SRI LANKA: World’s Patience with Tamil Tigers Ebbs

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Marwaan Macan-Markar

COLOMBO, Jan 24 2006 (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.”