Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: Difference between revisions
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The revolutionary ardour of the Tamil youth, which manifested in the form of indiscriminate outbursts of political violence in the early seventies, sought concrete political expression in an organisational structure built on a revolutionary political theory and practice. Neither the Tamil United Front nor the Left movement offered any concrete political venue to the revolutionary potential of the rebellious youth. |
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{{POV check}} |
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The political structure of the Tamil United Front. founded on a conservative bourgeois ideology could not provide the basis for the articulation of revolutionary politics. It became very clear to the Tamil masses and particularly to the revolutionary youth that the Tamil nationalist leaders, though they fiercely championed the cause of the Tamils, have failed to formulate any concrete practical programme of political action to liberate the oppressed Tamil nation. Having exhausted all forms of popular struggle for the last three decades, having been alienated from the power structure of the Sinhala State, the Tamil politicians still clung onto Parliament to air their disgruntlement which went unheard, unheeded like vain cries in the wilderness. |
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{{cleanup-date|September 2005}} |
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The strategy of the traditional Left parties was to collaborate with the Sinhala capitalist class and therefore their theoretical perspective was subsumed by the hegemonic ideology of that dominant class; which was none other than chauvinism. This suicidal class collaboration made the Left leaders to turn a blind eye to the stark realities of national oppression; it made them to ignore the revolutionary conditions generated by the Tamil national struggle; it made them incapable of mobilising the revolutionary aspirations of the Tamil militants. |
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[[Image:Sea Tiger Fast Attack boat.jpg|thumb|LTTE Sea Tigers off Mullaitivu in May 2004. The light fast attack fiberglass boats have proved highly effective against the Sri Lanka Navy. This boat has an all-female crew.]] |
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The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (LTTE, pronounced L-T-T-E), popularly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''', [[Tamil people|Tamil]], founded in [[1976]], is seeking to establish an independent state for Ceylon [[Tamil people|Tamils]], to be called [[Tamil Eelam]], in the north-east of [[Sri Lanka]]. |
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Confronted with this political vacuum and caught up in a revolutionary situation created by the concrete conditions of intolerable national oppression the Tamil revolutionary youth sought desperately to create a revolutionary political organisation to advance the task of national liberation. It was in this specific political conjuncture the Tiger Movement took its historical birth in 1972. |
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The head of the organisation is the reclusive guerilla leader [[Velupillai Prabakharan]], who is wanted by [[Interpol]] for offences "Murder, Organised Crime and Terrorism" [http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/Wanted/Notices/Data/1994/54/1994_9054.asp]. The LTTE has absorbed most of the cadres from the other Tamil miltant organisations over the two decades long war, for [[independence]] struggle. The organisation is widely recognised as the entity the government must negotiate with if it is to find a peaceful resolution to the [[Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka|country's ethnic conflict]]. It is currently a party to negotiations with the government aimed at seeking a solution to the long-standing crisis. LTTE-backed Thamizarasuk Katchi has won over 90% of votes in the [[electoral district]] of [[Jaffna]], in the [[Northern province, Sri Lanka|Northern Province]], in the [[Sri Lankan legislative election, 2004|parliamentary elections]]. The LTTE did not participate in the election as a political party but did openly support the TNA.[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3585143.stm] However, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (Lanka Academic) accused the LTTE of being involved in this election illegally, and using violence and impersonation to support TNA members. [http://www.lacnet.org/srilanka/politics/elections/] Centre for Monitoring Election Violence also stated that the election was not a "free and fair" one due to voter intimidation and violence by both of the major parties. [http://www.lacnet.org/srilanka/politics/elections/] LTTE is proscribed as a [[terrorist]] organisation by several countries including [[United States|USA]], [[United Kingdom|Britain]], [[India]], [[Australia]] and [[Malaysia]] but the ban in Sri Lanka was lifted to facilitate peaceful negotiations. |
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The movement was formed by its present leader and military commander Velupillai Pirabaharan. At the time of its inauguration the movement called itself The Tamil New Tigers and later on 5th May 1976 the organisation renamed .itself as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. From its iinception the Tiger movement took into its ranks the most resolute, the most dedicated most zealous young Revolutionaries. |
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==Current status== |
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Structured as an urban guerilla force, discipilined with an iron will to fight for the cause of national freedom, the Tigers emerged as the armed resistance movement of the oppressed Tamil masses. As a revolutionary liberation movement it provided a concrete organisational base to the insurrectionary spirit of the rebellious youth and soon established itself as the armed vanguard of the national struggle. The Tiger's commitment to armed struggle as the form of popular mass struggle was undertaken after a careful and cautious, appraisal of the objective conditions of the national struggle, with the fullest comprehension of the concrete situation in which the masses of people were presented with no other alternative other than to resort to revolutionary resistance to advance their national cause. |
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The LTTE controls sections in the north and east of the island, especially the regions lying outside the major cities. Since late [[2001]], there has been a [[ceasefire]], and the LTTE has indicated its willingness to give up its call for a separate state, seeking political and economic autonomy for Tamils within a one-state solution. The peace process has been mediated by [[Norway]], a country that has often found favour with both the government and the insurgents. This was certainly true at the inception of the peace process. But successive Sri Lankan leaders from the President downwards have been accusing Norway and its peace monitors in Sri Lanka of open bias in favor of the LTTE. [http://www.asiantribune.com/show_news.php?id=9161] In fact one Norwegian chief monitor was asked to leave Sri Lanka because of open bias during a sea battle off the eastern Sri Lankan coast; the monitor, according to the Sri Lankan government, helped frustrate efforts to seize a Tamil Tiger ship carrying arms. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3225329.stm] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3226669.stm] Together with the other Nordic countries, Norway supports the monitoring of the ceasefire through the [[SLMM|Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission]]. |
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Probakaran, the leader of the Tiger Movement, is an ardent young revolutionary, born on the 26th November 1951, in the coastal town of Valvettiturai, a place famous for its militancy against Sinhala State repression. Ho was drawn into revolutionary politics when he was sixteen, and earned the name 'Thamby' amongst the co-revolutionaries as he was very young. Pirabaharan represented the aspirations of the rebellious Tamil youth who, having become disenchanted with the failures of non-violent political campaigns, resolved to fight back the barbarous form of state violence perpetrated on their people. Pirabaharan soon organised a politico-military structure which found an organisational expression to the revolutionary ardour of these militant youth. Showing an extra-ordinary talent in planning military strategy and tactics and executing them to the amazement of the enemy. Pirabaharan soon became a symbol of Tamil resistance and the Tiger Movement he founded became the revolutionary movement to spearhead the Tamil national liberation struggle. |
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Talks on an interim solution were stalled due to accusations of soft politics by the President [[Chandrika Kumaratunga]], against the Prime Minister [[Ranil Wickremesinghe]], who belongs to the opposition party, and who was in charge of the negotiations. The talks are on hold until political uncertainty between the two main parties leaves it clear with whom the LTTE is to negotiate. |
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Ideologically bound to the revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism and Leninism, our movement firmly believes that its commitment to armed struggle is not an alternative to mass movement. The revolutionary armed resistance must be sustained and supported by the mobilised masses. The invincible power of the organised masses, we believe, must be activated as the force of popular resistance. Adopting Lenin's teaching that armed struggle 'must he ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism', our movement has chartered its political programme integrating the national struggle with class struggle defining our ultimate objective as national liberation and socialist revolution. With the conviction that armed struggle is the highest expression of political practice and must be channeled into a process of socialist revolution, the Tiger movement, from its earliest stages, engaged in developing and building political and military bases among the popular masses. |
