A nice little bank that could be robbed

(This is a Catapult Thangavelu of Kappang Highway column written four years ago and published in Subidcham and Independentsl. In the last paragraph he observes that even the Wanni leaders do not know where the orders are coming from and at the time this feature was written there was much less known about Selvaraja Pathmanathan alias KP and hardly anything about a medico from the UK who is in custody in the US facing possibly a charge involving massive funds for the purchase of weapons and other military material.)

(April 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Old habits die hard. May be the followers of a murderous bank robber felt like doing what their leader did when he apprenticed as a killer beginning with bank robberies. While on a mission to drive the Muslims out of Muthur during the recent campaign, a few Tiger teenagers in uniform passed by a small bank in the town. Suddenly, they must have felt inspired to rob it. May be they needed a lot of cash for a mission they had in mind.

So they robbed the bank; that they returned to the camp has not been confirmed. Punchi Puli acca feels they are already on their way to Canada to seek refuge helped by their guardian angels in Muthur itself. The LTTE are not the only people handling alien smuggling operations. Among the top guys in the field in the Colombo Underworld is a Muslim and his agent in Canada is a Tamil woman.

These are the very people who claim to be the sole spokespersons of the Tamils in Sri Lanka and this is the very organization that prides in having a judiciary of their own and even a police force. If their leader had robbed banks around the time he was about the same age as these boys in uniform, it is no excuse that they should follow suit some thirty years later.

But then the Tamil Tigers are a unique entity and a law unto themselves, individually and collectively. No one else other than a Tiger has the right of existence but even the loyalty to Prabhakaran must be one hundred percent, rather total submissiveness.

The current LTTE campaign has perceived and unperceived dimensions. While it falls in line with their determination to provoke a war, there are other factors such as ethnic cleansing of the East of Muslims and Sinhalese. They have to get Karuna dead or alive and wipe out the TMVP, a task that they know is beyond them.

They also strongly suspect that the TMVP has infiltrated and Zoo-Paa was nearly kidnapped by Karuna’s men a fortnight ago; that was the claim. Since then he has not appeared in public and is known to be sweltering in another hole that is not tunnel-linked to Groundhog Hole. A Wanni wit has named it the Bandicoot Hole. Very soon, it is feared the Tigers will run out of holes.

Punchi Puli acca said that since the attempted kidnap failed, they blamed it on Karuna’s men. According to her, it was an inside job because there are people in Wanni who want to liquidate him; may be the Big Chief himself is behind this idea. The chances are that Zoo-Paa will be soon out of Wanni and he probably expects Norway to help him out of this nightmare situation.

Karuna’s men do not want Zoo-Paa because for them he is a miserable small fry in the Wanni pack. The Big Chief has been using him as a convenient front liner with the kind of connections he has in Norway via Erik Solheim and Canada through his brother. Zoo-Paa carries an impressive title as political commissar and both words are beyond his understanding let alone what he is supposed to do as they title deems. Whatever press statements he is supposed to make are all prepared well ahead by people employed in Wanni for this purpose. He thinks communalism is the philosophy of the communists!

A certain section in the LTTE hierarchy also wants the government to aerial bomb a certain area in Wanni especially on the fringes of Mulliyawalai. They badly need a major martyrdom to overcome a very worrying situation that has gone too far. The government should never get drawn into this trap.

The Wanni leaders themselves are not sure who is leading and where the orders are coming from since the last Oslo “untalks” in particular.

-Sri Lanka Guardian