Sri Lanka: The Last Battle
Even seen from afar, the bloody end of Sri Lanka's 26-year old civil war is tragic and appalling.
Large numbers of sick, starving, shell-shocked Tamil refugees are being herded into government security compounds. The number of civilian dead caused by the government's final offensive against the last Tamil Tiger redoubt is unknown, but estimates run 6,000-10,000. The government in Colombo blocks all journalists and human rights group from the region.
It seems clear this struggle, which has cost 80,000-100,000 lives since the early 1980s, is over -- at least for now. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been crushed.
Standard wisdom has it that conventional armies can't win guerilla wars. But last week's defeat of the Tamil Tigers shows there are important exceptions to this general rule.
Russia finally managed to crush the life out of the Chechen independence movement after 18 years of cruel repression in which well over 100,000 Chechen civilians were killed by Russian forces. Totally isolated and ignored by the world, Muslim Chechnya's heroic battle for independence was finally snuffed out when almost all of its mujahidin fighters were hunted down and killed, and its population terrorized into silence by a thuggish regime of Moscow's Quislings.
Angola's anti-Communist UNITA movement fought for 27 years, as I saw myself while covering the bush wars in southern Africa. But after Washington decided that Angola's Communist regime would be a reliable supplier of oil, it abandoned old ally UNITA. Savimbi was betrayed and assassinated by foreign mercenaries (reportedly Israeli). UNITA, isolated in Angola's remotest regions, collapsed.
The third example was Ukraine in the 1950s. Its national liberation movement, isolated and unsupported, was ground down and finally exterminated by the Soviet KGB using the most brutal methods and mass intimidation.
I've followed Sri Lanka's bitter civil war between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils since it began. As with those endless disputes between Israelis and Arabs, Indians and Pakistanis, Turks and Armenians, I have great sympathy for both sides and watch these conflicts with deep sorrow.
Oppression of the island's 3.8 million Hindu Tamils by extremists from the 17 million-strong Sinhalese Buddhist majority, and demands for a separate Tamil state, sparked civil war. Britain planted the seeds of this conflict by favoring minority Tamils and putting many into plum positions, part of its standard divide and rule policy that has caused so many troubles to our day. Just look, for example, at Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.
Sri Lanka's Tamils are part of the ancient Dravidian race that once dominated India before being driven south by lighter-skinned Indo-European invaders. They are part of a rich, 2,000-year-old culture; Tamil is one of India's classical languages.
Sixty six million Tamils live in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and six million across southern India. Tamils are found from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean. Canada has one of the world's largest expatriate Tamil communities.
A portly Tamil militant with no military experience, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, founded and led a guerilla force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in a struggle for an independent homeland in eastern Sri Lanka. He soon became a renowned military leader, cult leader and even an unlikely sex symbol for Tamils everywhere. Tamil moderates seeking peace were caught in a crossfire between government forces and the ferocious Tigers. Prabhakaran ruthlessly wiped out all rivals and Tamils seeking compromise.
The Tigers, drawn from poor peasants and tea pickers, became one of the world's most formidable fighting forces, repeatedly defeating the heavily-armed Sri Lankan Army.
The Tigers were originally armed and financed by India, which sought to turn Sri Lanka into a protectorate. But Delhi finally turned against the Tigers and sent 80,000 troops to fight them. To everyone's amazement, the Tigers whipped the mighty Indian Army and forced it to humiliatingly withdraw from Sri Lanka.
As a former soldier and war correspondent, I marveled at the courage, determination and tactical proficiency of the Tigers, who even had their own tiny navy.
Their suicidal courage, use of suicide bombers, and attacks on civilian targets led them to be branded terrorists by many nations, including the US and Canada. Tamil Tiger expatriates became notorious for extortion and heroin dealing to finance their war. In 1991, India's late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was blown to pieces in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu by a female Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.
Tamils are not "terrorists," as Western governments and Colombo claimed. Nor are their opponents, the Sinhalese. Charges by Tamils that Sri Lanka's government is practicing genocide are untrue, though it has caused high civilian casualties. This has been an ugly civil war with constant atrocities committed by both sides. Aside from small arms, the Tamil's primary weapons were often bombs strapped on their bodies. This was a poor man's struggle against massive fire power and modern weapons. Civilians were targeted by both sides.
As the old saying goes, "war is the rich man's terrorism; terrorism is the poor man's war."
This week, the US and Britain criticized the Colombo government and demanded it cease military operations in civilian areas. The same US and Britain that just encouraged Pakistan's brutal attack on the Swat Valley that has so far created 1.5 million refugees.
The Tigers were relentlessly hemmed in by superior forces. Government forces finally cornered the Tigers on the northeast coast and ground them down with heavy artillery, tanks and air strikes. The Tigers fought to the bitter end until leader Prabhakaran was killed.
The Tigers were finally defeated because they ran out of maneuver space. Money, men and arms for the Tigers from the outside world had to run a Sri Lankan and Indian naval blockade. The world turned against Sri Lanka's Tamils.
History teaches it's imperative that Sri Lanka's government in Colombo avoid triumphalism or revenge and be magnanimous in victory. Tamil should be afforded a high level of autonomy -- as in India -- and ample power sharing in Colombo. There should be no prosecutions of Tiger leaders.
The bitter civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua that I also covered were eventually settled by wise and generous political concessions. Sri Lanka needs a similar process.
Unless Colombo is magnanimous in victory, it risks rekindling a low-level insurrection. India's 70 million plus Tamils are angry at the defeat and suffering of their cousins in Sri Lanka. Many are calling for Indian military intervention.
If Sri Lanka's Tamils are subjected to a Carthaginian Peace, there is a risk that India's millions of sympathetic Tamils could become the source of new woes on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka.