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The Sri Lankan government, while involved in a military expansion program, accuses the LTTE of using the ceasefire to build up its forces. The LTTE also continues to be accused by the government and international human rights organizations of abducting school children, killing political rivals and using suicide bombers. The LTTE, on the other hand, accuse the Sri Lankan government of carrying out killings of civilians, political workers and journalists using paramilitary groups armed by the government and operating from Sri Lankan military bases and government police stations in government-controlled Tamil areas. Others worry that the LTTE, government and some others are too focused on the money poised to come in from northern countries as peace unfolds, rather than seeking a solution that will lead to a workable and lasting peace. |
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The [[2004 Indian Ocean earthquake]] has increased tensions between the LTTE and the national government. Each group is blaming the other for inadequate preparation and treatment. The Sri Lankan government is alleged to have been blocking basic humanitarian aid for tsunami victims and access by foreign humanitarian agencies to the Tamil rebel held areas where over two thirds of the damage and deaths from the tsunami occurred. This included refusal to allow the [[UN Secretary General]] [[Kofi Annan]] to visit the worst hit areas on the island which are on the rebel held East coast when he asked to do so. The head of the UN [[World Food Program]] Jim Morris, however was finally able to visit rebel-held territory, despite initial objections by the Sri Lankan government. He added that aid had reached "nearly everyone... who has been harmed by the disaster". [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4158667.stm] |
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==Child Conscription== |
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[[Image:Childsoldiers.jpg|thumb|LTTE "baby brigade"]] |
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The LTTE has been accused of continuing to recruit child soldiers, including from tsunami relief camps.[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4171251.stm] UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for travel bans on the LTTE, along with 40 other groups accused of using child soldiers, as a result of this. |
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A Mandate for Secession |
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The emergence of the Tiger Movement marked a new historical epoch in the nature and structure of the Tamil national struggle extending the dimension of the agitation to popular armed resistance. While our Movement was engaged in organising and developing its politico-military structure, great events of extra-ordinary political significance began to unfold in the Tamill political domain. It was the time when national oppression assumed such severity and harshness that made joint existence between the two nations intolerable and impossible. |
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Tej Thapa, a South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch says, "The Tamil Tigers are stealing children from their homes to put them on the firing line. Despite all their promises, they are demonstrating absolute disregard for the most vulnerable part of the population it claims to represent" |
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[http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/28/slanka8976.htm] |
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It was at the peak of this national oppression, when secession became the inevitable political destiny of the Tamil nation, the Tamil United Front called for a national convention in May 1976 at Vaddukoddai where a historical resolution was unanimously adopted calling for complete political independence of the Tamil nation. It was at this conference that Tamil United Front changed it name to Tamil United Liberation Front. The convention outrightly condemned the Republican Constitution of 1972, which "has made the Tamils a slave nation ruled by the new colonial masters the Sinhalese who are using the power they usurped to deprive the Tamil nation of its territory, language citizenship, economic life, opportunities of employment and education thereby destroying all the attributes of nationhood of the Tamil people". The convention resolved that "restoration and reconstitution of the tree, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam based on the right to self determination inherent o every nation has become inevitable in order to safeguard the very existence of the Tamil nation in this country". |
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Amid international pressure, LTTE announced in July 2003 that it would stop conscripting child soldiers, but has reneged on the promises. Among the conscripted are the Tamil children orphaned by the [[tsunami]]. [http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/01/14/slanka10016.htm] |
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The General Elections of July 1977 became a crucial testing ground for the secessionist cause of the Tamil United Liberation Front. The T.IJ.L.F. asked for a clear mandate from the people to wage a national struggle for secession and accordingly the Front explicitly stated in the Manifesto: |
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[[UNICEF]] expresses disappointment over LTTE's continuous child conscription, "The LTTE has not lived up to its commitment to end once and for all the practice of taking children into its ranks." [http://www.unicef.org/media/media_21990.html] |
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.Hence the Tamil United Liberation Front seeks in the general election the mandate of the Tamil Nation to establish an independent sovereign' secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam that includes all the geographically contiguous areas that have been the traditional homelands of the Tamil speaking people in this country". |
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==Allegations of Ethnic Cleansing against Sinhalese and Muslims== |
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LTTE has carried out attacks on Sinhalese and Muslim in the predominantly Tamil Northern and Eastern provinces. During the mid-1980 and official plan was implemented "to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns."[http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/sri-lanka/sri-lanka144.html] Armed Sinhalese settlers who came from the poorer and less fortunate classes of the Sinhalese used established local militia called home guards to protect themselves from the hostile Tamil population. Sri Lankan president Jayewardene asserted that no part of Sri Lanka could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside.[http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/sri-lanka/sri-lanka144.html] |
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The Manifesto further stated: |
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[[Amnesty International]] reports how an LTTE soldier describes one of his attacks on villagers, "When recounting one attack, he described how he had held a child by the legs and bashed its head against a wall and how he enjoyed hearing the mother’s screaming." |
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-[http://www.lankalibrary.com/pol2.html] |
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"The Tamil Nation must take the decision to establish its sovereignty in its homeland art the basis of its right to self -determination. The only way to announce this decision to the Sinhalese Government and to the world is to vote for the Tamil United Liberation Front". |
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[[Image:LTTEAmpara.jpg|thumb|30 Sinhalese civilians, mostly women and children, massacred by LTTE women cadres in Ampara]] |
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The Manifesto finally pledged |
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Amnesty International reports also recounts testimony from children who were abducted and tortured by the Sri Lankan Army because of their Tamil ethnicity. |
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"The Tamil speaking representatives who get elected through these votes, while being members of the National State Assembly of Ceylon, will also form themselves into the 'NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF TAMIL EELAM which will draft a constitution for the State of Tamil Eelam and to establish the independence of Tamil Eelam by bringing that constitution into operation either by peaceful means or by direct action or struggle". |
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The Amnesty International paper ''Children In South Asia: their securing their rights'' recounts the abduction and torture of an 11-year old boy Rajah by the Sri Lankan Army. Rajah was tortured because his family was suspected of providing food to members of the LTTE. |
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In reference to the Tamil question the verdict at the elections was very crucial. It was fought precisely on a decision to secede. In a political sense, it assumed the character of a plebiscite, a public expression of a nation's will. The Tamil speaking people voted overwhelmingly in favour of secession, or rather, the people of Tamil Eelam exercised through a democratic political practice, their right to self -determination, their right to secede and form an independent State of their own. Thus, the Tamil question assumed a new dimension. Its no longer a question to be resolved by District Councils or by Federal system, nor by negotiations and pacts. It is no longer a question to bargain for concessions. It has become a question of national self-determination, a question of an inalienable right of a nation of people to decide their own political destiny. The Tamil nation did proclaim its determination to he an independent sovereign State, and this national will was articulated through a popular democratic practice. This was the specific mandate given to the T.U.L.F. leadership, an authentic irreversible mandate stamped with the popular will, a mandate to establish an independent sovereign socialist State of Tamil Eeelam. |
