Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3236030.stm

From a secret jungle base in the north-east of Sri Lanka, Velupillai Prabhakaran heads the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Mr Prabhakaran has shed his military image

He has a reputation as a fearless and ruthless guerrilla leader, and under his leadership, the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, have become a highly-disciplined and highly-motivated guerrilla force.

His organisation shows no sign of being defeated militarily by the Sri Lankan army, even though it is vastly outnumbered in its struggle for a Tamil homeland.

Mr Prabhakaran is reputed to wear a cyanide capsule around his neck, to be swallowed in the event of his capture.

He expects the same dedication from his troops, many of whom the Sri Lankan Government says are either women or children.

Enigmatic figure

Mr Prabhakaran inspires conflicting emotions in Sri Lanka - which reflect the divisions between the Sinhala and Tamil communities.

To his followers, he is a freedom fighter struggling for Tamil emancipation from Sinhala oppression. To his adversaries he is a megalomaniac with a brutal disregard for human life.

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Prabhakaran turned the rebels into a fearsome fighting force

--> E IIMA -->The Tamil Tiger leader seldom gives interviews to journalists, who are in any case restricted by the government from going into areas controlled by his forces.

His movements between his various jungle hideouts are the subject of great secrecy, and he is reported to have narrowly avoided assassination or capture on numerous occasions.

Born on 26 November 1954, in the northern coastal town of Velvettithurai, on the Jaffna peninsula, Velupillai Prabhakaran is the youngest of four children.

He was an average student, shy and bookish. He said in one of his rare interviews that he was fascinated by Napoleon and Alexander the Great, devouring books on their lives.

He was also influenced by the lives of two Indian leaders, Subhash Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, both of whom were involved in the armed struggle for independence from Britain.

Accused of killings

Angered as a teenager by what he saw as discrimination against Tamils in politics, employment and education, he began attending political meetings and practising martial arts.

He soon became heavily involved in the Tamil protest movement, and in 1975 was accused of being responsible for the murder of the mayor of Jaffna.

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Reports say the Tigers are still recruiting child soldiers

--> E IIMA -->That assassination was one of the first killings carried out by the burgeoning Tamil nationalist movement.

He was instrumental in the foundation of the Tamil Tigers around that time.

The killing of the mayor of Jaffna is not the only high-profile murder for which Mr Prabhakaran is the prime suspect.

He has also been accused by India of playing a key role in the murder of the former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991.

Mr Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber who, the Indians say, was acting on orders from Mr Prabhakaran.

It is alleged that Mr Prabhakaran wanted to avenge the Indian prime minister's decision in the mid-1980s to deploy Indian peace-keeping troops in Sri Lanka.

Despite the conflicting views surrounding Mr Prabhakaran, there is one point on which both the Sinhala and Tamil communities agree: he is the dominating force in the rebel movement, and without his consent peace in Sri Lanka will never be attainable. --> E BO -->

Saving Children from Mines

Unexploded ordnance and land mines put children's lives at risk in conflict affected eastern Sri Lanka. At UNICEF supported clubs children educate children on what to do if they discover the explosive devices

By Jens Laerke BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka

– One Friday afternoon, Varatharaj Thinesh was squatting on the ground in the small village of Murakotanchenai in an eastern district of Batticaloa, idly digging in the dirt with a bottle. With nothing better to do, he half-heartedly followed a discussion between some uncles and aunts nearby, and was just going about being a regular 14-year-old schoolboy with no particular plans for the afternoon.

Then the bottle in his hand scraped the rubber corner of an anti-personnel land mine and he came within a hair's breadth of losing life or limbs.

Now Thinesh sits at the very same spot educating friends from his Children's Club and other local children on the risk of mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO).

Thinesh is a child animator in a Mine Risk Education programme funded and coordinated by UNICEF in partnership with the Sri Lankan NGO Sarvodaya.

Thinesh was fortunate because he knew what to do when he realized he had accidentally unearthed a land mine which had floated into the Children's Club with the heavy monsoon rain. He didn't touch it, he didn't run away, he didn't panic – instead, he called on the grown-ups around so that they could alert the police and have it removed safely.

"Despite the mine I found, I do feel safe within the boundaries of the village because it has been cleared. But I don't know what is outside", says Thinesh.

 Message of caution

Mines and UXO do not respect any political peace agreements – once mines are laid or ammunition fired, they pose a threat for years, sometimes decades, to come. Mine clearance accompanied by Mine Risk Education can therefore take credit for the decline in casualties over the past years: The number of deaths and injuries in Batticaloa District has gone down from a high point of 31 in 2000 to 2 casualties in 2005. In Sri Lanka as a whole, the number of casualties has declined from 167 to 30 over the same period.

