Sri Lanka: Ethnic Conflict, LTTE And Future
'It is now crystal clear that the Sinhala leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question. Therefore, we are not prepared to place our trust in the impossible and walk along the same old futile path…. We therefore ask the international community and the countries of the world that respect justice to recognize our freedom struggle.” This is the key sections of the annual Heroes’ Day statement delivered by the slain leader of the disabled Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), V. Pirapaharan. Serious Sri Lanka watchers would agree that such a statement represents not only the Tamil disappointments and distrust, but also it effectively exposes the duplicity of five decades old southern Sinhalese politics, which categorically refused to do meaningful political business with the Tamil leaders who represent the North and East Tamils. Moderates The Tamil Tigers, who mirrored the Sinhala political establishment in its dealing with dissent and pluralism, unquestionably are the deadly elements of the Sri Lanka society. Whether the Tamil Tigers, for that matter, violent Tamil nationalists are freedom fighters as they claim themselves or deadly terrorists as the Sri Lanka governments describe, history will answer it. My point here is that the birth of Tamil Tiger movement had roots in Sri Lanka’s history and its anti-Tamil agendas. It is important to point that there was not an overnight decision among the ordinary Tamils to approve the agendas of the Tamil Tigers: the failure of Sri Lankan polity to meet the demands of the Tamil moderates was a key foundation for the origin of the Tamil extremism in Sri Lanka. Instead of listening to the Tamil leaders and accommodating their reasonable demands, the Sinhalese ruling leaders of the time assaulted and stoned the Tamils and their leaders, and even hired the Sinhalese to become butchers to kill innocent Tamils and moderate leaders. One needs to realize that successive governments since 1956 controlled by the Sinhalese miserably failed to engage the Tamil moderates such as the Federal Party (FP).