Soviet-trained Tamils threaten U.S. ally

Monday, May 15, 2000

If Jaffna, Sri Lanka's second city and the cultural center of the country's Tamil population, falls to the insurgents in the battle taking place right now, it could be the ultimate crisis in a 20-year civil war. More than 25,000 seemingly demoralized government soldiers are penned down after a series of recent tactical and strategic defeats. Belatedly, outside powers are trying to head off a showdown -- at least one that would end with an independent Tamil state in northern and eastern Ceylon [as the island was known in British colonial days]. At issue are important geopolitical implications for the region -- and, although virtually ignored until the past few days by the Clinton Administration, for U.S. efforts to maintain peace in Asia.

The origins of the conflict lie in a complex ethnic and religious feud that goes back over centuries, between the primarily Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the country's Hindu Tamils. It also is replete with contradictions and betrayals on all sides. The insurgents, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE], ambitions go much farther than just a Tamil state in Sri Lanka -- they would include incorporating the 60 million fellow Tamils in south India.

The LTTE's origins go back to the 1970s when India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and segments of New Delhi's security apparatus looked the other way while Soviet-allied guerrilla organizations, including the PLO, trained Tamil cadre in south India. Even by the standards of such other kindred nationalist organizations such as the Irish IRA, the Basque ETA, the Turkish Kurds, the LTTE has waged a campaign of unmitigated terror and intimidation, against Sri Lankan Tamils as well as the Sinhalese and the government. There are more than a half million refugees from the fighting now in India, as a result of the fighting and ethnic rioting against the Tamils by the Sinhalese. It was an LTTE activist who killed Mrs. Gandhi's son, Rajiv, in a suicide attack while the former prime minister was campaigning in south India in 1991.

Although the LTTE is banned in India for this long string of terrorist acts -- including a recent failed attempt to kill Sri Lankan Pres. Mrs. Chndrika Kumaratunga as well as its successful assassination of Pres. Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 -- it is no secret that it has a large following among Tamils in India and the Tamil Diaspora overseas, including the U.S., who finance its arms purchases. Tamil members of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's coalition cabinet are said by the Indian press to be sympathetic to the LTTE. And Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, always something of a loose canon, has met with LTTE representatives and fought Indian naval career officers over policy concerning the traffic in arms and refugees in the region. By a combination of terror and intimidation and corruption, the Tamil insurgents have managed to keep their logistics lines open to south India, and, in fact, their recent successes are no small part due to their getting multibarrel rocket launchers of Soviet design and various national manufacture, perhaps including Indian.

Indian national governments -- as distinguished from the state government in Tamil Nadu state -- have opposed the Tamil independence demands. Many Indian observers see it as a threat to Indian unity itself. That is why India in 1987 brokered a settlement for a federal state in Sri Lanka granting the Tamils autonomy and sent in a peacekeeeping force. But negotiations for implementing the agreement broke down and the Indian army suffered heavy casualties under attack from the LTTE, withdrawing after two years in an episode that not a few have referred to as "India's Vietnam".

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhu has forced Prime Minister Vajpayee to promise publicly that he will not repeat this episode by acceding to Sri Lankan request for help in evacuating their forces, now precariously close to being cut off even by air. But the threat that Sri Lanka might go to Pakistan -- or even China for help -- has put the Indians on the horns of a dilemma. [It was, by the way, on a return from a visit to Sri Lanka that the current Pakistan chief of state, Gen. Musharraf, was barred from landing in Karachi by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, leading to the coup d'etat against the civilian government.] And as this is written, Indian naval forces are said to be giving "psychological" support to the Sri Lankans by maneuvers off the coast, and New Delhi has also suggested the possibility of "humanitarian" air drops to the more than 200,000 civilians in the area.

India, as well as the U.S., is said to have been behind the reestablishment of relations between Sri Lanka and Israel earlier this month after a break of several decades [brought about by agitation by Sri Lanka's small Moslem minority] in order to speed up access to munitions from Tel Aviv. Sri Lanka's Israeli Kefir fighters, bought earlier, are in bad need of maintenance and spare parts. The authoritative Hindu of Chennai [Madras] says new arms are flowing to the Sri Lankans from Pakistan, North Korea, and South Africa.

Whatever the immediate outcome of this battle, however, larger issues are at stake. What is at the back of all the geopoliticians' minds is the disposition of Trimcomalee, the site of an historic naval base on Sri Lanka's northeastern coast. It was Trimcomaleee, which was at the center of the Portuguese domination of the Indian Ocean in the 17th century and the subsequent British control of the region. One of the stumbling points in negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and the insurgents has been the disposition of this part of the Island. During the days of Soviet naval expansion in the late 70s -- when the Soviet fleet was being fueled at Gabinda in Angola by American oil companies operating under franchises from the pro-Soviet Angolan government, had access to the former British naval base at Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea, access to former American installations at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, and was going for a base in Portuguese East Timor -- Trimcomalee appeared a Soviet target through its collaboration with the LTTE..

It was the possibility that it might have become an American base as Sri Lanka moved toward the Americans in the 1970s that made India give the green light to the Tamil insurgents. [Sri Lanka was, incidentally, the only government in the region outside the Gulf States that permitted U.S. use of its airfields during the Gulf War.] Now -- the possibility of Pakistan, or its ally, China -- having access to the base as well as the political threat of an independent and radicalized Tamil state in Sri Lanka that must be giving Mr. Vajpayee and his friends nightmares in New Delhi. Nor can it be much of a comforting thought for Berger, the Clinton national security adviser, who has been pushing along with the State Dept. for a new American alliance with India as the coming hegemonic power in the region.

Sol Sanders is a veteran Asian correspondent and a former editor at U.S. News & World Report.