June 25, 2007
Western Countries Cracking Down
on LTTE Operatives By M.R. Narayan
Swamy
New Delhi
The arrest of its senior most operative in Britain is the latest of
crippling setbacks Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have suffered in the
West, which was seen until recently as a safe haven for the deadly
insurgent group.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is facing an
unprecedented crackdown in countries ranging from the US to
Australia where it had over the years painstakingly built an
overseas empire to finance and arm its separatist campaign in Sri
Lanka.
Even as it fought to break up Sri Lanka's northeast, establishing a
state within a state, it used the Tamil diaspora and the freedom
available particularly in the West to generate financial and other
forms of support to sustain its costly protracted war.
The Western tolerance of the LTTE, Tamil sources say, seems to be
withering away. But even by the standards of what has taken place
since 2005 in several countries, the June 21 arrests in London of A.
Chrishanthakumar, more widely known as A.C. Shanthan, and an
associate are seen as a terrible blow to the Tamil Tigers.
Shanthan, a long-time associate of the LTTE's late ideologue Anton
Balasingham, is president of the British Tamil Association (BTA).
More importantly, he is the head of the LTTE in Britain, where the
group opened its first overseas branch in the 1970s.
A civil engineer by training, Shanthan, 51, was taken into custody
under the UK Terrorism Act, which bars support to any group dubbed
terrorist. The LTTE was banned in Britain in 2001. British
authorities also raided offices of LTTE fronts.
"Shanthan was a key person in LTTE," a Tamil activist in London who
did not want to be named told IANS over telephone. "His arrest will
affect Tiger morale. For years the LTTE was so cocky that it thought
no one could harm it in Britain, law or no law. That is over."
The London development came just two months after authorities in
France, where the LTTE has maintained its International Secretariat,
swooped on the Tigers, slapping charges of "financial terrorism" and
links "with a terrorist enterprise" against 15 men.
But it is the US that has hit the LTTE really hard. In April this
year, an LTTE activist was charged in New York with raising funds
for the Tigers and for arranging meetings in Sri Lanka between Tiger
leaders and American Tamils with backgrounds in engineering,
technology, weaponry and medicine.
Again in New York, eight Sri Lankan Tamils were arrested in August
2006 and accused of trying to provide material support to the LTTE.
Four of them reportedly met an undercover agent and sought to buy SA
18 surface-to-surface missiles, missile launchers, AK-47s and other
weapons.
The next month, at another American court, a Sri Lankan Tamil, a
Singaporean and four Indonesians were charged - after an elaborate
sting -- with attempting to buy night vision devices, sniper rifles,
submachine guns and grenade launchers for LTTE.
Far away, authorities in Australia cracked down on the LTTE in
November 2005, when Sri Lanka elected Mahinda Rajapakse as
president, questioning over 15 LTTE operatives and raiding offices
of LTTE front organisations and supporters' homes in Melbourne.
More arrests took place in Melbourne in May 2007 to check funding to
the Tigers.
LTTE suspects have also been detained in such countries as Canada,
home to the largest Sri Lankan Tamil population, Switzerland,
Thailand and Indonesia. Others have reportedly quietly put LTTE
activists under the scanner.
Tamil sources say there is a patter to the crackdown.
"My sense is that stopping LTTE funding is a policy priority now in
the West. So this sort of activity is likely to continue," another
Tamil activist who regularly interacts with Western diplomats said.
The LTTE's steady rise in Sri Lanka was accompanied by the growth of
its overseas network, both overt and covert. The Tigers used genuine
support to its cause as well as strong-arm tactics to raise huge
sums of money. The West was also a safe haven for its well-oiled
propaganda network. Until the late 1990s, the West hardly paid any
heed.
But post-9/11 and the steady collapse of the Sri Lanka ceasefire,
the West is discovering in the LTTE traits that until recently it
saw only in Islamic outfits.
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