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"Two soldiers... threw me in a tub which had no water in it. I got up and ran to my mother at the gate. I held my mum and asked her not to allow them to take me. They snatched me away again. I was put against the wall and one of the soldiers kicked me with his knee in my stomach. I screamed. Then they took me behind their compound. There was a coconut tree. They tied my legs with rope and pulled me upside down. While hanging, I was beaten with netted [twisted] wire about six times. Then they let me down and tied my hands. I was beaten with sticks from the tulip tree." [http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/childasia/report3.htm#recruit] |
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Children were also killed by the Sri Lankan Army, and armed Sinhalese and Muslim Home Guards in reprisal for attacked carried out by the LTTE. |
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Amnesty International stated in reprisal for the LTTE attack on the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, "Amirthalingam Surenthran, a 13-year-old student and his 17-year-old brother, Amirthalingam Jagendram, were among eight civilians deliberately shot at close range by police and home guards at Tampalakamam, Sri Lanka, on 1 February 1998. At about 6.30am, around 20 police and home guards who appeared drunk dragged them out of the house and reportedly took them inside the police post and shot them." [http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/childasia/report3.htm#recruit] |
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The Repression and Resistance |
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Refugees International reports "In October 1990, the LTTE decided to evict the Muslim population of Jaffna, approximately 100,000 people, with two days notice. The Muslims were told to leave the North within 48 hours or face death." |
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[http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/1247/] |
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The General Elections of 1977 resulted in a massive victory for the extreme right-wing United National Party (U.N.P,) with nearly 85 of the seats in Parliament. The traditional Left Parties were completely wiped out without a single seat, and the Tamil United Liberation Front, for the first time in Ceylon's political history, became the leading opposition Party in Parliament. The stage was set for a confrontation; the Tamils demanding secession and separate existence as a sovereign State and the Sinhala racist ruling Party seeking absolute State power to dominate arid subjugate the will of the Tamil nation to live free. The intensity of this contradiction took its manifest form soon after the elections into a racial holocaust unprecedented in its violence towards the Tamils. |
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The BBC reports on LTTE's evicted the Sinhalese and Muslim population of northern Sri Lanka, "Just a decade ago, Jaffna was a cosmopolitan city, where the Tamils lived alongside Muslims and the predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese. Upon taking control, the LTTE asked the Sinhalese and Muslims to leave." |
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[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/743834.stm] The LTTE has stated that it was evicting Sinhalese and Muslim settlers, who were moved in state sponsored programs. |
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In this island wide racial conflagration hundreds of Tamils were mercilessly massacred and millions worth of Tamil property was destroyed and thousands of them made refugees. The State police and the armed forces openIy colluded with the hooligans in their gruesome acts of arson, looting, rape and mass murder. Instead of containing the racist violence that was ravaging the whole island, the Government leaders made inflammatory statements with racist connotations that added fuel to the fire. It was the Tamil plantation workers who bore the brunt of this racial onslaught. 17,000 of them became refugees and sought asylum in the Tamil areas of the North and Fast. |
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==India's involvement== |
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The racial horror had a profound impact on Tamil political thinking. While it hardened the militancy of the revolutionary youth, it exposed the political impotency of the Tamil bourgeois leadership, who, having failed to fulfill its pledges to the people. sought a collaborationist strategy to placate the Sinhala leaders. Jayawardane in his Machiavellian shrewdness soon realised that T.U.L.F. leaders were not serious in their secessionist demand but sought alternative to deceive the Tamil masses. |
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The LTTE's early years of struggle reportedly enjoyed considerable sympathy from the Indian government, especially in the state of [[Tamil Nadu]] where there was sympathy for the discrimination against Sri Lankan Tamils by the majority [[Sinhalese]]. It is widely believed that India provided the LTTE and other Tamil guerilla groups with monetary and training support. |
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The real threat of secession, the Government thought, arose from the militant Tamil youths who are unappeasable, irreconcilable and committed to the core to the goal of an independent socialist Tamil Eelam. The new regime, therefore, utilised all means to crush the revolutionary youth, the very ground from where the cry for political freedom emanated. The Government thus embarked on a ruthless policy of repression, delegating extra-powers to the police and military to clamp down on the Tamil youth. Caught up in a revolutionary situation and constantly victimised by the Police the young Tamil revolutionaries were forced to resist the State repression. The dialectic of repression and resistance began to unfold into a deadly national struggle ushering the armed people's war that opened a new dimension in the freedom movement of the Eelam Tamils. |
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After the [[Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord]] was signed on July 29, [[1987]] by Indian Prime Minister [[Rajiv Gandhi]] and President [[Junius Richard Jayewardene|Jayewardene]], the Sri Lankan Government made a number of concessions to Tamil demands, which included devolution of power to the provinces, merger—subject to later referendum—of the northern and eastern provinces, and official status for the Tamil language. India agreed to establish order in the north and east with an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and to cease assisting Tamil insurgents. Militant groups including the LTTE, although initially reluctant, agreed to surrender their arms to the IPKF. |
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As time went on, the Indian forces began to meet with stiff opposition from all sides. None of the concessions agreed to in the Indo-Sri Lankan agreement was implemented by the Government of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government, fearing a large scale rebellion, began to grow wary of the presence of IPKF, and allegedly entered into a secret deal with the LTTE that culminated in a ceasefire. However, the LTTE and IPKF continued to have frequent hostilities, and according to some reports, the government even armed the rebels willing to see the back of the Indian forces. Casualties mounted and eventually India pulled out its troops. Support from India dropped noticeably in 1991, after the assassination of a recently ex-Prime Minister of India, [[Rajiv Gandhi]], by a woman suicide bomber ([[Thenmuli Rajaratnam]]) widely believed to be an LTTE member. India remains an outside observer to the ongoing peace process, with frequent demands to press for an extradition of Prabhakaran, even if a peace deal is struck between the parties in the future. |
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[[Image:LTTECoin.jpg|right|thumb|A coin issued by the LTTE.]] |
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Tiger Movement comes to limelight |
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After the election of Ranil Wickramasinghe as prime minister on a pro-peace mandate, the LTTE unilaterally declared a ceasefire in 2000 in which the government reciprocated and both later entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Sri Lankan government brokered by Norway. The LTTE runs a de-facto independent state, [[Tamil Eelam]], within Sri Lanka. The LTTE is mainly funded by taxes collected within this territory. The LTTE employs both children and women in its ranks. It also has a naval wing called the Sea Tigers. |
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On the 7th April 1978, a police raiding party headed by the notorious torturer Inspector Bastiampillai suddenly surrounded a Tiger training camp deep into the northern jungle and held the guerrillas at gun point. One of our commando leaders. Lieutenant Che!vanayagam (alias Aman) tactfully swooped on a police officer, snatched his 5MG and gunned down the police party. Inspector Bastiampillai (do), Sub-Inspector Perambalam, Police Constable Balasingham and Police driver Siriwardana were all killed. Our geurrilla Unit sustained no casualities. The incidents alarmed the Government but created euphoria among the Tamils since it signified the first major incident of armed resistance against the repressive state apparatus. |