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Thank you, Mr Margoulis for an exceptionally objective and informed account of the history of the Tamil struggle. As you say, the world turned against Sri Lanka's Tamils. The world used the Tigers as cover-up for allowing Tamil civilians to be killed in return for political and economic favour from a terrorist state. I don't however, agree with you that the SL government was not involved in genocide. We will never know the truth of that unless there is an independent inquiry.
I don't expect Sri Lanka to give any equal rights to Tamils, not even the smallest concession. Why should it when the world doesn't care? The Tigers may have been defeated but the Sinhalese government will continue to use imaginary fears of their re-appearance as their excuse not to give Tamils their rights.
But now that it has finished the Tamils off, it will turn against Sinhalese--that's what terrorist states do. I wish it good luck too in playing off China, Russia, Pakistan and India against each other. It took three decades for Sinhalese to finish off a small insurgent army. I wonder how long before it becomes its own victim in today's Great Game.
This is a modern day invasion. The final target of LTTE was to make entire SL a Tamil Home land by wiping out all Sinhalese with the help of Tamil Nadu. Sinhalese don't have any more rights than the Tamils in SL. The Tamil racism evolved into seperatism and then to terrorism. The terrorism is defeated. Have you know anything more racial than "This is Tamil Home land. No other can live here. This belongs to Tamil only". They created a bogus history, cried non-exisiting "genocide" , cried bogus dicremination claims to justify thier cause. Lies have no future. Even the Tamil gods were with Sinhalese, because they know the truth.
Read what an educated well to do Tamil who lived in Sl South has to say now.
http://www
Read what an older Tamil who use to live in SL has to say
http://www
This is the TRUTH.
Have I known anything more racial than the statement "This is Tamil Homeland. No other can live here"? Yes. What about the Sri Lankan government's declaring of Sinhalese as the country's ONLY official language although it had citizens who speak Tamil, one the world's few classical languages that are still alive today? What about Buddhism made the state religion? What about the policy that Tamils must get 30% more marks than Sinhalese for entry into university? What about 1 million Tamils declared to be non-citizens in 1948?
Sri Lanka comprised Singhalese and Tamil kingdoms through history. Why are the Tamils not considered to be equal citizens of the country?
The Tamils fought for equality, not supremacy. Please don't project Sinhalese supremacy onto a community that has been marginalized and treated as less than human by Sri Lanka as well as the rest of the world.
As for accusations of genocide being false, please demand an inquiry to determine the truth of this. That is what Tamils want--an independent inquiry. Don't pass off government propaganda as truth.
My understanding is that the Tamil's conventional forces have been defeated; either the Tamil's will accept this defeat or will shift back to guerilla tactics. They still have a large diaspora and doubtless the ability to rebuild. Their choice will depend profoundly on how Sri Lanka treats the conquered.
Finally, someone that gets it.
Yes, thank you for saying this.
No guerilla movement can last long without foreign intervention of some kind. Ever. Look what happened to Spartacus.
Appeasement of power hungry terrorists does not work-----ever. After 25 years of negotiations with the Tamil Tigers and 25 years of the Tigers refusing to negotiate in good faith and genning up grievance after grievance to keep the war going, Sri Lanka just finally took action to end the misery. Maybe this could be a good lesson for Thailand which is fighting an Islamic insurgency, same for the Philippeans. Look what Russia did in Chechnya and look what Columbia did with the FARC.
Now maybe Israel will get the message.
The message is that the Tamils should not have compromised themselves by setting up separtist quasi-state without destroying the central government first and then helping to install a new government sypathetic to their cause. From then on it was an arms race between a weak state and a very very weak quasi-state leading to a conventional war which the weaker of the two was bound to lose. In other words, the Tamils were more effective as insurgents and should have stuck to it longer -- never giving the Sihnalese a chance to recuperate -- as long as was necessary until they achieved actual independence. Any future insurgents (Islamic or otherwise) would do well to learn from the strategic hubris of the Tamil Tigers.
If Israel actually believes that it can pull off a Chechnya-style campaign in Lebanon and Gaza, they are welcome to their madness.
They'd have to mount a massive invasion of Lebanon, complete with high casualties and missile counter-attacks they wouldn't be able to stop. Gaza would also serve as a death-trap for IDF soldiers, people who face obliteration typically fight harder.
How many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would Israel need to kill? Will it obliterate Beirut, as Russia obliterated Grozny? How long will Israel try to occupy Lebanon and Gaza?
Those who the gods will destroy they first make mad. . .
Apples and Oranges. Israel does not have the political will, nor the national will to lose 6000 soldiers in a few months like SL did. Israelis are a paranoid bunch with almost zero partiotism. The sole advantage Israel had during all its past wars against the regular Arab armies is that the conflict never actually took place in the homeland, but on Arab countries. Things changed rastically when the Israeli population got under the line of fire of Hizbollah in 2000 and 2006.
The general rule is, easy come, easy go. It's very easy for a nation comprised mostly of immigrants to simply pack their bags and leave, while it's next to impossible to uproot indigenous people without immense war crimes.
Spot on, and that's why the most likely outcome will be the "evaporation" of Israel. Some trends:
Since 2007, more Jews have left Israel than have come in. Some 700,000 to 1 million Israeli Jews live abroad, and a 2007 poll reportedly found that nearly one-half of all young people are considering leaving. Recent news reports say that 1 in 4 Israelis will leave if Iran goes nuclear.
According to the U.N. Population Division, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) will be home to 4.4 million Palestinians in 2010, but 10 million by 2048.
Palestinians in Lebanon number about 400,000, and their numbers are growing. Gaza: 2,407,681. Birth rate: 25.95 births/1,000 population.
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