"I am happy that I can teach children something that they know nothing about but really have to be aware of" says Thinesh, who finds that his young audience responds well to the education. The Kanimoli Children's Club that Thinesh is member of is one of the 145 clubs in the 3 eastern district Batticaloa, Trincomalee, and Ampara affected by the war. In Batticaloa there are 40 clubs offering Mine Risk Education.

Today, Kanimoli has 60 members aged 6-17 years, but many more children from the area have already seen the educational mine risk programme. The program includes small drama pieces, with singing and dancing that engages children in the performance. It also raises awareness of the plight of children disabled by mines and UXO. First and foremost, however, it drums the message of caution into the young audience.

And caution is required in Murakotanchenai village which was deserted during the conflict, but re-populated after the ceasefire agreement in 2002. Next to the Children's Club is an army camp, a classic indicator that mines and UXO most probably are lying around.

Despite the obvious danger, Thinesh, his parents, and four brothers and sisters came back to the village after the ceasefire. They had been displaced by the war for most of the 1990s.

"We found around 15 mines and UXO when we came back, one of them on our way to school. My parents knew that this is a dangerous area - but this is where our house is", he explains before heading back to a group of some 30 children waiting in the club's yard for the day's programme.

source: http://www.unicef.org/srilanka/reallives_1712.htm?q=printme

Internally Displaced Children in Sri Lanka: Trincomalee

By Katey Grusovin

Minha (7 years old) sits in her aunt's tent in Al Tharique School in Kantale which has become an IDP camp for people displaced by the continuing hostilities in Sri Lanka's volatile North East.

Like most people fleeing from the Muttur area, she too had to leave with her family and only the clothes she was wearing at the time. She wasn't even able to collect her slippers and had travel to Kantale in her bare feet. Minha used to attend Grade 4 in Muttur. Remembering her school and friends she said, "My school will start in one week. I hope we can go back home soon, so I don't miss my classes." School was due to resume on August 14 but has been delayed for a week by the education authorities given the uncertain situation.

Agencies are working with local authorities to find a solution to get children back to learning as soon as possible. Al Tharique School is one of 66 IDP sites that have sprung up in the District of Trincomalee, It is currently housing a population of 6333 IDPs, mainly from Muttur Division. 997 of are children and 3843 are women.

© UNICEF/Shehzad Noorani

A girl child at the Ayesha Girls College IDP Camp in Kantale.

Sitting on the floor next to her sisters, a girl child read from a textbook she found lying around in the camp at Ayesha Girls College. Kantale in Trincomalee District.

Although most IDPs have been provided with some sort of shelter and other basic necessities like food and clothing by NGOs and local organizations - providing educational and psycho-social support still remains a major challenge. Most children do not have any textbooks or even toys to play with.

source: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/images/ibc_srilanka_dancing.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/sri_lanka_36012.html&h=140&w=200&sz=14&hl=en&start=44&um=1&tbnid=_Bj5HW8mgkPrYM:&tbnh=73&tbnw=104&prev=/images%3Fq%3DSri%2BLanka%2BChildren%2Bpeace%2B%26start%3D42%26ndsp%3D21%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Every day she dresses him for school in a crisp white shirt, even though they live in a sun-blasted, dusty camp in eastern Sri Lanka.

Sumeshan is five years old, born as the ceasefire between the government and the Tamil Tigers was signed.

He should have been growing up in a country at peace - instead he's a displaced person in Sri Lanka's continuing war.

Political statement

"We couldn't stay at home because of the shelling," says his mother, sitting in the long, low hut with a roof of tarpaulin donated by the United Nations that they share with dozens of others.

"We travelled by river and through the jungle for three days before we finally got here."

Monday, 26 March 2007, 16:14 GMT 17:14 UK

Whatever you may think of their goals and methods, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have always been innovative.

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Experts say the technology was rudimentary but effective

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It was they who refined the suicide bomber, and used them to devastating effect.

And what other insurgent groups can boast a naval wing? The rebels have boats armed with guns, known as the Sea Tigers.

Now they have confirmed what Sri Lanka's government had suspected for a long time - they have an air capability too.

The first mission of what the rebels are calling the Tamil Eelam Air Force, or TAF, took place overnight.

Two light aircraft - according to the government it might have been one - set off, presumably from a jungle airstrip in the north of the country, and flew south.

If they were detected they were not stopped.

Their target was the air force base at Katanayake, north of the capital.

They flew overhead and dropped several bombs, killing three airmen on the ground and wounding many more.

