LTTE desperate for cadres in North - report

Less than three years after it took on the Government with aggressive war mongering, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is desperate for fighters, an Indo Asian News Service report quoting Tamil activists and diplomatic sources said.

According to Tamil sources in the island’s Northeast, the LTTE is appealing to Tamil families to contribute at least one member each, irrespective of age and gender, to take on the advancing military, the report said.

It said: Amid continuously shrinking of Tamil Tiger territory, the Norwegian-sponsored peace process is on hold in Sri Lanka with no signs of resuming any time now.

Western diplomats say that Norwegian facilitation will remain on hold as long as fighting rages. There is unlikely to be any advancement in the peace process in the near future.

Although Norwegian diplomats do not travel any more to LTTE areas, they are in touch with the Tigers through other means. Norway is also in close touch with India, which everyone agrees matters the most in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka knows it needs to keep India on its side. For the first time in a long time, India, however, does not seem to be making any bones about being neutral in Sri Lanka. Despite pro-LTTE noises in Tamil Nadu, India refuses to publicly criticise anything it feels is going wrong on the Sri Lankan war front.

On Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met an array of Sri Lankan political forces in Colombo, ahead of the SAARC summit.

Those he met included Tamil groups opposed to and sympathetic to the LTTE. To everyone he had one message: India would like democratic forces to prevail in Sri Lanka’s North-East.

Meanwhile, the refugee flow into India is manageable. New Delhi is also relentlessly pursuing the LTTE in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere so that it does not source war materials from India. This is music to Colombo’s ears.

The LTTE now controls about 4,000 sq km - or just six percent of Sri Lanka’s land territory. And the population under its control is said to be about 250,000 - a mere 1.25 percent of the country’s total.

This is a far cry from 2005 when it controlled a vast area in Sri Lanka’s north and east. However, soon after President Mahinda Rajapaksa took power in November that year, the LTTE took the offensive, stoking a war that rages to this day.

Military officials say that the LTTE’s ability to counter-attack in a major way has been seriously eroded over the past year. The loss of the East has meant that the LTTE has lost valuable training ground and a region where it recruited cadres to wage war.

While Sri Lankan leaders admit that it will be impossible to crush the LTTE as long as a sense of Tamil nationalism exists, the LTTE appears to be on the retreat in the North. But those who have known the LTTE warn that it will not give up, come what may.

Colombo certainly thinks it is winning the war. And although the pro-LTTE media makes noises about the need for a dialogue, there is no guarantee the LTTE wants that.

IANS