The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam silenced their guns and vowed to lay down their arms for good, raising hopes of an end to the 25 year long armed struggle on the island nation of Sri Lanka. [WaPo]
Meanwhile Sri Lanka’s state television announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the LTTE has been killed in fighting with government troops. [TOI]
Many on the island nation believed that the war would never come to an end until Prabhakaran was captured or killed. Under his leadership, the LTTE quickly rose to prominence and became the face of the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka. However, for all their tactical brilliance, they failed to grasp the concept of public relations. For starters, the LTTE never made the metamorphosis from an armed rebellion to a political one. India started out sympathizing with the initial version of the Tamil rebellion because of strong sympathy for the minority Tamils, especially in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But that quickly changed following the IPKF fiasco. Prabhakaran effectively ended any Indian sympathy for the Tigers by orchestrating the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. After that, any Indian support for the Tigers was largely restricted to certain section and certain political parties of Tamil Nadu, largely for the purpose of vote bank politics.
The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent shift in the West’s policies towards terrorist organizations, effectively sealed the LTTE’s fate. Even in their last battle stretching over the last few weeks, the LTTE managed to turn international opinion against them for using civilians as human shields. It does not say too much about your public relations machine when the legacy you leave behind, is that of being pioneers of modern day suicide attacks.
As the nation of Sri Lanka celebrates it victory over the LTTE, they are faced with a simmering discontent among the nation’s minority Tamil population and a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions with the civilian causalities and refugees left by the incessant fighting. Hopefully, with Prabhakaran out of the way, perhaps the island nation can begin to cobble together a new beginning.
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