Tamil Leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran Killed: The War in Sri Lanka is Over: Sri Lankan Americans Respond

The war between Sri Lankan government forces and the Tamil Tigers that has been fought for decades now is over. Of course the rebuilding and reconciliation process must begin, but the heaviest of fighting has now been completed. The Tamil Tigers were one of the most brutal and tenacious groups this planet has ever seen. Famous for carrying cyanide pills around their necks, out side of the Muslim world they were one of the only groups to regularly use suicide strikes on their opponents.

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lankan troops won the final battle in a separatist conflict seen as one of the world's most intractable wars, and put the island nation under government control for the first time since 1983, the military said.

In the climactic final gun battle, special forces troops killed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran as he tried to flee the war zone in an ambulance early on Monday, state television reported.

LTTE intelligence chief Pottu Amman and Soosai, head of the "Sea Tiger" naval wing, were also believed killed, the report said. Prabhakaran founded the LTTE on a culture of suicide before surrender, and had sworn he would never be taken alive.

Army commander Lt-Gen. Sarath Fonseka said troops on Monday morning had finished the task given to them by President Mahinda Rajapaksa three years ago.

Near the end the Tamils were reduced to a pocket in the northern part of the island and using trapped refugees as human shields in an attempt to stop their final destruction, but the Sri Lankan government opted to crush the area leading to heavy fighting and civilian casualties:

Report from last Week--IT IS too late to warn of a civilian slaughter in north-eastern Sri Lanka. The “bloodbath [predicted] has become a reality,” said the UN’s spokesman in Colombo on May 11th, as news of the latest atrocity emerged from the crowded beach where the army and Tamil Tiger rebels are fighting their last battle. On May 9th and 10th 480 civilian refugees are reported to have been brought dead or dying to a makeshift hospital in the war-zone, victims of shellfire. A bigger number are alleged to have been buried uncounted in the sand. On May 12th and 13th the hospital itself was shelled, and around 100 people killed, according to doctors working there. The UN considers their testimony to be “consistently reliable”.

Interestingly enough, the defense chief who has prosecuted the war, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, is also an American citizen:

Asked whether he could not have prosecuted a just war more justly, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the defence chief, says the government had no choice but to use extraordinary tactics against a monstrous foe. Mr Rajapaksa denied they included extra-judicial killing. But he admitted that many Tamils had been detained and interrogated for extended periods. Most, he claimed, were operating as LTTE agents under false identities. “You can’t expect all the normal things that happen in a normal society because the LTTE are not like that.”

If this recalls the defence of water-boarding and other brutalities offered by America’s former government, it should. A former Sri Lankan army colonel, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is also an American citizen; and the government has often likened its war against the LTTE to America’s zero-tolerance of Islamist terrorists. To an extent, America and its Western allies have encouraged the comparison, by proscribing the Tigers as a terrorist group. Yet the Western powers, which face no threat from the LTTE and whose politicians are susceptible to skilful lobbying by the expatriate Sri Lankan Tamils who bankroll it, have extended their sympathy only so far. They have lambasted the government for its human-rights abuses and, in the case of the EU, Sri Lanka’s biggest export market, threatened to cancel preferential trade terms. Making matters worse, the government has used such criticism, levelled, it claims, by Tiger-hugging imperialists, to stir up Sinhalese nationalism. This has hardened domestic support for the war, but alienated Sri Lanka’s foreign allies.

Now the Tough Part:

For Mr Rajapaksa (President of Sri Lanka) to win over many Tamils would be tough. Yet if he is to turn military triumph into enduring peace, he must try. And in some ways, he has an historic opportunity to succeed. Crowned with laurels, he is expected to hold parliamentary and presidential elections within a year, and win thumping majorities in both. That would give him—and his three brothers with ministerial status—unprecedented power to transform Sri Lanka. Having removed the obstructive LTTE, or (remembering the restorative powers of the Tamil diaspora) at least crippled it, Mr Rajapaksa could preside over the emergence of a liberal Tamil polity. By implementing a policy of regional devolution, that has existed on the statute for two decades but never in fact, he would go a long way to meeting the basic political demand of most Tamils. Such steps would win Mr Rajapaksa global acclaim. Yet there seems worryingly little chance he will take them

They still have a long road ahead. Sri Lankans in America are meeting the news with a mix of happiness and nervous, the stalemate dominated the war for so long meant it was never discussed, now though, the happy balance might be overturned:

With the end of more than 25 years of civil war in Sri Lanka this week, the Sri Lankan diaspora on Staten Island that was able to enjoy the taste of home together without ethnic conflict is suddenly faced with divisions within their immigrant community

For years, whether they were of Sinhalese origin, like the owner of the Lak Bojun restaurant on Victory Boulevard, or part of the Tamil minority, like a doctor who has long relished the curries there, they counted each other as friends — and never talked politics.

For Sanjeewa Wickremaratne, 40, the restaurateur, who served a dozen years as a captain in the Sri Lankan Army before coming to Staten Island in 2000, the news that the ethnic Tamil separatist rebels had been defeated was simply cause for jubilation.

“It’s really joyful because, to be frank, everybody was suffering for the last three decades,” he said on Monday afternoon, when his restaurant was empty. “It’s peace for everybody.”

He dismissed the history of oppression that drove many Tamils from the country or into the ranks of the guerrillas, saying: “There was no ethnic problem. No race issue, nothing at all. Only a terrorism problem.”

But the restaurant’s longtime customer, Dr. Anantham Harin, had to disagree. His home was burned and his father killed by Sinhalese extremists in the riots and massacres of 1983, he said. And from the safety of the United States, he watched a tiny guerrilla band recruit Tamils from refugee camps “because they had lost their homes and their hope.”

For a long time, being a tiney minority forced the Sri Lankans of Sinhalese and Tamil ancestry to work together on the face of established groups:

And as so often happens in New York’s immigrant communities, the ties among Sri Lankans have kept ethnic conflicts in check. The Sri Lankan immigrant community — estimated at about 5,000 in New York City and 9,000 in New York State, New Jersey and Connecticut — has for 30 years, for example, held joint Tamil-Sinhalese New Year’s celebrations in April. They have played joint cricket games at August picnics sponsored by the Sri Lanka Association of New York, which has carefully rotated its presidency between the Sinhalese and other Sri Lankan ethnic groups, including Burghers and Tamils, as well as Sri Lankan Muslims, according to a past president, Pushpa R. Jagoda.

If they could only match that in Sri Lanka! Perhaps with peace Americanized Sri Lankans can help the people in their home country match the unity.

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