Sri Lanka - Mission Accomplished?
[caption id="attachment_29" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="The body identified as Tamil Tiger leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, being carried through Sri Lankan troops."]
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When Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller and I set out a few weeks ago to cover what appeared to be the waning days of the 25-year conflict in Sri Lanka, we knew that the fighting could come to an end before we ever got our piece to air.
And so it did. On Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the LTTE, a militant group that has been fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority for nearly three decades.
Over the years, the war in Sri Lanka has received little attention in the US. It was a local conflict, and the US never really had a dog in the fight. That’s how it appears on the surface anyway. But dig a little deeper and you see that the war in Sri Lanka has had repercussions that extend far beyond the small island nation’s shores.
The LTTE are in many ways the original gangsters of modern day terror. They have been one of the most cutting-edge insurgencies the world has ever seen, and their tactics have served as a model and inspiration for terrorist organizations around the globe. Today, the Tiger’s influence can be seen from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of an increasingly fragile Pakistan.
Inventors of the suicide vest, the LTTE conducted more suicide operations than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. Innovators in international fund raising, they proudly boasted that they were the only militant group to have formed a navy and an air force.
But after Sept. 11, the mighty Tigers, who once controlled up to a quarter of Sri Lankan territory, quickly found themselves on the wrong side of history. And the once feeble government of Sri Lanka was emboldened by the Global War On Terror launched by the US and its allies.
We’ll examining this and much, much more in our piece, including if the conflict is truly over. We’ve seen at least one premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” since the war on terror began. Major combat operations in Sri Lanka may have ended, but there’s a lot of hard feelings and the long road of reconciliation still lies ahead.
[/caption]When Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller and I set out a few weeks ago to cover what appeared to be the waning days of the 25-year conflict in Sri Lanka, we knew that the fighting could come to an end before we ever got our piece to air.
And so it did. On Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the LTTE, a militant group that has been fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority for nearly three decades.
Over the years, the war in Sri Lanka has received little attention in the US. It was a local conflict, and the US never really had a dog in the fight. That’s how it appears on the surface anyway. But dig a little deeper and you see that the war in Sri Lanka has had repercussions that extend far beyond the small island nation’s shores.
The LTTE are in many ways the original gangsters of modern day terror. They have been one of the most cutting-edge insurgencies the world has ever seen, and their tactics have served as a model and inspiration for terrorist organizations around the globe. Today, the Tiger’s influence can be seen from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of an increasingly fragile Pakistan.
Inventors of the suicide vest, the LTTE conducted more suicide operations than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. Innovators in international fund raising, they proudly boasted that they were the only militant group to have formed a navy and an air force.
But after Sept. 11, the mighty Tigers, who once controlled up to a quarter of Sri Lankan territory, quickly found themselves on the wrong side of history. And the once feeble government of Sri Lanka was emboldened by the Global War On Terror launched by the US and its allies.
We’ll examining this and much, much more in our piece, including if the conflict is truly over. We’ve seen at least one premature declaration of “Mission Accomplished” since the war on terror began. Major combat operations in Sri Lanka may have ended, but there’s a lot of hard feelings and the long road of reconciliation still lies ahead.
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- groups:
- vanguard blog, VG-blog-MVZ, TERROR
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- tags:
- Terrorism, Terror, Sri Lanka, Tamil Tigers, 6 more
