Tigers: Neither down nor out

by Maj. Gen. Ashok Kumar Mehta

(June 17, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Never before in the ongoing 30-year-long war have the Sri Lankan Security Forces (SLSF) been better placed to defeat the LTTE. This has come about by a combination of proactive political, diplomatic and military measures. The war has been categorised in four phases: Eelam War (EW) One (1983-87), EW Two (1990-95), EW Three (1996-2002) and EW Four (2005 onwards).

The turning point of the war was the split in the LTTE in March 2004, when the LTTE wing in the East under its leader Karuna defected to form an independent group aligned with the government. The Tamils in the east are different in habit and character from the Tamils in the north. Some of the LTTE’s best fighting units came from the east and its elite strategic reserves for the storming of Jaffna in 2000 after the fall of Elephant Pass were under Karuna. That they were never used is another story.

Once Karuna split from the LTTE in the north, the demerger of the north and east and erasing the concept of a Tamil homeland became an achievable goal. The Sri Lankan government (SLG) began working on this script as soon as the present President Mahinda Rajapakase assumed power in 2005 with the support of the right-wing Sinhala chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). As is its wont, the LTTE tested the political and military will of the new President by closing the sluice gates of a water tank in Mawil Aaru in 2006 depriving 30,000 Sinhalese in Trincomalee of water for their farms.

The battle of Mawil Aaru spread towards the east engulfing the Muslim-predominant Muttur and Tamil-inhabited Sampur, both south of the Trincomalee Harbour. Major battles were fought and lost by the LTTE in their last foothold in the east, north of the Verugal river in Trincomalee district. The capitulation in Sampur especially was a big blow for the Tigers as they lost their strategic control of the Trincomalee harbour. From Sampur they were able to interfere with the movement of shipping in the harbour.

The LTTE’s next defeat was at Vakkarai in early 2007 immediately south of the Verugal river, which is the boundary between Batticaloa and Trincomalee districts. The mother of all battles was fought around Topigalla, the biggest LTTE base in the east. The fall of Topigalla in July 2007 coincided with what Rajapakse triumphantly called the “Liberation and reawakening of the east”. Without Karuna/Pillayan, none of this would have been possible.

The loss of the east forced the LTTE to regroup its forces into the three districts under their control — Mannar, Kilinochchi and Mullaithivu, the last two comprising the heart of the Wanni jungles. For the LTTE the situation was similar to, but worse than, that during November 1987 after the Tigers were defeated by IPKF in Jaffna. They pulled out of the Jaffna peninsula and built a new citadel in the Wanni. The difference now is that they have no fallback base in the east and are hemmed in between SLSF in the north and the east. The Wanni defences were prepared in the late 1980s to fight the IPKF and have no doubt been significantly fortified.

Two key developments choreographed by the government facilitated a favourable outcome of the military campaign. In late 2006, in response to a public interest litigation by the JVP, the courts held that the merger of the north and east in 1987 had been illegal. This demerger of the north and east was ratified on the ground by the military victory in the east. Karuna’s notoriety in extortion, recruiting child soldiers and other excesses in the east had become such a major international embarrassment for the government that SLSF engineered a split through a rival group led by Pillayan. Karuna disappeared, surfacing in a British jail on charges of a fraudulent passport.

Local and provincial elections in the east held recently were won by the local alliance teamed with Pillayan who was made the first chief minister of the Eastern Provincial Council over the head of a rival Muslim claimant. Rajapakse has been successful in manipulating the ethnic conflict into a “just war against terrorism” but the country’s record in human rights has plummeted. More importantly, he has turned power-sharing between Sinhalese and Tamils into one between Muslims and Tamils. Buoyed by the political and military success in the east, the war in the north has entered a bloody and critical phase. Rajapakse’s strategy is to defeat the LTTE in the north and hold elections replicating the east.

As part of its psychological war, the government has claimed several times in the past that the legendary LTTE supremo Pirabhakaran had been killed or incapacitated. Intelligence-driven targeted assassinations of top LTTE leaders have certainly increased but Pirabhakaran has remained elusive. The LTTE used to believe it was invincible and its leader Pirabhakaran immortal. Both convictions have been bruised though neither has faded. Even if Pirabhakaran is taken out by precision bombing or disease or sickness, LTTE as an entity will remain.

The contagion of dynastic rule has spread to guerrilla forces too. Pirabhakaran’s son Charles Antony, named after the outfit’s leader of Special Forces, who is an aeronautical engineer and commands the Tamil Eelam Air Force is likely to take over. Any transition in this monolithic organisation will not be entirely non-violent but the outfit will neither disintegrate nor disappear. Under a new leadership the LTTE can either opt for dialogue or keep fighting till they are in a better bargaining position. The balance of military advantage at present is on the side of the government.

The Tigers are fighting on the ground of their choosing with some of their best fighters, the hard core of suicide bombers and the air force, intact. They have already made good some of their losses in shipping and shortfalls in artillery and mortar ammunition. Rough equivalence will be restored once they acquire air defence weapons. The bloody nose given to the SLSF in the battle of Muhumalai in April and the precision of their suicide attacks in land and under water show they are neither down nor out. And there is life after Pirabhakaran.
- Sri Lanka Guardian