War is over, but no peace

BY DARA MacNEILL

While the Sri Lankan military has achieved a 25-year-old goal in the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) this does not equate with a guarantee that the war for an independent Tamil homeland is over.
Already, lurid stories are beginning to circulate of the fate that befell the last remaining Tamil Tigers, including the senior leadership at the hands of the Sri Lankan military.
On Monday, TamilNet - a news website run by Tamil expats - reported how in the early hours of the morning, several senior LTTE members contacted supporters in Europe and asked that they inform the Red Cross that only 1,000 wounded Tamil ‘cadres’, civilians and political representatives remained in the ‘safety zone’, upon which the Sri Lankan military was advancing.
The LTTE members said there was no firing from the Tamil side. Within hours all senior Tamil leaders named in the report, were reported dead.
From the Tamil perspective, it now seems quite clear that the Sri Lankan authorities rejected any possibility of a peaceful surrender and opted instead to eliminate the senior leadership of the LTTE, both political and military.
Among those killed was the chief and main founder of the LTTE, Vellupillai Prabhakaran.
The Sri Lankan military, in their anxiety to crush the LTTE may instead have just provided another generation Tamils with a gallery of martyred heroes. At the very least it has served to deepen rather than exhaust the reservoir of bitterness and injustice that fuelled the 25 year long war. As will the estimated 7,000 Tamil civilians killed in the army offensive, not to mention the 70,000 that lost their lives overall.
Indeed, within hours of the army’s ‘victory’ there were public threats to ‘take the war’ against the Colombo authorities to the streets of Sri Lanka’s towns and cities. These threats were issued in the name of the High Security Zone Residents’ Liberation Force, a group that has previously claimed responsibility for Tamil Tiger suicde bombings.
Over the last 25 years, the LTTE has built a formidable support network, primarily among the Tamil diaspora in Europe and North America, numbering in excess of 1.5 million people. Following the 2004 Tsunami, this network bypassed official aid projects and provided considerable resources to the relief and rehabilitation work carried out directly by the LTTE.
It is highly unliklely that this support base will evaporate and the network is unlikely to wither, particularly as its chief organiser - Kumaran Pathmanathan - was given the full authority to represent the LTTE abroad, as the Sri Lankan military offensive began in January.
And given the predilection of the majority Sinhalese Sri Lankan government for authoritarianism, it is hard to envisage that there will not be a clampdown on all things Tamil, thus providing further possible fuel for renewed conflict.
Having seen its ‘military option’ bear fruit, it would seem highly unlikely that Colombo would suddenly learn the value of politics and dialogue. And the Tamils desperately need new leadership, one that does not make repeated strategic blunders and threaten to undermine the very justice of their cause.
The war in Sri Lanka may be finished, but the conflict is far from over.