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The [[LTTE Black Tiger|Black Tigers]] is an elite unit of LTTE members responsible for conducting suicide attacks against civilian, political, religious, economic and military targets. |
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On the 25th April 1978, the Tiger movement for the first time officially claimed responisibitity for the annihilation of the raiding party and the earlier killings of Police officers and Tamil traitors. Thus, the Tiger Movement came to limelight announcing itself to the world as the revolutionary resistant movement of the Tamils committed to the goal of national liberation of Tamil Eelam through armed struggle. The Sinhala Government reacted swiftly by enacting a law proscribing the Tiger movement. The Government also poured into Tamil areas large contingents of armed units for the 'Tiger hunt' and brought the Tamil nation under total military occupation. |
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== Notable Attacks == |
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(Information derived from [http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp MIPT] database, selected for inclusion based on lethality or notability.) |
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Having intensified the military repression in Tamil Eelam, Jayawardane introduced a new constitution on the 7th September 1978, which bestowed upon him absolute dictatorial executive powers and gave Sinhala language and Buddhist religion extra-ordinary status, and relegated a second-class status to the Tamil language. While the Tamil Parliamentary Party failed in its duty to register any mass protest, the Tiger movement brought the matter to the attention of the international community by blowing up an AVRO aircraft, the only passenger plane owned by the national airline (Air Ceylon). The incident was a humiliation to the Government but boosted the moral of the Tamil freedom movement. |
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* '''August 18, 1989''': Suspected LTTE militants invaded a hospital in Colombo and from there subjected a nearby Indian Army post to grenade and small-arms fire, killing 24 soldiers. Because of the location, the Indians were unable to return heavy fire. |
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* '''May 21, 1991''': LTTE-affiliated suicide bomber [[Thenmuli Rajaratnam]] assassinated former Indian prime minister [[Rajiv Gandhi]] while the latter was campaigning for a parliamentary candidate in [[Tamil Nadu]], also killing an additional 13 bystanders. Following the assassination, seven suspected LTTE activists committed suicide after being surrounded by police. |
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* '''January 31, 1996''': An attack by the LTTE on the [[Central Bank Bombing|Colombo Central Bank]] killed 90 and injured a further 1,400 people, damaging other buildings in the process. It was the most deadly LTTE attack in the history of the group's operations. |
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* '''October 15, 1997''': An LTTE bomb exploded at the Colombo World Trade Center, killing 13 and injuring hundreds. |
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* '''January 5, 1998''': Four likely members of the Black Tiger squad drove an explosives-laden truck into the [[Sri Dalada Maligawa]] (or "Temple of the Tooth"), a major Buddhist shrine, killing 7 and injuring 25. The attack took place just days before foreign dignitaries were expected to attend celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Sri Lankan independence at the temple. |
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* '''March 5, 1998''': Two LTTE bombs exploded aboard a bus in [[Maradana]], killing thirty-two and injuring 252 passersby. |
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* '''May 14, 1998''': A member of the Black Tiger squad jumped in front of a vehicle carrying Sri Lankan Brigadier [[Larry Wijeratne]] and detonated explosives, killing the general and two guards. Wijeratne was the commander of Sri Lankan forces in the [[Point Pedro]] area of the Jaffna peninsula in the Tamil-inhabited north of the country. Press reports described the assassination as a "serious blow" to the government's efforts in the area. |
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*'''July 29, 1999''': An LTTE suicide bomber killed Sri Lankan [[Member of Parliament|MP]] [[Neelan Thiruchelvam]] along with two others. Six bystanders were injured. |
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* '''December 18, 1999''': A female LTTE suicide bomber exploded herself at a rally in Colombo in an apparent assassination attempt on Sri Lankan president Kumaratunga, who was injured in the blast. Ten people were killed and three injured. Another blast elsewhere killed a [[United National Party]] activist and a former army general. |
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* '''January 7, 2000''': A suspected LTTE suicide bomber killed Sri Lankan Industrial Minister [[C.V. Gooneratne]] during a holiday march in [[Rawatne]]. A further 20 were killed and 60 wounded. |
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* '''May 18, 2000''': A suspected LTTE bomber killed 23 and injured 70 at a Buddhist temple in [[Battilacoa]] during celebrations of the [[Vesak]] holiday. |
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* '''October 3, 2000''': An LTTE bomb killed parliamentary candidate [[Mohammed Baithullah]] and more than twenty others in [[Muttur]]. At least 49 others were injured. Baithullah had previously served as an intelligence officer in the Sri Lankan police. |
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The Tigers stepped up the campaign by raiding a Government bank (Tinnevely People's Bank) on the 5th December 1978 appropriating 1.68 million rupees of state money. In this daring daylight raid two police officers were shot dead and another seriously wounded Our guerrilla fighters escaped without any casualty, taking away the weapons from the enemy. |
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To stamp out the growing armed resistance the Government took draconian measures. On the 20th July 1979 Jayawardane's racist regime enacted the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which contained the most infamous provisions that contravened the very principles of the Rule of Law and violated the norms of human justice. This notorious law denied trial by jury, enabled the detention of people for a period of eighteen months and allowed confessions extracted under torture as admissable in evidence. |
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==Recent developments== |
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On August 12, 2005, the LTTE was named as the primary suspect in the assassination of Sri Lanka's foreign minister, [[Lakshman Kadirgamar]]. Two LTTE members were arrested for surveillance of the minister's residence a few weeks before the shooting. [http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/08/12/sri.lanka/] |
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Having enacted the law the Government declared a State of Emergency in Jaffna the northern Tamil capital and dispatched more military units to Tamil areas under the command of Brigadier Weeratunga with special instructions to wipe out 'terrorism' within six months. Empowered by law and encouraged by the State, the fascist Brigadier unleashed military terror unprecedented in its violence. Hundreds of innocent youths were arrested arid subjected to barbarous torture and several of them were shot dead and their dead bodies were dumped on the road side. Their oppressive measures caused massive outcry all over the world and the Terrorism Act brought universal condemnation by the world human rights movements particularly by the International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International. |
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On September 27, 2005, the [[European Union]] announced a travel ban on all LTTE delegations across all 25 member states and according to the [[British Foreign Office]] is openly considering listing them as a terrorist organization in response to the killing of Sri Lankan foreign minister [[Lakshman Kadirgamar]]. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/sinhala/news/story/2005/09/050927_eultte.shtml] |
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==See also== |
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* [[Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka]] |
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* [[The_Terrorist|The Terrorist]] (film) |
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* [[M.I.A.]] (famous daughter of Arular) |
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==Further reading== |
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Tigers step up guerrilla campaign |
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*Ranawaka, Champika. (2003) ''Koti Vinivideema'' |
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*Balasingham, Anton. (2004) 'War and Peace - Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers', Fairmax Publishing Ltd, ISBN 1-903679-05-2 |
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*Gamage, Siri and I.B. Watson (Editors). (1999) ''Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka - 'Pearl of the East' or 'Island of Tears'?'', Sage Publications Ltd, ISBN 0-7619-9393-2 |
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*Balasingham, Adele. (2003) ''The Will to Freedom - An Inside View of Tamil Resistance'', Fairmax Publishing Ltd, 2nd ed. ISBN 1-903679-036 |
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*Narayan Swamy, M. R. (2002) ''Tigers of Lanka: from Boys to Guerrillas'', Konark Publishers; 3rd ed. ISBN 8122006310 |
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*Pratap, Anita. (2001) ''Island of Blood: Frontline Reports From Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints''. Penguin Books, ISBN 0142003662 |