They also terrified passengers waiting for flights at the nearby international airport, some of whom described panic and chaos as people ran for cover amid the sound of explosions.

.. S IBOX --> ..> ..>

It's interesting, a bold effort... very Biggles Colombo-based defence expert

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As the air base echoed with the sound of machine gun fire the light aircraft turned around and flew back home.

The rebels have released photographs of the plane they said was responsible.

Pilots are shown wearing pale blue Tiger striped uniforms, in one shot grouped around the elusive rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

There is no shot showing the entire aircraft, but the Sri Lankan Government believe it to be a Czech-designed Zlin-143. One picture shows four bombs mounted underneath the fuselage.

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"It's a very basic system they seem to have put on their aircraft, very hit and miss," said one foreign defence expert based in Colombo.

"It's interesting though, a bold effort. To fly down at night and get back is quite a message to send. It's very Biggles."

Conflict-changing

The government says its air defence system was a success because the fighter jets housed in hangars at the air base were not damaged.

And there was nothing like the scale of damage caused in 2001, when a Tiger attack on the airport complex left half the national airline fleet in flames.

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Vellupillai Prabhakaran was pictured with the Tamil "air force"

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But the Sri Lanka Air Force has launched an investigation into how the planes got through.

And the police have also launched an inquiry.

A spokesman, citing the ongoing investigation, refused to confirm reports they were looking into the possibility that Special Task Force police commandos had spotted the rebel aircraft flying in the north of the country up to an hour before they struck.

Analysts believe the attack has opened a new dimension in Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war.

"It changes the conflict completely," said Iqbal Athas of Jane's Defence Weekly.

"For two decades the fight has been confined to the land and the sea. Now we see the emergence of the air capability of the Tigers. It's the first time they've demonstrated the capability that they can not only use it, but get away."

And he pointed out that army camps, the homes of important figures, and naval craft at sea have suddenly become more vulnerable.

'More to come'

The Tigers said this would not be the last aerial attack.

"It is not only pre-emptive, it is a measure to protect Tamil civilians from the genocidal aerial bombardments by Sri Lankan armed forces," rebel military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan told Reuters.

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The military said it prevented the attack from being worse

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"More attacks of the same nature will follow."

The air raid comes as the Tigers were seen to be facing setbacks on the ground.

In recent months they have been driven from many towns and villages along the coast in the Eastern province.

And one senior government figure has talked of defeating the rebels militarily within two to three years.

The government has long suspected that the rebels were trying to get aircraft, smuggling them in pieces to be assembled in their northern stronghold.

"It's not a new dimension," said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe.

"They were constructing a runway about two or three years back. During the ceasefire agreement they have brought all these things. This is the first time they have come and they were successful in putting the bombs.

"But they were not successful as per the plan that they wanted as they couldn't destroy any air force facilities. Definitely this is not a major threat and it will be neutralised." .. E BO -->

Friday, 15 June 2007, 09:13 GMT 10:13 UK

A panel set up to monitor a Sri Lankan probe into human rights abuses has warned the process will end in failure unless changes are made.

The International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) is worried about the involvement of the attorney general's department in the inquiry.

It has warned there are conflicts of interest by its participation.

The government has come under pressure over human rights as the country had slid back into civil war. .. E SF -->

'Lack of impartiality'

The report from international experts comes as Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa is in Geneva defending the country's human rights record.

The President's Commission was set up to look into a number of incidents that were blamed on the security forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels.

.. S IIMA --> ..> ..>

Monitors also looking into alleged Tamil Tiger attacks

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It includes the assassinations of politicians, and the killing of 17 workers from the French charity Action Against Hunger, which Nordic ceasefire monitors blamed on the military.

As part of efforts to make the inquiry transparent the international community nominated a group of experts to observe the process.

In their second report they have said they are concerned about the involvement of lawyers from the attorney general's department.

Abductions

The experts said they had "observed examples of a lack of impartiality", with counsel from the department stating "as fact matters which are controversial to the case".

The panel said the probe would end in failure unless independent lawyers are brought in.

The experts have also said they are concerned about the lack of an adequate witness protection programme, particularly amid many reports of abductions in the country.

The President's Commission has rejected the criticism from the experts saying it is satisfied the probe will yield results.

It also called for at least one member of the international panel to be in Sri Lanka to observe the proceedings.

Meanwhile Amnesty International has urged the president to ask the United Nations to set up a mission to monitor human rights in the country.

