'The Sri Lankan army has damaged the LTTE's military invincibility'

'The Sri Lankan army has damaged the LTTE's military invincibility'

January 23, 2009
Colonel R Hariharan (retd), who served as the head of intelligence of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka 1987 to 1990, analyses the war on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in an interview to rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.

The question often asked was, after Killinocchi, what? How significant was the fall of Killinocchi?

Killinocchi has three dimensions. Two dimensions are directly relevant to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and one of these is relevant to the Sri Lankan government.

First, the LTTE dimension. Killinocchi was promoted as the capital of the LTTE, on the basis of which it was trying to be on par with the Sri Lankan government in the 2002 peace talks. That was because they signed the ceasefire agreement and agreed to the peace process under the Oslo agreement. So, in a way the Sri Lankan government recognised indirectly the LTTE as the representative of the Tamil people. There were elected members of Parliament who are Tamils, but they were not there as part of the peace process.

So, the LTTE had built up a huge infrastructure to project Killinocchi as the capital with all the fanfare, judiciary, police, etc. It even had its own civil and criminal procedure courts. But it ignored the fact that they still had to depend on civil supplies from the Sri Lankan government.