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*de Votta, Neil. (2004) ''Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka.'' Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804749248 |
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The political events that unfolded since 1981 involved massive genocidal onslaughts on the life and property of the Tamil community and increased guerrilla campaigns of our liberation movement. |
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== External links == |
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*[http://www.ltteps.org/ LTTE Peace Secretariat] |
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*[http://cfrterrorism.org/groups/tamiltigers.html US Council on Foreign Relations Page on LTTE] |
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*[http://www.interpol.int/public/Data/Wanted/Notices/Data/1994/54/1994_9054.asp Interpol] |
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*[http://www.spur.asn.au// Society for Peace, Unity and Human Rights in Sri Lanka] |
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*[http://www.ict.org.il/ International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism]] |
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*[http://www.tamilnation.org/ltte/ Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] |
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*[http://hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=slanka Human Rights Watch: Sri Lanka] |
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*[http://www.tamilnet.com/ Tamil Net] |
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*[http://www.tamilweek.com/ Tamil Week] |
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*[http://www.uthrj.org University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna)] |
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*[http://www.lankaweb.com/news/latest.html LankaWeb] |
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*[http://www.tamiltigers.net/ tamiltigers.net] |
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*[[http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/2000/2000_04_Tigers_Terrorism.html McKenzie Institute Page on LTTE]] |
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*[http://www.tamileelamnews.com] |
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*[http://www.peaceinsrilanka.com/ Peace in Sri Lanka] |
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*[http://www.lankawatch.com/ Sri Lanka Media Watch] |
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*[http://www.eelam.com/ Tamil Eelam Home Page] |
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*[http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/ltte.htm] |
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On the midnight of 31st May 198!, the Sinhala police went on a wild rampage burning down the city of Jaffna This state terrorism exploded into a mad frenzy of arson. looting and murder. Hundreds of shops were burnt to ashes, the Jaffna market square was set on flames. A Tamil newspaper office and Jaffna M.P.'s house were gutted. The most abominable act of cultural genocide was the burning down of the famous Jaffna public library destroying more than 90,000 volumes of invaluable literary and historical works an act that outraged the conscience of the world Tamils. The whole episode was master minded by two Cabinet Ministers (Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake) of Jayawardane's regime who were in Jaffna during the riots and were supervising the orgy of police violence. |
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An island wide racial conflagration flared up again just three months after the burning of Jaffna, a racial onslaught on the Tamils organised by leading members of the Government, assisted by the armed forces, and executed by gangs of Sinhala thugs and hooligans. And again our people became the cruel victims of Sinhala racist barbarity; victims of insane sadistic orgy, victims of arson, looting, rape and murder. Hundreds of our people, including women and children were slaughtered, thousands of them made homeless and millions worth of Tamil property destroyed. |
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The repetitive pattern of this organised violence that brought colossal damage in terms of life and property to our people signified the genocidal intent underlying this horrid phenomenon. The objective of the chauvinistic ruling class is nothing other than to inflict maximum injury to the Tamils to terrorise, subjugate and destroy the aspirations of our people for political independence. Yet more and more the oppression intensified the determination of our people became more and more hardened with an iron will to resist the forces of repression. As the consequence of heightened repression the resistance of the freedom fighters increased with such a vehemence that it caused the destabilisation of the Sinhala state and disrupted the civil administrative system in Tamil Eelam. |
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[[Category:Secessionist organizations]] |
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[[Category:Tamil|Tigers, Tamil]] |
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[[Category:Irregular military]] |
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[[Category:Suicide bombing]] |
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On the 2nd July 1982 the Tiger guerrillas launched a lightening attack on a police patrolling party at Nelliady, Jaffna, killing four police officers on the spot. Three police personnel were seriously injured. |
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[[de:Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]] |
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[[fr:Tigres de libération de l'Eelam tamoul]] |
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Another major incident of guerrilla attack that shook the Sinhaha police system was the successful raid on the well-guarded Chavakachcheri Police station. On the early morning of 27th October 1982 a Tiger guerrilla unit commanded by Lieutenant Lucas Charles Antony (alias Aseer) launched a well planned sudden attack on the Police station, killing three police officers and injuring several others. The rest of the police personnel fled in terror. From the Police armoury we raided thirty-three pieces of weaponary - nineteen repeater guns, nine 303 rifles, two sub-machine guns, two shot guns and one revolver. Two of our guerrilla members sustained minor injuries. This successful guerrilla raid forced the Government to close down almost all the Police stations in the North and the Police administrative system became paralysed. |
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[[fi:Tamilitiikerit]] |
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[[he:הנמרים הטמילים]] |
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On the 18th February 1983 our freedom fighters shot and killed Police Inspector Wijewardane and his jeep driver Rajapaksa of Point Pedro Police station. Inspector Wijewardane is notorious for Police repression in that area. |
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[[id:Macan Tamil]] |
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[[ja:タミル・イーラム解放のトラ]] |
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On the 4th March 1983 at Umaiyalpuram, Paranthan, our guerrilla fighters ambushed an army convoy and in the gun battle that ensued several army personnel were seriously injured and the rest fled in fear. In that ambush two armoured cars were damaged. |
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[[no:Tamiltigrene]] |
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[[pl:Tamilskie Tygrysy]] |
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On the 2nd April 1983 the Tigers blasted the Jaffna Secretariat building by bombs. Just a few hours before a Government organised 'security conference' to discuss ways and means to crush the Tiger movement. The blast caused extensive damage to the building and destroyed all State documents. Several Government jeeps were set on fire. |
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[[sv:LTTE]] |
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[[ta:தமிழீழ விடுதலைப் புலிகள்]] |
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On the 29th April 1983, the Liberation Tigers assassinated three prominent supporters of the ruling United National Party on the same day, as a warning to all Tamil traitors who supported the racist Government. Two of them were U.N.P. candidates for the local elections (F. V. Ratnasingham of Point Pedro and S. S. Muthiah of Chavakachcheri) and the other, S. S. Rajaratnam, a long time U.N.P. supporter, and the body-guard of lJ.N.P's Jafina organiser K. Ganeshalingam As a direct consequence of this action all the Tamil U.N.P. candidates withdrew from the elections and several Tamils resigned from the ruling party. |
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Tiger's Political Campaign Succeeds |
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Responding to a mass campaign launched by our movement the majority of the Tamil people hymn predominately in the northern province staged a mass boycott of local elections on the 18th May 1983. |
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Such a mass boycott of elections, unprecedented in the political history of the Tamils, constitutes a great political and propaganda victory for the Tiger Movement. The T.U.L.F. which defied the Tiger appeal, suffered an insulting humiliation and irreparably damaged its political image, when 90% of the voters in the North rejected the Party's appeal to vote. The boycott was called by the Tigers, who, for the first time, launched an effective popular campaign appealing to the people to shun the local government elections as a mark of disapproval and rejection of the racist State system that has imposed a reign of terror and repression against the Tamils. |
