Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam in a special letter to the United Nations General Assembly has asked to recognize the sovereignty of the Tamils in Sri Lanka as they did in Kosovo and East Timore.
LTTE has made this request yesterday, ahead of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksha's address to the UN's Head of States at the opening day of the 62nd General Assembly today. This was the first time LTTE has urged the UN to accept their sovereignty, after fighting with the Sri Lankan government's troops for more than three decades, which has left nearly 60,000 dead.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Tigers ask UN to Recognize the Sovereignty of Tamils
Posted by Defence Reporter at 8:57 AM 2 comments
Operation in Mannar
The Army launched a limited-scale offensive utilizing the 58th Division on Monday. Small teams of infantry, also comprising Commandos, have advanced between 800 meters to one kilometer into enemy areas and have captured an LTTE bunker-line. The Army has so far recovered 13 bodies of LTTE cadres. Casualty figures of the troops stood at 20 wounded and 2 killed as of today. The operation is still continuing left of the Yoda Wewa in the area between Uylankulam and Vankalai. LTTE has deployed an assortment of troops to counter the offensive including the 'Soothiya Regiment' comprising around 150 female cadres.
Posted by Defencewire at 8:27 AM 8 comments
Radicalized Violence: The LTTE
Generalized theories do not capture the pressing and important issues that are contextual and profoundly influence individuals and groups to engage in terrorism. Research shows that individual-level factors, from demographics (i.e., education and income) (2) to experience (i.e., exposure to repression or conflict casualties) (3) to personality (i.e., degree of introversion or extroversion, depression, or sociopathy)(4) do not sufficiently explain suicide terrorism. Often, poverty is cited as one of the main causes of terrorism but is a poor explanation for recent events of suicide terrorism.(5) The theory that suicide terrorism is primarily nationalistic and is aimed at coercing a foreign state to withdraw forces in what the perpetrators see as their homeland does not reflect the individual logic of suicide terrorism in most cases.(6) While the nationalistic argument of terrorism is valid in certain situations, it lacks currency in explaining the motivation of secular groups such as the LTTE in carrying out acts of violence and suicide terrorism in internal conflicts.
Most scholars agree that there is no “profile” for the individual terrorist. Indeed, experts who have interviewed terrorists and psychiatrists who have tested would-be terrorists claim they are “normal, competent” human beings who have radicalized, and genuinely believe in their cause.(7)
The real question, then, is: How do “normal, competent” human beings and groups radicalize? In secular groups such as the LTTE, the radicalization process takes place within the social, political, historical and cultural spheres. However, before convictions like suicide bombing can take hold, they have to be nurtured. The radicalization process of the LTTE therefore incorporates two distinct phases. The first phase of radicalization is the de-construction of traditional social, political, historical and cultural norms. The second phase focuses on violent radicalization and re-constructing new social, political and cultural norms and conditions to sustain and justify violence and suicide terrorism. Hence, this new ideology provides the moral justification for maintaining these violent activities.
Therefore, to better understand the LTTE and its violent radicalization the traditional social environments, cultural practices, customs, myths and native languages that has a profound influence in sustaining terrorism within the LTTE must be studied. Especially female suicide terrorism of LTTE, cultural history, caste, oppression and the status of women in traditional Tamil societies in the Northern and Eastern provinces of
1. Bjorgo, Tore. ed. Root causes of Terrorism Myths, realities and ways forward
2. See Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, “Education, Poverty, Violence and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?” Working Paper 9074, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2002. Available at
3. See Scott Atran, “The Genesis of Suicide Terrorism,” Science Magazine No. 299 (March 2003): 1534-1539.
4. Ariel Merari was the first to show this. See a review of his work and others in Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (
5. Pape, Robert. Dying to Win, The strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (
6. Robert Pape is the proponent of the theory that suicide terrorism is aimed at foreign occupation forces. Dying to Win, The strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
7. This is the prevailing view of the experts cited above. Bruce Hoffman originally claimed this, and that terrorists saw themselves acting out of “defense,” in Inside Terror, 1995. More recently, regarding Muslim terrorists in
8. The term female/s is used in this article. The LTTE recruits child soldiers some of whom are girls. There are no records of LTTE using children as suicide cadre. In the absence of any credible records to differentiate between women from the broader category of females, the author will be using the term female/s in the paper. In
Posted by defenceAnalyst at 1:53 AM 3 comments