiting ensued in the sticky monsoon heat of evening – then suddenly he was among us, short, tubby, looking younger than his 47 years, dressed as usual in green combat fatigues, pounding up on to the stage closely hemmed in by muscular young bodyguards, all wearing sunglasses. Someone in Mr Prabhakaran’s camp had been watching too many videos. More:
A Dark herd creeps across a grassy plain, wades a shallow lagoon and clambers to safety. Filmed from the air on April 20th, this was a scene Sri Lanka’s government had been dreaming of: the start of a mass breakout from the Tamil Tigers’ last sanctuary by, it claims, over 100,000 refugees-perhaps two-thirds of those being held hostage there. Having inspired the exodus, by breaching a sandy embankment around this “refuge”, a few kilometres of beach in north-eastern Sri Lanka, the army has encircled the surviving Tigers.
According to its private estimate, the Tigers may be reduced to 1,000 hardened fighters, plus a few thousand recently impressed refugees. The army believes Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tiger chief, and his senior henchmen are among them-as was also claimed this week by a spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the rebels are properly known, after the Eelam, or Tamil homeland, for which they have waged a 26-year war. To bag these men, the last prize of a brutal two-year offensive, the army claims to be using stealthy tactics, with “deep-penetration” commandos and snipers. It has a history of over-egging its battlefield triumphs. But the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa seems genuinely to believe that one of Asia’s oldest wars could be over within days.
Robert Mackey at the New York Times news blog, The Lede:
As Somini Sengupta reported in The Times earlier this week, despite a two-day pause in fighting, the Sri Lankan government has “rebuffed international appeals to protect civilians trapped in a war zone in its northeast.” Now some visual evidence of the damage that fighting has caused is coming to light.
Ms. Sengupta explained on Sunday why Human Rights Watch calls this small area of northern Sri Lanka “one of the most dangerous places in the world.”
An estimated 100,000 ethnic Tamils are trapped in a deadly and shrinking five-square-mile wedge of land in northeastern Sri Lanka, where the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, fighting for an ethnic homeland for 25 years, have effectively held them hostage as a civilian shield.
A video report from Channel 4 News in London on Thursday (embedded below), showing scores of civilian victims killed last week in the crossfire between Sri Lanka’s government and the rebel Tamil Tigers (officially known as t is clear that the L.T.T.E.), in a part of the country off-limits to journalists, is difficult to watch. More:
Her husband predicted the authorities would murder him. Now in hiding, she is on a mission to bring justice to Sri Lanka. Andrew Buncombe reports from Colombo in The Independent:
Sonali Samarasinghe bids farewell to her husband.
There had been previous incidents, threats and warnings scrawled in red paint. And on that very morning, when they had driven before work to the chemist’s shop, two sinister-looking men on a large black motorbike raced past their car. Lasantha Wickrematunga, a newspaper editor, and his wife, Sonali Samarasinghe, were convinced they were being tailed.
Back in their home, Mrs Wickrematunga, who is also a journalist, pleaded with her husband to stay at home. But it was a Thursday – a vital production day at her husband’s Sunday newspaper – and he had to go. “See you in the office,” she said as he left. Thirty minutes later she received a phone call telling her he had been fatally shot as he made his way to the office on the outskirts of Colombo. She rushed to the hospital and found her husband on a trolley, blood seeping from his mouth and ears. Doctors struggled to save him, but there was nothing they could do.
The Tamil Tigers are facing military defeat, but victory will be pyrrhic unless the Sinhalese rethink their supremacist attitudes. Randeep Ramesh in The Guardian:
The speech by Sri Lanka’s president claiming the extinction of the Tamil Tigers might signal the end of a war, but not of the fighting. What underlies the conflict is the idea that Sri Lanka is not a nation defined by geography, but by competing races.
The Indian Ocean island is home to a bewildering array of subnational and communal identities. There are Sinhalese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, Tamil Christians, Dutch Burghers and Tamil-speaking Muslims known as Moors.
It now looks like two ancient civilisations – Tamils and Sinhalese – are locked in a Manichean struggle. The leadership of both peoples increasingly see Sri Lanka as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. As both sides view the other as Satan, they both scorn compromise.
Driven from their northern headquarters, Sri Lanka’s Tamil rebels face defeat. From the Economist:
The long conventional war in Sri Lanka, pitting the Sinhalese-dominated government against the vicious rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who have been fighting for a separate homeland for the Tamil minority, is almost over. On Monday January 5th the army was reported to be bombarding the LTTE’s remaining scrap of territory in north-eastern Sri Lanka, after last week taking the rebel capital of Kilinochchi, which the LTTE ruled for a decade of its 25-year armed struggle.
This last battle may be bloody. On Sunday the rebels claimed to have killed 53 soldiers near Mullaitivu, the last big rebel-held town, and the alleged refuge of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s feared leader. Both sides have predicted that the rebels will continue to wage a guerrilla campaign after their last battlefield defeat. But the government hopes that by killing or capturing Mr Prabhakaran it may at least curtail the conflict. Fearing a terrorist reprisal from the Tigers-who have become perfectors of the suicide bomb-blast-it has tightened security measures in Colombo, the capital, and forced all ethnic Tamils in the city to be registered.
Sri Lanka’s military on Friday said it had seized Kilinochchi, which the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had claimed as capital of the nation they want to create for Sri Lankan Tamils.
With that, the military has struck a strategic and symbolic blow that shows it has made the most battlefield progress at any time since the war began in 1983. That has analysts asking if the ground war could soon be over.
The last time he visited Sri Lanka, it was two days after the Boxing Day tsunami had struck. Yet among the devastation, a shaky ceasefire between Tamil rebels and government forces seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. So what went wrong? Euan Ferguson returns to find an island paradise once again torn apart by conflict. From The Observer:
Hard not to laugh, for a brief second, when you’re told about Claymore landmines. I am being told of them by a helpful young Sri Lankan near a military checkpoint, who is making a fairly compelling case not to be stupid by waiting till dark and dancing off around the guns and into the jungle. But I’m quietly laughing because I have just learned that the Claymore – shaped like a fat, convex, olive-green laptop with little legs to bury in the ground – has embossed writing on the business end. What the writing says is: ‘Front towards Enemy.’
Even the arms industry, apparently, can’t help but pap-feed us with health and safety disclaimers. And one of the most effective counters to tripwires, it turns out, is Silly String, which lands on the wires in all its gaudy, giveaway colours, without detonating them. The most inhuman, anonymous, cowardly, deadly weasels of modern warfare, and they come with safety warnings, and they’re battled by streamers designed more normally for parties featuring jelly. Hard not to laugh. Briefly.
When the West complains of human rights violations, Sri Lanka may not have to listen. It’s now getting aid from China. Somini Sengupta reports from Colombo in The New York Times.
For 25 years, the dirty little war on this island in the Indian Ocean has stretched its octopus arms across the world. The ethnic Tamil diaspora has provided vital funding for separatist rebels; remittances from Sri Lankan workers abroad have propped up the economy; the government has relied on foreign assistance to battle the insurgency.
Today, a shifting world order is bearing new fruits for Sri Lanka. Most notably, China’s quiet assertion in India’s backyard has put Sri Lanka’s government in a position not only to play China off against India, but also to ignore complaints from outside Asia about human rights violations in the war.
The timing is propitious. The government jettisoned a five-year cease-fire this year, and is now banking on a military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In so doing, it has faced a barrage of criticism over human rights abuses and has lost defense aid from the United States and some other sources. And, in recent months, government officials have increasingly cozied up to countries that tend to say little to nothing on things like abductions and assaults on press freedom.
