By Satya@gt
Published: May 20, 2007
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Terrorists or Freedom fighters, however one may call the LTTE. LTTE and India have been friends, enemies, indifferent neighbors.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a Tamil group in Sri Lanka fighting for an independent homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka which won its freedom from Britain in 1948 is multicultural, multiethnic country, consisting of minority Tamils and majority Sinhalese. It has been troubled with ethnic strife since its birth.

The Tamil minorities, who have enjoyed prosperity under the British, were subjected to oppression and racial discrimination after Sri Lanka’s independence. Their lands taken away from them, discriminated at work, stripped of their constitutional rights, slaughtered like helpless lambs, and it was during this genocide that LTTE was born as a violent movement to win self-determination through bullet. LTTE has been fighting the Sri Lankan government for a separate Eelam (homeland) since its birth in 1975. It is lead by the courageous, daring and infamous Vellupillai Prabhakaran. As India is its natural cultural and ethnic ally, it looked to us for help.

The following are our reasons to support LTTE

Save the minority Sri Lankan Tamils from state oppression.

To safeguard our national security and strategic interests in the Indian Ocean. During the 1970’s US had plans to setup a naval base in Trincomalee. It was quiet dangerous to have a big naval fleet so close to our mainland and supporting our arch-enemy Pakistan.

India’s intelligence agencies RAW & IB trained, equipped and supported the infant rebel movement, making it one of the most formidable fighting groups in the entire world. We taught them everything about asymmetric warfare (guerilla warfare), fund-raising, psychological warfare, and Intelligence-gathering in various training camps across India. We infiltrated their fighters into Sri Lanka, exfiltrated injured fighters and sympathizers to India for medical aid and safety. We supported their families who had to escape Sri Lanka.

All this support has led to LTTE emerging as one of the strongest and fearful revolutionary groups. With an Army, Navy (Sea Tigers), Air force (Air Tigers), established bureaucracy, and judiciary LTTE held areas are almost like any nation except that LTTE is not recognized in the world as a legitimate government. LTTE has established fund raising networks in every part of the globe. Funds are raised from sympathetic expatriates, smuggling weapons and drugs, extortion, and a well organized taxation system. They came up with modern form of suicide bombing (Black Tigers) which was used with devastating results. LTTE’s sea and land based suicide bombings were successfully emulated by other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, PLO, and Hezbollah. Many experts claim that the Al-Qaeda’s attack on USS Cole off the coast of Yemen is very similar to LTTE’s suicide attacks.

However, there was significant change in India’s attitude towards LTTE under Rajiv Gandhi. After Indo-Sri-Lankan accord in 1998, Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was sent to the island to maintain peace between the warring parties. However, this mission soon turned into a localized war between IPKF and LTTE. The peace keeping mission was pulled out of Sri Lanka after Indian army suffered serious losses at the hands of the rebels and growing discontent within both the minority Tamil and majority Sinhala population. The most disastrous consequence of the mission was the assassination of our Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperembudur.

In the years following Rajiv’s assassination India stopped playing an active role in Sri Lanka’s politics. Our overt support to LTTE has been cut-off, LTTE has been declared a banned terrorist organization under POTA, but at the same time there was no move to militarily or diplomatically assist Sri Lanka in resolving the crisis. LTTE has managed to grow in strength and brought many areas in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka under its control, in fact it became a de facto government in these areas with complete government infrastructure. This lead Sri Lanka to seek aid from other nations like military support from Pakistan, China, and USA; Diplomatic support from Norway, EU, and Japan.

In the past few years, LTTE and Sri Lankan government signed ceasefires, violated them and all the while killing many innocent civilians. Since the birth of LTTE in 1975, the human cost of the civil war between LTTE and Sri Lankan government is 64,000 innocent civilians being massacred and many more being made refugees. The human toll of Sri Lanka’s civil war exceeds that of both Kashmir and Northeast conflict combined.

I personally believe that no terrorist/armed freedom struggle can grow, and sustain itself without external aid from other nations, for example the conflict in Kashmir where the terrorists are aided by Pakistan. India nurtured LTTE to what it is today, or at least gave the initial boost needed for the fledgling organization.

So is India just as guilty as Pakistan for the deaths of so many civilians?

I leave it to the readers to make up their own mind.

I am a nationalist, and believe that a nation must do everything possible to safeguard and promote its interests. I do not believe in right and wrong, moral and immoral when it comes to issues of national interest, only national interests come first all the time.

In that belief, I say that India is right and in fact we should have strongly continued our support to LTTE and/or strongly coerced Sri Lankan government with all means possible to reach a fair settlement with LTTE, this way the current overtures that US is making to have army and naval bases in Sri Lankan will not come to fruition and at the same time we could have kept other nations like Pakistan and China from having any influence in our backyard.

India in spite of all the obvious advantages chooses to remain an indifferent neighbor to both the humanitarian and strategic loss. I wonder why our country is always reacting to global events instead of shaping them. Why is our foreign policy passive, and not active in molding the geo-political scenario in our vicinity to our advantage?

Hopefully in the future, we make events instead of reacting to them.

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