IMHO and LTTE Connection

By Hassina Leelarathna from Los Angeles, California

Indications of material support to designated terrorist group call for scrutiny

(September 15, Los Angeles, Sri Lanka Guardian) The ceaselessly protean LTTE has appeared in numerous guises, using various names, creating and molding the terrain to fit their agenda. TRO, White Pigeon, Illankai Thamil Sangam - are just some of its avatars. If shut down in one place, they rise up brimming with energy in another.

Along with the decline and fall of the LTTE, there’s been a flurry of activity in the US Tamil diaspora with their front groups and operatives hitting on all cylinders as they hastily reinvent themselves, taking cover under a plethora of names spun from their indefatigable acronym maker - USTPAC (United States Tamil Political Action Council) , APSL (Americans for Peace in Sri Lanka), and PEARL, (People for Equality And Relief in Lanka) to name a few. The current momentum is being played out at several levels, by several groups. One is pushing a political agenda, as was evident in the meeting Assistant Secretary. South and Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake had with a group of representatives from known LTTE fronts. Another is advocating a purported ‘peace and reconciliation’ plan even while another is accusing Sri Lanka of genocide’ and continuing old LTTE propaganda. Undoubtedly, it’s a byzantine network of organizations, but it’s the same people, the same agenda, and all roads lead to the same Babylon: Tamil Eelam.

Comprised of an army of Tamil expatriates entrenched in a sycophantic culture that follows orders obediently (most are ‘economic refugees’ trafficked by the LTTE), an illgotten booty estimated at nearly a billion dollars, and a well-oiled propaganda machine, this network is essentially the next frontier of the Eelam war. As terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratne warns: "Although the LTTE in Sri Lanka is dead, there will be efforts by the vast LTTE network overseas to revive violence. As long as support for LTTE persists overseas, Sri Lanka will remain under threat."

Central to that support, is, of course, fundraising. When freezing the assets of the TRO, the LTTE’s main fundraising and money laundering department, the US Treasury noted: In the United States, TRO has raised funds on behalf of the LTTE through a network of individual representatives. According to sources within the organization, TRO is the preferred conduit of funds from the United States to the LTTE in Sri Lanka. With the TRO banned, the mantle of ‘humanitarian’ fundraising appears to have fallen on a group that calls itself the International Medical Health Organization (IMHO). There’s nothing ‘international’ about this all-Tamil group which has effectively supplanted the banned TRO in the US and is suddenly on the radar as the beneficiary or organizer of several fundraisers held in the name of the IDPs. On June 13, the group held a fundraiser in Bellflower in Southern California and raised $13000, purportedly to build toilets at Menik farm, a very well known IDP shelter. Another IMHO fundraiser is slated for August 22 at the Ambassador theater in Pasadena, CA. More are scheduled outside of California.

The monies raised from these fundraisers no doubt amount to just chump change for an organization allied with the LTTE - which raised an estimated $70 million in tsunami funds alone (and used most of it to buy weapons). But such fundraisers are an opportunity for self promotion, anti- Sri Lanka propaganda, and establishing credibility. Just as the 2004 tsunami provided a bonanza to the TRO to raise and launder funds for the LTTE, the IDP situation (created by the LTTE when it took thousands upon thousands hostage in the last stages of the war) is turning out to be a sturdy milking cow for IMHO and others.

With post-war dust settling, the emergence of an organization with direct and indirect ties to a proscribed terrorist organization demands scrutiny, not just for the potential threat to Sri Lanka but from an American perspective as well. As a 501@(3) nonprofit, has it exercised the due diligence required to ensure its tax-free assets don’t fall into terrorist hands? Has it contravened US counter-terrorism laws? Has it knowingly provided material support to a terrorist outfit? Who are its players, who are its allies, where has it been and where is it headed?

The genesis of the IMHO, known as the Tamils Health Organization (THO), is in itself an indicator of its LTTE ties. It was launched on Nov. 1, 2003 as part of the AGM of the Illankai Thamil Sangam, a virulently anti-Sri Lankan LTTE front in the USA.

Among the four founders of the THO is physician Sujanthy Rajaram in April 2009 added her voice to that of the frenzied LTTE diaspora that was making a lastditch effort to save the trapped terrorist leaders in the Wanni by outrageous claims that the SL military was using chemical weapons. In an article titled ‘Medical Crisis in the Wanni,’ Rajaram not only endorses the falsified chemical weapons charge ( made by a pro-LTTE website called ‘War Without Witness in Sri Lanka’) she goes on to provide advice on what the Wanni victims should do to fight the effects of chemical warfare. The advice, all in English, was surely not for the benefit of the Tamil-speaking people who were at the time fleeing their homes. Strategically placed on the ‘Tamils for Obama’ site the purpose was clearly to create the kind of atmosphere of panic and urgency that grabs the attention of the international community.