Ministers have previously rejected such a move, saying it would infringe on Sri Lanka's sovereignty... E BO -->

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6755749.stm

II.The Seeds of the Conflict and Earlier Efforts at its Management and Resolution

Despite the tensions and violence that have been a feature of life in post-independence Sri Lanka, there has been an irrepressible strand of pragmatism, which eventually helped in moderating the outcome of many of the very contentious issues. For instance, religious strife in the form of tensions and conflict between Buddhists and Christians-in particular the Buddhists and Roman Catholics-one of the most divisive factors in Sri Lankan public life for about 80 years or so beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century, has ceased to be a contentious issue in politics since the early 1970s. The point needs to be made, and as emphatically as possible, not merely that these religious disputes were principally among the Sinhalese themselves, between the Christians and Buddhists, and not between the latter and the Tamils, but also that religious tensions are only of very limited significance in the current conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils.

1956 saw the passage of the Sinhala Only Act in parliament. The Act made Sinhala the sole official language and was the catalyst for heightened tensions between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities that eventually resulted in ethnic riots that year and more serious riots two years later. The accommodation reached in language policy after the violence associated with the introduction of language policy reform in 1956, is significant. Modifications initiated between 1956 and 1978, through political necessity (in 1958) and a realistic adjustment to life in a plural society (1978), all but conceded parity of status to the Tamil language with Sinhala. The clauses on language in the constitution of 1978 reflected a recognition of an existing reality. The explicit reversion to parity of status to the two languages, which came in 1987 and 1988 as a part of a political settlement brokered by the Indian government, was also a recognition of this.

The bitterness underlying the controversies on employment is explained in part by the conflict between Tamils' traditional anxiety to maintain the levels of employment in the state services they had grown accustomed to under British rule and the attempts of Sinhalese to insist on what they regard as their legitimate share of it.

After independence, competition for posts in the public service increased, especially with the rapid expansion of educational opportunities in the Sinhalese areas. This greatly reduced the prospects of the Tamils in their traditional search for positions in government service. Over the next twenty-five years they would be overtaken in almost every sector of state employment and in the professions by the Sinhalese, overtaken but far from being overwhelmed. For a while they retained their advantageous position in some of the professions-medicine, law and engineering-but lost it by the early 1980s. This represented the intellectual capital of the past, carefully gathered, and protected and augmented but, in their eyes, not expanding rapidly enough to overcome what they saw as the disadvantages of the new policy changes which would adversely affect the next generation of Tamils.

Changes in university admissions policy have contributed substantially and dramatically to the sharp deterioration of ethnic relations in Sri Lanka in the last three decades, and to radicalising the politics of the Tamil areas in the north and east of the island. The crux of the problem was that the Sri Lanka Tamils who constitute no more than an eighth of the island's total population, had a dominant position in the science-based faculties of the then University of Ceylon at Peradeniya and Colombo. In 1970, for instance, the Tamils gained just over 35 percent of the admissions to the science-based faculties; in Engineering and Medicine it was as high as 40%. In 1970, the United Front coalition led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike introduced a fundamental change by instituting a system of standardisation of marks by language media at the university entrance examination. The effect of this was to place the Tamil students at a disadvantage in that they had to obtain a higher aggregate of marks to enter the university-in the medical, science and engineering faculties-than the Sinhalese. Thereafter, a district quota system was also introduced which gave weightage to students in rural areas and from backward communities. All this represented a departure from the traditional practice of selecting students on the basis of actual marks obtained at an open competitive examination. The Tamils, justifiably, saw this change in university entrance policy as patently and deliberately discriminatory.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the newly-elected UNP government changed this policy, and moved towards a more equitable university admissions system, a mixture of district quotas and merit, and affirmative action for rural areas-Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim. Nevertheless memories of the unilateral and discriminatory change in university policy made in the early 1970s still remain fresh in the minds of Tamils, although the policy has been changed, and despite the very substantial expansion of university places in medicine and engineering that has taken place after 1979 providing greater opportunities to students from all sections of the population. The Tamils' share of places in the engineering and medical faculties has varied from 35% to 25% since 1978-79, to very recent times when it has fallen to around 15%.
Next, there is the accommodation reached on one of the long-standing grievances of the Tamils, the distribution of state-owned land among landless peasants. Tamil politicians have generally claimed that the Sri Lankan state has used state-owned land as a means of changing the demographic pattern in what they-i.e. the Tamil politicians-call the "Traditional Homelands of the Tamils," primarily state-owned land in the Eastern Province. Researchers have shown how little validity there is in these criticisms, but advocates of the Tamil cause have persisted with them nevertheless and through sheer repetition these charges have gained widespread acceptance among Tamil politicians and Tamil scholars.

