No locality can be free of shellfire if it houses military personnel and weaponry. When surveys of the war reiterate that concept today, they are misleading the world.
In repeatedly deploying the concept “NFZ” in its communications both the American ambassador and GSL boxed themselves into a corner. It was also a strategic folly because the Tiger command centres and, eventually, by April 2009, a substantial proportion of their firepower, were located in that area. The GSL proclamation, G above, was legally invalid because both parties to a war must agree upon such lines of demarcation. GSL, responding perhaps to international pressure and seeking diplomatic gloss, declared this coastal stretch, viz., the Tiger’s “Last Redoubt,” to be the Second “No Fire Zone” in mid-February 2009. kilometer stretch of coast from Puttumattalan to Vellamullivaikkal was also the hub of Sea Tiger operations and soon became the HQ command centre for Prabhakaran and his senior officers. By mid-February 2009 the numbers here could have been as much as 260,000 (a guesstimate) and accounted for the bulk of the corralled populace.į. This roughly 24-30 sq. Thus, as DBS Jeyaraj indicated as it occurred, some 20,000 people from the Mullaitivu locality were moved to the eastern coastal strip in Mullivaikkal as early as December 2008. That is only a part-truth that conceals a greater strategic objective in Prabhākaran’s thinking: t he people were also to serve as a defensive barrier on the coast to obviate the possibility of a GSL amphibious operation that would box in the LTTE and prevent any hoped/for rescue operation courtesy of some international intervention. So the LTTE engaged in an unprecedented act of international blackmail (see Pulidevan’s comment above).Į. As Ranil Wickramasinghe has recently insisted, the civilians were indeed “hostages” during the last five months of the war when they were all trapped within the “Vanni Pocket” in the north-east corner. Tent city on coast- Pic from UNPoE Report C ongested main road in Last Redoubt – -TamilNet, 29 March 2009 T ent locality, Last Redoubtĭ. Tamil people on the move– Pic from en., but also in HRW 2009 From early 2008 the Tamil civilian population had been persuaded & ordered to retreat ahead of the advancing GSL forces so that they constituted the wherewithal for this picture of “calamity” (presented as “genocide” in some Tamil circles abroad even at that stage). Therefore, from mid-2008 the LTTE marshaled its propaganda arms and its many allies (both willing and gullible) to develop a spectre of “an impending humanitarian disaster” in the regions it held.Ĭ. the LTTE was outgunned and outmanned and without its warehouse ships … and thus in danger of severe defeat.ī. By mid-2008 he would have seen the writing on the wall: viz. As Sivaram indicated, Prabhākaran had a capacity for long-term scenario-planning. However, four facets of the broad historical context must be stressed initially: (I) Prabhākaran had one goal only: Eelam and a separate state (II) the LTTE used two ceasefire periods in 19-06 as recuperating periods for renewal of their war effort (III) as Ben Bavinck and the UTHR reports have insisted, Thamilīlam under Prabhākaran was a fascist state and (IV) the Rajapaksa government which struggled for survival against the LTTE proved the validity of the Marxist dictum that there is an unity in any contradiction: it became distinctly authoritarian itself, albeit still populist in its self-convictions. The focus is on the period 2008-to-May 2009.
Eelam war ii series#
Harrison- Pic from Guided by a series of studies that I have indulged in over the years 2010-15, let me summarize my findings in point form. “ Just as in Kosovo if enough civilians died in Sri Lanka the world would be forced to step in” – Pulidevan of LTTE to a pal in Europe (quoted in Harrison 2012: 63). A fuller pictorial history can be seen in Roberts, Tamil Person and State.
Nor does it contain the illustrative maps and images that are a vital component of any survey … and which therefore adorn this article. Michael Roberts, courtesy of the essay in Colombo Telegraph entitled “ Down–to-Earth: The Hard Truths of Eelam War IV, ” which, alas, does not contain the vital hyperlinks.
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