Trincomalee under new LTTE Guerrilla Threat

A group of 20 LTTE cadres who appeared last 12th in a resettled Muslim village east of Peraru Jungles robbed a large stock of dry rations and hauled them back in a tractor as the Sri Lanka Navy and Police detachment at Kallampattu in Kuchchaveli turned a blind eye.

The Tigers who are starving without food inside the Peraru Jungle, came in a tractor with its lights turned off around 7.20pm and went straight into three local boutiques at Vadarikulam Muslim village. 10 cadres surrounded one boutique while five others went to another. One lone Tiger took rations from the third. Two boutiques belonged to two Muslim women from the resettled village constructed by AHEAD NGO with CORDAID NGO funding. The other was owned by a Muslim man.

The Tigers then handed over thousand rupee notes to the boutique owners. One got Rs. 15,000 total, the other Rs. 10,000 and the third got Rs.1000 total. When villagers, who were earlier summoned to a meeting by the Kuchaveli Police to warn against this group of Tiger who, intelligence reports had indicated, had entered the Peraru East jungle, complained of the Tiger Team, the Police had handed over the case to the Navy detachment. The Navy, which withdraws its road picketing after 6pm, refrained from engaging the Tigers.

The Tigers are at least 70 guerrillas strong in this area and have apparently been starving without food for quite some time. They were forced to move from place to place by Navy Special Forces (SBS). The rations taken away by them were mostly canned food, rice, lentils and sugar. The boutique owners, in their statements to the Police have claimed that the Tigers paid only half the value of the goods taken away. If this is true, how three small local boutiques in this village had such large stocks remains to be seen. The manner in which the Tigers had walked straight into the shops suggest they had done their homework before 'shopping'.

This is a familiar pattern we have observed for many years in the East under Paduman and Karuna. The Muslim villages, which act as a buffer between government and LTTE dominated areas were frequented by Tigers for supplies. It was almost a small economy by its own merit in many sch villages. This allowed former LTTE Eastern leaders like Paduman and Karuna to maintain a small group of men, 'living off the land' for sustained guerrilla offensives, attacks in the south and to provide logistical support for small troop movements from Mulaithivu to Yala.

The combined failure of the security establishment in the area has already strained the relationship between the Police and the Navy. Trincomalee, like Colombo, has a special security forces coordinator to quell emergencies. But his powers are limited to the Town and Gravets area only.

The Vadarikulam village is only 2km from Kuchchaveli town. It is situated along the border of Thiriyaya and Kuchchaveli. Kuchchaveli is only 30km by road to Trincomalee Town. Along jungle routes, it is much closer. The Peraru Jungle is criss-crossed by gravel and cart roads built by NEIAP (North Eastern Irrigation and Agricultural Project) during the Cease-fire. These routes are now enabling the Tigers to move in large numbers in tractors and other basic off-road vehicles. Earlier this month, the Tigers were ambushed in Peraru West and North sectors. Now they have crept into Peraru East, which is ominous to Sinhala villages like Gomarankadawela and Thiriyaya for example.

Meanwhile the Special Task Force, after a series of failures to locate Tigers in Kanjikudiaru, have yesterday discovered an LTTE weapons dump inside Kanchanakudah jungle, north of Tsunami devastated Komari village situated along the Akkaraipattu-Potuvil road. The Tigers maintained a large base in the interior of Akkaraipattu at Pavattai before the east was 'cleared'. The cache of arms recovered included close to 100,000 rounds of T-56 ammunition and 4 25kg Claymore Mines.