Sri Lanka and the LTTE

This destructive and unnecessary entire multi-decade long civil war is the sad result of racist discrimination and the vicious cycle that occurred after that. Sri Lanka is a lot worse off than before the crisis.

With all sorts of institutionalized discrimination against Tamils being set up by the new Sinhalese majority government upon independence, it's no surprise that the Tamils started forming political groups, which eventually formed a coalition to oppose all these changes.

When a minority is unable to get their rights through the legislative processes, they will resort to armed struggle, and that is precisely what is happening here. With nothing being gained from negotiations, a lot of Tamils have given up on politics and resorted to armed struggle. To make things worse, Vellupilai Prabkharan's LTTE took control of this by ruthlessly destroying the other groups and killing their leaders.

For a long time, it used to be like this: Sri Lankan military mounts campaign, gains back territory, then a internationally brokered ceasefire which the LTTE regroups, then one side would break the ceasefire and the LTTE would come back and conquer the territories, and then the cycle restarted. In short, a never ending vicious cycle.

From a military standpoint, the LTTE is a formidable foe for the Sri Lankan military. Having advanced weapons like thermobaric weapons and mini submersibles, and the use of unethical / unlawful tactics and methods, like hijacking commercial ships, it is no surprise that they are very capable indeed.

However, like quite a lot of other terrorist groups around, Prabkharan is playing his cards wrong. No matter what equipment they have or they carry out, there's no way that the LTTE can win militarily - it can't match the Sri Lankan armed forces if they really decide to fight them out. To add to that, the LTTE’s various atrocities against Tamil people, like killing other Tamil politicians, simply exposes him as a power hungry murderer, not a freedom fighter for the Tamil people.

The LTTE’s idea of peace negotiations as a rearming time might seem smart in the short term, but in the long term people realize that they don’t want peace and will go crush them totally at the next opportunity, like what is going on now.

The best effect that the LTTE can achieve has already been achieved: drawing the Sri Lankan government into a long drawn out guerrilla war like the Viet Cong did in the Vietnam War. However, nobody benefits anyway: it only makes Sri Lankans, regardless of race, suffer. The only person probably benefiting out of this is Prabkharan himself, relying on the bloodshed for power.

For the Sri Lankan government, they must realize that military might alone cannot solve the problem by itself, like as in previous campaigns. To end it once and for all, they must solve the root cause of the whole problem – the discrimination that the Tamils face and their poverty from all these years of violence. To do that, they would have to remove all these barriers as well as allow Tamils more participation in politics, to actually show them that politics is more effective than armed struggle. This would deprive the LTTE of whatever legitimacy it might have as freedom fighters. However, it is easier said than done.

With that, hopefully the Sri Lankan government can end this vicious cycle once and for all.