The relationship of IMHO members to the LTTE/TRO, however, goes beyond the realm of propaganda antics.

A Lancaster cardiologist whose office address and phone number have been identified as a TRO center by the LTTE’s official organ, Tamilnet and in other documents, is also the IMHO’s California coordinator. The TRO (AKA TREO - Tamil Refugee Relief Organization) office on Heaton Avenue in Lancaster is the medical office of Dr. S. Sunder, IMHO California coordinator. The phone number used by the TRO is still being used by Sunder for fundraising and other activities of the IMHO, which raises the question of the TRO, designated a terrorist front whose funds were frozen in Nov. 2007 by the US Treasury, continuing to raise funds under a different guise. The advertisement for the June 13 IMHO fundraiser in Bellflower, that appeared in several publications, points to such with S. Sunder’s wife, Thilaka Sunder, being shown as one of three organizers and the same TRO phone number provided as her contact number.

Another IMHO board member of interest is San Ramon, CA, resident Jegan Thambaiyah who is also a member and one-time president of a group called Tamils of Northern California (TNC), essentially another pro-Tiger group. Counting just what it has declared in its tax statements, from 1999 to 2006, the TNC’s funds to the TRO totaled about $400,000.

In addition to funding the TRO, the TNC has carried out numerous campaigns on behalf of the LTTE. It was the TNC (along with Ilankai Thamil Sangam; Tamils Of Northern California; Tamil Welfare And Human Rights Committee; Federation Of Tamil Sangams Of North America; World Tamil Coordinating Committee; Nagalingam Jeyalingam) that took the US State Dept to court challenging the Patriot Act for criminalizing providing material support to terrorist organizations such as the LTTE.

TNC has steadily raised funds for the IMHO in the past and is continuing to do so, with copious borrowings from the LTTE propaganda machine.

It is also one of the groups that fought hysterically to get the international community to intervene in Sri Lanka to stop the war in May of this year and save the LTTE by petitioning for a "Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council on the Human Rights Situation in Sri Lanka."

The TNC indirectly provided other assistance to the Tigers when it funded an organization called the International Tamil Technical Professionals’ Organization (ITTPO), the parent of VanniTech - supposedly a high-tech computer training facility - which was opened in 2003 by LTTE political leader Tamil Selvam and other Tigers in Killinochchi. The ITTPO’s first director board included the head of the TRO’s USA office, N. A. Ranjithan, and Vimal Rajagopal, also identified by Tamilnet as a TRO operative. Ranjithan’s TRO office in Cumberland, MD, into which the TNC and other Tamil diaspora groups poured funds, was raided in 2006 by the FBI and eventually closed down as being an LTTE front in Nov. 2007 by the US Treasury. (The Tamil Foundation, another organization headed by Ranjithan, was designated an LTTE front earlier this year and its assets too are now frozen.)

In addition to the shared links to the LTTE with the TNC, the IMHO maintained a direct relationship with the terrorist group. It is a given that nothing could have been done in the Wanni without the approval and support of the Tiger leadership. Since its inception in 2004, the IMHO has partnered directly with the LTTE by way of a Kilinochchi-based NGO called the Center for Health Care (CHC) which operated almost exclusively in the LTTE-held areas. The CHC website contains photographs of a handful of token activities in the south, which, on closer review, turn out to be tsunami-related funding - a dental chair donated by the foreign NGO Direct Relief International and a mobile clinic on board the Dundee Mercy Bus funded by Australian donors.

With funding from several expatriate organizations, including IMHO-US, the CHC set up eleven health centers named ‘Thileepan Medical Centers’ in LTTE-held areas. The centers, identified by the CHC website as ‘primary care’ centers were manned by rural ‘medical practitioners,’ who provided the most rudimentary treatment. The centers were named after former LTTE political wing head Rasiah Parthiban alias Thileepan who died in 1987. When LTTE supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran was injured in an air attack by Sri Lankan forces I December 2007, he is said to have been treated at a Thileepan medical center at a hidden jungle location, an indication of the centers being used to treat not just civilians but militants as well.

To be continued

-Sri Lanka Guardian