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V. Pirabaharan chairman and the military commander of the Tiger Movement in a statement widely circulated among the people called upon the Tamils to 'reject the civil administrative machinery of the Sri Lankan state terrorists and join the popular armed struggle directed towards national emancipation'. He also accused the reactionary bourgeois political Party, the Tamils United Liberation Front. as functioning as agents of the Sinhala racist regime and utilise the slogan of 'freedom' to win the elections. |
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On the day of elections (18th May '83) just before the voting started, time bombs planted by our movement exploded at five polling booths in the Tamil city of Jaffna causing panic and havoc among the armed forces. On the same day, an hour before the polling ended Liberation Tiger guerrillas opened fire with machine guns on the army arid police units guarding a polling booth at NaIlur, Jaffna, killing an army corporal and seriously wounding a soldier and two policemen. As a consequence of guerrilla attacks, the Government imposed a state of national emergency. |
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Reasons for the Recent Holocaust |
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The causality that underlies the recent holocaust is manifold. It is absurd to assume that our guerrilla ambush on the midnight of 23rd July 1983 that killed fourteen Sinhala soldiers and seriously wounded several others precipitated the calamity. Riots had already exploded at Trincomalee weeks before the guerrilla ambush. Aided by the military, masses of Sinhala hooligans went on a wild rampage at Trincomalee massacring innocent Tamil people and burning down their houses. Under the cover of Emergency and Curfew the military openly colluded with the Sinhala vandals in an orgy of arson, looting and murders. |
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An all out genocidal assault on the Tamils living in Colombo has been pro-planned by Sinhala fascist groups led by leading members of the ruling party. The recent outburst, unprecedented in its destructive horror, is therefore certainly an open manifestation of a genocidal programme hatched by the fascist leadership as the Hitlerian 'final solution' to the Tamil national question. |
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There are two basic reasons for the ruling Sinhala bourgeoisie to let loose a genocidal repression on Tamils. Firstly, to divert the mass attention from a deepening economic crisis brought about by a dependent neo-colonial economy which has reduced the Sri Lankan Government as a perpetual beggar to western imperialist aid-giving agencies. The popular resentment that has been accumulating from massive inflation and mass unemployment as a consequence of a disastrous economic policy has been constantly diverted and channeled as anti-Tamil hysteria. Secondly, the massacre of Tamils on a genocidal scale the Sinhala fascist ruling class always conceived as the only solution to the national question. Mass killings and massive destruction of property, these fascists wrongly assumed, may humble the Tamils and wipe out the Tamil national freedom struggle. |
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Revision as of 03:42, 5 October 2005
The revolutionary ardour of the Tamil youth, which manifested in the form of indiscriminate outbursts of political violence in the early seventies, sought concrete political expression in an organisational structure built on a revolutionary political theory and practice. Neither the Tamil United Front nor the Left movement offered any concrete political venue to the revolutionary potential of the rebellious youth.
The political structure of the Tamil United Front. founded on a conservative bourgeois ideology could not provide the basis for the articulation of revolutionary politics. It became very clear to the Tamil masses and particularly to the revolutionary youth that the Tamil nationalist leaders, though they fiercely championed the cause of the Tamils, have failed to formulate any concrete practical programme of political action to liberate the oppressed Tamil nation. Having exhausted all forms of popular struggle for the last three decades, having been alienated from the power structure of the Sinhala State, the Tamil politicians still clung onto Parliament to air their disgruntlement which went unheard, unheeded like vain cries in the wilderness.
The strategy of the traditional Left parties was to collaborate with the Sinhala capitalist class and therefore their theoretical perspective was subsumed by the hegemonic ideology of that dominant class; which was none other than chauvinism. This suicidal class collaboration made the Left leaders to turn a blind eye to the stark realities of national oppression; it made them to ignore the revolutionary conditions generated by the Tamil national struggle; it made them incapable of mobilising the revolutionary aspirations of the Tamil militants.
Confronted with this political vacuum and caught up in a revolutionary situation created by the concrete conditions of intolerable national oppression the Tamil revolutionary youth sought desperately to create a revolutionary political organisation to advance the task of national liberation. It was in this specific political conjuncture the Tiger Movement took its historical birth in 1972.
The movement was formed by its present leader and military commander Velupillai Pirabaharan. At the time of its inauguration the movement called itself The Tamil New Tigers and later on 5th May 1976 the organisation renamed .itself as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. From its iinception the Tiger movement took into its ranks the most resolute, the most dedicated most zealous young Revolutionaries.
Structured as an urban guerilla force, discipilined with an iron will to fight for the cause of national freedom, the Tigers emerged as the armed resistance movement of the oppressed Tamil masses. As a revolutionary liberation movement it provided a concrete organisational base to the insurrectionary spirit of the rebellious youth and soon established itself as the armed vanguard of the national struggle. The Tiger's commitment to armed struggle as the form of popular mass struggle was undertaken after a careful and cautious, appraisal of the objective conditions of the national struggle, with the fullest comprehension of the concrete situation in which the masses of people were presented with no other alternative other than to resort to revolutionary resistance to advance their national cause.
Probakaran, the leader of the Tiger Movement, is an ardent young revolutionary, born on the 26th November 1951, in the coastal town of Valvettiturai, a place famous for its militancy against Sinhala State repression. Ho was drawn into revolutionary politics when he was sixteen, and earned the name 'Thamby' amongst the co-revolutionaries as he was very young. Pirabaharan represented the aspirations of the rebellious Tamil youth who, having become disenchanted with the failures of non-violent political campaigns, resolved to fight back the barbarous form of state violence perpetrated on their people. Pirabaharan soon organised a politico-military structure which found an organisational expression to the revolutionary ardour of these militant youth. Showing an extra-ordinary talent in planning military strategy and tactics and executing them to the amazement of the enemy. Pirabaharan soon became a symbol of Tamil resistance and the Tiger Movement he founded became the revolutionary movement to spearhead the Tamil national liberation struggle.
Ideologically bound to the revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism and Leninism, our movement firmly believes that its commitment to armed struggle is not an alternative to mass movement. The revolutionary armed resistance must be sustained and supported by the mobilised masses. The invincible power of the organised masses, we believe, must be activated as the force of popular resistance. Adopting Lenin's teaching that armed struggle 'must he ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism', our movement has chartered its political programme integrating the national struggle with class struggle defining our ultimate objective as national liberation and socialist revolution. With the conviction that armed struggle is the highest expression of political practice and must be channeled into a process of socialist revolution, the Tiger movement, from its earliest stages, engaged in developing and building political and military bases among the popular masses.
A Mandate for Secession
The emergence of the Tiger Movement marked a new historical epoch in the nature and structure of the Tamil national struggle extending the dimension of the agitation to popular armed resistance. While our Movement was engaged in organising and developing its politico-military structure, great events of extra-ordinary political significance began to unfold in the Tamill political domain. It was the time when national oppression assumed such severity and harshness that made joint existence between the two nations intolerable and impossible.
It was at the peak of this national oppression, when secession became the inevitable political destiny of the Tamil nation, the Tamil United Front called for a national convention in May 1976 at Vaddukoddai where a historical resolution was unanimously adopted calling for complete political independence of the Tamil nation. It was at this conference that Tamil United Front changed it name to Tamil United Liberation Front. The convention outrightly condemned the Republican Constitution of 1972, which "has made the Tamils a slave nation ruled by the new colonial masters the Sinhalese who are using the power they usurped to deprive the Tamil nation of its territory, language citizenship, economic life, opportunities of employment and education thereby destroying all the attributes of nationhood of the Tamil people". The convention resolved that "restoration and reconstitution of the tree, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam based on the right to self determination inherent o every nation has become inevitable in order to safeguard the very existence of the Tamil nation in this country".