Finally, we turn to the most intractable problem of all-devolution of political power. Differences of opinion over devolution have proved to be altogether more difficult to resolve. And this was despite the great deal that has been achieved between 1980 and 1987 in establishing a second tier of government, a major political achievement given the failure of previous attempts made in 1957-58, and 1965-68. Politicians are caught between the Sinhalese electorate's deep-rooted suspicions about the political consequences of devolving more power to the provinces and the Tamils' insistence on transferring greater extents of power to the provinces or regions at the expense of the central government, their demands ranging from the creation of a large Tamil-dominated North-Eastern Province, to the establishment of a federal political structure with a weak centre and more powerful provinces or regions. This is quite apart from the LTTE's insistence on a separate state as a non-negotiable demand.

Those in the forefront of the Tamils' agitation for devolution of power have always been vague, deliberately or unconsciously, in the terminology used in their arguments, and the distinction between provincial autonomy, states' rights in a federal union, and a separate state have been blurred by a fog of verbiage, and obfuscation. The close links that were established in more recent times between Tamil political groups ranging from the TULF to various separatist groups, with the government and opposition in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, have naturally aggravated the situation, and more so the establishment of training camps in Tamil Nadu for separatist activists who made forays into the northern and eastern coastal regions of Sri Lanka from these. The result is that decentralisation, which was and should be, a purely Sri Lankan matter has taken on a cross-national dimension of which India's role as mediator in the political negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and representatives of Tamil opinion in the 1980s was the most conspicuous feature.

Pressure for decentralisation of administration is limited to the Tamils, and largely to the Tamils living in the north and east of the island, where they are either a majority or form a substantial minority. There is no pressure-on the contrary strong opposition to it-from other ethnic groups. Quite apart from the opposition of the Sinhalese majority to most schemes of devolution of power, the Muslim minority, especially those living outside the Eastern Province, have been deeply concerned about the dangers of their political marginalisation in a decentralised political and administrative structure.

One of the unfortunate consequences of concentrating attention on district and provincial units, and on supra-provincial units has been a neglect of one of the less controversial and more viable forms of decentralisation-local government institutions at the municipal and urban council levels and village council levels.


III . Towards Reconciliation and Reconstruction

As the analysis of earlier parts of this essay would show, one of the answers to the question of how it all went wrong in Sri Lanka, lies in the adoption of majoritarian policies to quicken the pace of changes that had already begun, in a short-sighted attempt to secure immediate gains-e.g. the language policy of 1956, and the university admission policies of 1970-71. Once opposition to these policies emerged, and it came soon enough in the first case (language reforms) in the form of ethnic tensions and riots, the attempts at modifications of these policies, or even a reversal of them, have proved to be much less effective in repairing the damage than they could have been. The attempts at removing grievances on a piecemeal basis, resorted to in the case of language policy from 1958 and thereafter in the 1970s and 1980s and in the case of university admission policies in the late 1970s and 1980s, have had less of a positive impact than was anticipated.

The first policy option then is to emphasize the inappropriateness of purely "majoritarian" decision-making in sharply divided societies. On the basis of the empirical evidence from Sri Lanka it would be true to say that the ethnic tensions have generally occurred whenever governments have either totally disregarded, or paid less attention than they should have, to the legitimate interests and concerns of minorities. After 1977 tensions have persisted or have erupted in violence despite the efforts of governments to take into consideration the legitimate interest of minorities, in devising new policies, or seeking a reversal of policies which have contributed to the current conflict. What this demonstrates is that in periods of prolonged ethnic conflict, it is extremely difficult to reverse a trend.

Second, where sharp cleavages exist in societies, political stability is ensured, if not guaranteed, by devising institutional arrangements giving minorities easy access to the highest decision-making processes. By doing so minorities would have sense that their opinions have been considered in devising policies, and in their implementation. Sri Lanka' record in this regard has been more constructive and imaginative than its recent history of the persistence of ethnic tensions and frequent eruptions of violence would lead us to believe.
Thirdly, where religious or linguistic divisions have deep historical roots, political stability could be ensured by a deliberate lowering of expectations on both sides of the divide. Just as a majority group who believe that they have been the principal victims of the imposition of colonial rule should resist the temptation to adopt policies that would hasten the redress of historical grievances, so too a minority group should desist from making exaggerated claims and demands. What is needed is a process of mutual lowering of expectations. Although the processes of government are then often reduced to a prosaic and humdrum search for areas of agreement between contending groups or factions within those groups, it has had the great benefit of keeping the peace in a sharply divided society.

* K M de Silva is Executive Director, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka and Emeritus Professor of Sri Lanka History, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

source: http://www.lankalibrary.com/pol/background.htm

source: http://www.lankalibrary.com/pol/let_down.htm