Sri Lanka History Tamil Tigers

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/blanktemplate/2008/11/2008111061193133.html

1948: Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, gains independence from British rule. Ethnic Tamils feel disenfranchised by the so-called "Citizenship Act" which denied citizenship to the Tamils and their descendants brought from India by the British to work on tea plantations

1956: Solomon Bandaranyake, then prime minister, enacts a law making Sinhala the only official language of Sri Lanka, alienating the Tamils. Peaceful protests by Tamils are broken up by a Sinhala mob and riots follow.

1957/65: Pacts are signed between the government and the Tamils giving them a measure of regional autonomy and freedoms in language and education, but the agreements remain largely on paper.

1970: New constitution enshrines earlier law making Sinhala Sri Lanka's official language and makes Buddhism the country's official religion, further alienating Tamils who are mainly Hindus and Christians.

1972: Ceylon becomes a Republic and is officially renamed the Republic of Sri Lanka. Velupillai Prabhakaran forms the Tamil New Tigers group to set up a separate homeland - the Tamil Eelam.

1975: Tamil New Tigers re-named Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

1978: LTTE proscribed as an illegal organisation.

1981: Riots in Jaffna. A state of emergency is declared.

1983: First guerrilla-style ambush by LTTE kills 13 soldiers. Rioting erupts, killing hundreds of people. About 150,000 Tamil refugees flee to India where Tamil military training camps are established.

1987: The Indian government cracks down on armed Tamil groups in India.
First suicide attack by LTTE kills 40. Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord signed and India agrees to deploy peacekeepers - the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), which quickly gets drawn into the civil war.

1990: IPKF withdraws from Sri Lanka. LTTE becomes the prominent Tamil armed group. Over 100,000 Muslims are expelled from LTTE dominated areas, many with just two hours notice.

1991: Rajiv Gandhi, then Indian prime minister, is assassinated by a female LTTE suicide bomber.

1993: Ranasinghe Premadasa, then president of Sri Lanka, is killed in a LTTE suicide bomb attack.

1999: Chandrika Kumaratunge, a former prime minister and later the first female president of Sri Lanka, is wounded in an assassination attempt during an election rally.

2002: Norway-brokered ceasefire between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government comes into effect. It holds for five years despite many incursions from both sides. A road linking Jaffna peninsula and the rest of Sri Lanka opens after 12 years.

2004: The LTTE splits. Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, also known as Colonel Karuna, commander for the Batticaloa-Amparai, breaks from the LTTE forming a pro-government outfit.

2005: The government of Sri Lanka and LTTE sign Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-Toms) by which the two entities agreed to work together to offer relief to the communities devastated by the Asian Tsunami. Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lankan foreign minister, is assassinated by the LTTE.

2007: After weeks of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan army takes back the LTTE-held town of Vakarai. LTTE air force attacks various Sri Lankan targets including Colombo airport. SP Thamilselvan, leader of the LTTE's political wing, is killed in an air raid.

2008: The Sri Lankan government formally withdraws from the ceasefire with the LTTE and renewed fighting erupts. Amid attacks and counter-attacks, Sri Lankan forces seem to gradually gain the upper hand.

2009: After months of the military consistently advancing against the LTTE, the government declares victory.

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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/18/tamil_tiger_leader_killed_sri_lanka

ANJALI KAMAT: Before we go into the future, can you talk a little bit about the history of the LTTE and of the chief of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who the Sri Lankan military is saying is now dead?


AHILAN KADIRGAMAR: Sure. When these acts of discrimination took up—came across in the 1970s, there were a number of armed groups that took up the armed struggle. The LTTE was one of them, and Velupillai Prabhakaran was the founder of the LTTE. And following the 1983 riots, so this major program where over 2,000 Tamil civilians were killed, these militant groups mushroomed, as thousands of youth joined these various militant groups.


But in the mid-’80s, in 1985, 1986, the LTTE decimated, they physically eliminated all the other militant groups, killing their leadership, massacring hundreds of fellow Tamil cadres, and claimed that they were the only sole representative. And Prabhakaran has always had a strategy of eliminating all other alternatives within the Tamil community. They also massacred the leadership—the parliamentary leadership, such as the Tamil United Liberation Front in the late ’80s. And they have consistently assassinated Tamil dissenters, dissident activists and politicians, to claim that they can be the only representative of the Tamil community. So, the construction of a traitor has been part of the politics.


And they also—you know, to match the might of the Sri Lankan state, they also developed suicide bombing. They were one of the first forces to start suicide bombing extensively in the world. They carried out assassination of political leaders in the south. And they even brought in women and children into their forces.


But they were mainly a military organization. They did not have a strong political wing, hardly a political wing at all. And their entire organization was built around the personality cult of Prabhakaran and a military structure.


So, in that sense, what we see now with the end of the war is, as reports claim, Prabhakaran has been killed, and the LTTE’s military structure has been destroyed. So, in that sense, I see it as also the end of the LTTE.


ANJALI KAMAT: Now, the LTTE has styled itself as the sole representative of the Tamil people. What’s your sense of the humanitarian crisis, tens of thousands of largely Tamil civilians who were trapped in this northern area for months, you know, withstanding shelling, fighting from both sides? Where are they now? What’s their future in the new Sri Lankan state?


AHILAN KADIRGAMAR: When the war escalated over the last couple years and as the LTTE withdrew into this small strip of territory, they also took, you know, anywhere around 250,000 Tamil civilians into that little territory and held them more or less as hostages, while the army continued to indiscriminately shell.


Now, over the last couple months, those 200,000 people, the bulk of them, have come out. They’ve been put in what the government is calling welfare camps, which human rights groups have described as internment camps, where they are boxed into barb-wired camps, and they don’t have free movement out of those camps. And then, of course, even over the last few days, with heavy fighting, civilians have been killed. Many of them have been maimed. There’s untold human suffering that has gone on over the last few months. And, of course, the LTTE also cynically used those civilians. They were shooting at civilians who were trying to flee.


Now, the question is, what’s going happen to all this particular population of the Tamil community, you know, 250,000 who are in these camps? When will they be resettled? A number of activists—you know, the human rights community is pushing for the timely resettlement of all these civilians. So, there needs to be pressure on that. There needs to be much more access by international organizations, such as the United Nations human—UNHCR, of ICRC, the International Red Cross, so that they can ensure that there are no human rights abuses of the civilian population and that there is timely resettlement.


ANJALI KAMAT: And finally, Ahilan, what’s your sense of what the future of Sri Lankan politics will look like? What’s the possibility for a democratic future in Sri Lanka? What are the ways of reining in Sinhala nationalism? And what are the ways of reining in, you know, what you have described in your article as a long trend of Tamil authoritarianism, as exemplified by the LTTE?


AHILAN KADIRGAMAR: Yeah. What the LTTE did in their claim to sole representation was to very much decimate the entire political leadership of the Tamil community. So, in that sense, it’s going to take some time for the Tamil community to rebuild a certain democratic political culture.


But it’s also important to note that, you know, the Tamil community is not the only minority in Sri Lanka. There is a sizable Muslim minority. There’s a sizable upcountry Tamil minority. This is indentured labor brought over by the British to work in the tea plantations. Now, any solution has to address the concerns of all the minorities. And there are also, of course, caste minorities. The question of women remains. There are rural people also in the Sinhala community. So, any political solution has to address their concerns.


And the debate in Sri Lanka has been around some form of a constitutional settlement that will allow for much more devolution of power to the regions, but also an interlocking mechanism where there will be power sharing at the center, such as a bicameral legislature. And then there has to be better access, in terms of education, to employment. Now the minorities have only a very small share in state employment.