The General Elections of July 1977 became a crucial testing ground for the secessionist cause of the Tamil United Liberation Front. The T.IJ.L.F. asked for a clear mandate from the people to wage a national struggle for secession and accordingly the Front explicitly stated in the Manifesto:
.Hence the Tamil United Liberation Front seeks in the general election the mandate of the Tamil Nation to establish an independent sovereign' secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam that includes all the geographically contiguous areas that have been the traditional homelands of the Tamil speaking people in this country".
The Manifesto further stated:
"The Tamil Nation must take the decision to establish its sovereignty in its homeland art the basis of its right to self -determination. The only way to announce this decision to the Sinhalese Government and to the world is to vote for the Tamil United Liberation Front".
The Manifesto finally pledged
"The Tamil speaking representatives who get elected through these votes, while being members of the National State Assembly of Ceylon, will also form themselves into the 'NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF TAMIL EELAM which will draft a constitution for the State of Tamil Eelam and to establish the independence of Tamil Eelam by bringing that constitution into operation either by peaceful means or by direct action or struggle".
In reference to the Tamil question the verdict at the elections was very crucial. It was fought precisely on a decision to secede. In a political sense, it assumed the character of a plebiscite, a public expression of a nation's will. The Tamil speaking people voted overwhelmingly in favour of secession, or rather, the people of Tamil Eelam exercised through a democratic political practice, their right to self -determination, their right to secede and form an independent State of their own. Thus, the Tamil question assumed a new dimension. Its no longer a question to be resolved by District Councils or by Federal system, nor by negotiations and pacts. It is no longer a question to bargain for concessions. It has become a question of national self-determination, a question of an inalienable right of a nation of people to decide their own political destiny. The Tamil nation did proclaim its determination to he an independent sovereign State, and this national will was articulated through a popular democratic practice. This was the specific mandate given to the T.U.L.F. leadership, an authentic irreversible mandate stamped with the popular will, a mandate to establish an independent sovereign socialist State of Tamil Eeelam.
The Repression and Resistance
The General Elections of 1977 resulted in a massive victory for the extreme right-wing United National Party (U.N.P,) with nearly 85 of the seats in Parliament. The traditional Left Parties were completely wiped out without a single seat, and the Tamil United Liberation Front, for the first time in Ceylon's political history, became the leading opposition Party in Parliament. The stage was set for a confrontation; the Tamils demanding secession and separate existence as a sovereign State and the Sinhala racist ruling Party seeking absolute State power to dominate arid subjugate the will of the Tamil nation to live free. The intensity of this contradiction took its manifest form soon after the elections into a racial holocaust unprecedented in its violence towards the Tamils.
In this island wide racial conflagration hundreds of Tamils were mercilessly massacred and millions worth of Tamil property was destroyed and thousands of them made refugees. The State police and the armed forces openIy colluded with the hooligans in their gruesome acts of arson, looting, rape and mass murder. Instead of containing the racist violence that was ravaging the whole island, the Government leaders made inflammatory statements with racist connotations that added fuel to the fire. It was the Tamil plantation workers who bore the brunt of this racial onslaught. 17,000 of them became refugees and sought asylum in the Tamil areas of the North and Fast.
The racial horror had a profound impact on Tamil political thinking. While it hardened the militancy of the revolutionary youth, it exposed the political impotency of the Tamil bourgeois leadership, who, having failed to fulfill its pledges to the people. sought a collaborationist strategy to placate the Sinhala leaders. Jayawardane in his Machiavellian shrewdness soon realised that T.U.L.F. leaders were not serious in their secessionist demand but sought alternative to deceive the Tamil masses.
The real threat of secession, the Government thought, arose from the militant Tamil youths who are unappeasable, irreconcilable and committed to the core to the goal of an independent socialist Tamil Eelam. The new regime, therefore, utilised all means to crush the revolutionary youth, the very ground from where the cry for political freedom emanated. The Government thus embarked on a ruthless policy of repression, delegating extra-powers to the police and military to clamp down on the Tamil youth. Caught up in a revolutionary situation and constantly victimised by the Police the young Tamil revolutionaries were forced to resist the State repression. The dialectic of repression and resistance began to unfold into a deadly national struggle ushering the armed people's war that opened a new dimension in the freedom movement of the Eelam Tamils.
Tiger Movement comes to limelight
On the 7th April 1978, a police raiding party headed by the notorious torturer Inspector Bastiampillai suddenly surrounded a Tiger training camp deep into the northern jungle and held the guerrillas at gun point. One of our commando leaders. Lieutenant Che!vanayagam (alias Aman) tactfully swooped on a police officer, snatched his 5MG and gunned down the police party. Inspector Bastiampillai (do), Sub-Inspector Perambalam, Police Constable Balasingham and Police driver Siriwardana were all killed. Our geurrilla Unit sustained no casualities. The incidents alarmed the Government but created euphoria among the Tamils since it signified the first major incident of armed resistance against the repressive state apparatus.
On the 25th April 1978, the Tiger movement for the first time officially claimed responisibitity for the annihilation of the raiding party and the earlier killings of Police officers and Tamil traitors. Thus, the Tiger Movement came to limelight announcing itself to the world as the revolutionary resistant movement of the Tamils committed to the goal of national liberation of Tamil Eelam through armed struggle. The Sinhala Government reacted swiftly by enacting a law proscribing the Tiger movement. The Government also poured into Tamil areas large contingents of armed units for the 'Tiger hunt' and brought the Tamil nation under total military occupation.
Having intensified the military repression in Tamil Eelam, Jayawardane introduced a new constitution on the 7th September 1978, which bestowed upon him absolute dictatorial executive powers and gave Sinhala language and Buddhist religion extra-ordinary status, and relegated a second-class status to the Tamil language. While the Tamil Parliamentary Party failed in its duty to register any mass protest, the Tiger movement brought the matter to the attention of the international community by blowing up an AVRO aircraft, the only passenger plane owned by the national airline (Air Ceylon). The incident was a humiliation to the Government but boosted the moral of the Tamil freedom movement.
The Tigers stepped up the campaign by raiding a Government bank (Tinnevely People's Bank) on the 5th December 1978 appropriating 1.68 million rupees of state money. In this daring daylight raid two police officers were shot dead and another seriously wounded Our guerrilla fighters escaped without any casualty, taking away the weapons from the enemy.
To stamp out the growing armed resistance the Government took draconian measures. On the 20th July 1979 Jayawardane's racist regime enacted the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which contained the most infamous provisions that contravened the very principles of the Rule of Law and violated the norms of human justice. This notorious law denied trial by jury, enabled the detention of people for a period of eighteen months and allowed confessions extracted under torture as admissable in evidence.
Having enacted the law the Government declared a State of Emergency in Jaffna the northern Tamil capital and dispatched more military units to Tamil areas under the command of Brigadier Weeratunga with special instructions to wipe out 'terrorism' within six months. Empowered by law and encouraged by the State, the fascist Brigadier unleashed military terror unprecedented in its violence. Hundreds of innocent youths were arrested arid subjected to barbarous torture and several of them were shot dead and their dead bodies were dumped on the road side. Their oppressive measures caused massive outcry all over the world and the Terrorism Act brought universal condemnation by the world human rights movements particularly by the International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International.
Tigers step up guerrilla campaign
The political events that unfolded since 1981 involved massive genocidal onslaughts on the life and property of the Tamil community and increased guerrilla campaigns of our liberation movement.
On the midnight of 31st May 198!, the Sinhala police went on a wild rampage burning down the city of Jaffna This state terrorism exploded into a mad frenzy of arson. looting and murder. Hundreds of shops were burnt to ashes, the Jaffna market square was set on flames. A Tamil newspaper office and Jaffna M.P.'s house were gutted. The most abominable act of cultural genocide was the burning down of the famous Jaffna public library destroying more than 90,000 volumes of invaluable literary and historical works an act that outraged the conscience of the world Tamils. The whole episode was master minded by two Cabinet Ministers (Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake) of Jayawardane's regime who were in Jaffna during the riots and were supervising the orgy of police violence.
An island wide racial conflagration flared up again just three months after the burning of Jaffna, a racial onslaught on the Tamils organised by leading members of the Government, assisted by the armed forces, and executed by gangs of Sinhala thugs and hooligans. And again our people became the cruel victims of Sinhala racist barbarity; victims of insane sadistic orgy, victims of arson, looting, rape and murder. Hundreds of our people, including women and children were slaughtered, thousands of them made homeless and millions worth of Tamil property destroyed.
The repetitive pattern of this organised violence that brought colossal damage in terms of life and property to our people signified the genocidal intent underlying this horrid phenomenon. The objective of the chauvinistic ruling class is nothing other than to inflict maximum injury to the Tamils to terrorise, subjugate and destroy the aspirations of our people for political independence. Yet more and more the oppression intensified the determination of our people became more and more hardened with an iron will to resist the forces of repression. As the consequence of heightened repression the resistance of the freedom fighters increased with such a vehemence that it caused the destabilisation of the Sinhala state and disrupted the civil administrative system in Tamil Eelam.
On the 2nd July 1982 the Tiger guerrillas launched a lightening attack on a police patrolling party at Nelliady, Jaffna, killing four police officers on the spot. Three police personnel were seriously injured.
Another major incident of guerrilla attack that shook the Sinhaha police system was the successful raid on the well-guarded Chavakachcheri Police station. On the early morning of 27th October 1982 a Tiger guerrilla unit commanded by Lieutenant Lucas Charles Antony (alias Aseer) launched a well planned sudden attack on the Police station, killing three police officers and injuring several others. The rest of the police personnel fled in terror. From the Police armoury we raided thirty-three pieces of weaponary - nineteen repeater guns, nine 303 rifles, two sub-machine guns, two shot guns and one revolver. Two of our guerrilla members sustained minor injuries. This successful guerrilla raid forced the Government to close down almost all the Police stations in the North and the Police administrative system became paralysed.
On the 18th February 1983 our freedom fighters shot and killed Police Inspector Wijewardane and his jeep driver Rajapaksa of Point Pedro Police station. Inspector Wijewardane is notorious for Police repression in that area.
On the 4th March 1983 at Umaiyalpuram, Paranthan, our guerrilla fighters ambushed an army convoy and in the gun battle that ensued several army personnel were seriously injured and the rest fled in fear. In that ambush two armoured cars were damaged.
On the 2nd April 1983 the Tigers blasted the Jaffna Secretariat building by bombs. Just a few hours before a Government organised 'security conference' to discuss ways and means to crush the Tiger movement. The blast caused extensive damage to the building and destroyed all State documents. Several Government jeeps were set on fire.
On the 29th April 1983, the Liberation Tigers assassinated three prominent supporters of the ruling United National Party on the same day, as a warning to all Tamil traitors who supported the racist Government. Two of them were U.N.P. candidates for the local elections (F. V. Ratnasingham of Point Pedro and S. S. Muthiah of Chavakachcheri) and the other, S. S. Rajaratnam, a long time U.N.P. supporter, and the body-guard of lJ.N.P's Jafina organiser K. Ganeshalingam As a direct consequence of this action all the Tamil U.N.P. candidates withdrew from the elections and several Tamils resigned from the ruling party.
Tiger's Political Campaign Succeeds
Responding to a mass campaign launched by our movement the majority of the Tamil people hymn predominately in the northern province staged a mass boycott of local elections on the 18th May 1983.
Such a mass boycott of elections, unprecedented in the political history of the Tamils, constitutes a great political and propaganda victory for the Tiger Movement. The T.U.L.F. which defied the Tiger appeal, suffered an insulting humiliation and irreparably damaged its political image, when 90% of the voters in the North rejected the Party's appeal to vote. The boycott was called by the Tigers, who, for the first time, launched an effective popular campaign appealing to the people to shun the local government elections as a mark of disapproval and rejection of the racist State system that has imposed a reign of terror and repression against the Tamils.
V. Pirabaharan chairman and the military commander of the Tiger Movement in a statement widely circulated among the people called upon the Tamils to 'reject the civil administrative machinery of the Sri Lankan state terrorists and join the popular armed struggle directed towards national emancipation'. He also accused the reactionary bourgeois political Party, the Tamils United Liberation Front. as functioning as agents of the Sinhala racist regime and utilise the slogan of 'freedom' to win the elections.
On the day of elections (18th May '83) just before the voting started, time bombs planted by our movement exploded at five polling booths in the Tamil city of Jaffna causing panic and havoc among the armed forces. On the same day, an hour before the polling ended Liberation Tiger guerrillas opened fire with machine guns on the army arid police units guarding a polling booth at NaIlur, Jaffna, killing an army corporal and seriously wounding a soldier and two policemen. As a consequence of guerrilla attacks, the Government imposed a state of national emergency.
Reasons for the Recent Holocaust
The causality that underlies the recent holocaust is manifold. It is absurd to assume that our guerrilla ambush on the midnight of 23rd July 1983 that killed fourteen Sinhala soldiers and seriously wounded several others precipitated the calamity. Riots had already exploded at Trincomalee weeks before the guerrilla ambush. Aided by the military, masses of Sinhala hooligans went on a wild rampage at Trincomalee massacring innocent Tamil people and burning down their houses. Under the cover of Emergency and Curfew the military openly colluded with the Sinhala vandals in an orgy of arson, looting and murders.
An all out genocidal assault on the Tamils living in Colombo has been pro-planned by Sinhala fascist groups led by leading members of the ruling party. The recent outburst, unprecedented in its destructive horror, is therefore certainly an open manifestation of a genocidal programme hatched by the fascist leadership as the Hitlerian 'final solution' to the Tamil national question.
There are two basic reasons for the ruling Sinhala bourgeoisie to let loose a genocidal repression on Tamils. Firstly, to divert the mass attention from a deepening economic crisis brought about by a dependent neo-colonial economy which has reduced the Sri Lankan Government as a perpetual beggar to western imperialist aid-giving agencies. The popular resentment that has been accumulating from massive inflation and mass unemployment as a consequence of a disastrous economic policy has been constantly diverted and channeled as anti-Tamil hysteria. Secondly, the massacre of Tamils on a genocidal scale the Sinhala fascist ruling class always conceived as the only solution to the national question. Mass killings and massive destruction of property, these fascists wrongly assumed, may humble the Tamils and wipe out the Tamil national freedom struggle.