The recently finished Future Minds display in Jaffna was a enormous success. It drew thronging crowds for more than a few days. The youth were cheerful and children frolicking. eagerness that people evinced in that fun filled educational and manufacturing occasion bore indication to the fact that the Taliban civilization the LTTE compulsory on Jaffna has given way to a self-governing way of life. The exhibition had been preceded by a pair of mass protests next to the LTTE in Jaffna.
This kind of community reply is analytic of the fact that the military has won over the northern public and the northerners are dehydrated for democratic system and a improved life which they opulently merit. It has also given the lie to the maintain that the LTTE still enjoys well-liked support and people are pending its return. Those who support terrorism from a safe coldness and wait for the LTTE to make a reply and turn that part of the country into a blaze are only eager against hope.
There is a fallacy that the LTTE is being under attack only on the military front. therefore it is claimed in some accommodation that Sri Lanka is attempting a military answer to the conflict and so the LTTE will stay alive the on-going military attack and continue to purpose as a rebel outfit. The quarrel that the government will have to talk to the LTTE at some tip is also based on this irrational way of thinking.
It is not only on the military front that the LTTE is life form fought. In the Vanni the carrying weapons armed forces are all out to beat the outfit. They have by now exploded many a myth that the nationalist lobby had used to lionise the Tigers. The LTTE is about to face the worst ever military defeat in the very heartland of its militancy. Prabhakaran having a Humpty-Dumpty kind fall is only a substance of time.
He lost Paranthan to the army yesterday and now Elephant Pass and Kilinochchi are very susceptible to a military assault which is about to occur. His mistake of defensive Kilinochchi at the expense of other deliberately important areas has enabled the army to reach the outskirts of Mullaitivu with family member effortlessness, and the loss of its main base on the Eastern coast will be unbearable to the LTTE, as it has already lost control of the vital littoral west of the A-9 highway totally.
The army won't stop at Mullativu and move northwards the length of the shore thus efficiently cutting off the LTTE's right of entry to the sea. In such an possibility, Prabhakaran will find himself hostility on more than a few fronts in a surrounded by land area. The fiercely fought battle for Kilinochchi won't leave the LTTE with so many cadres for prospect battles.
The LTTE has also got a severe beating on the following front. It has ceased to be a factor in the Eastern Province government, though it is making a frantic effort to make its attendance felt through hit and run plans which it cannot maintain over a era of time without having a strong base either in the North or the East. The Vanni offensive will deprive the LTTE of all its remaining bases in the North. If the government sustains its development drive in the East and strengthens the newly formed PC by implementing the 13th Amendment properly, the eastern democracy will fully recover in record time.
The newly liberated areas are being developed fast. Rehabilitation of the A-32 highway will begin shortly and that arterial road will link the North and the South far more effectively than the A-9. Better roads, transport, education facilities, communication and so on will certainly deal a heavy blow to the LTTE, which created conditions similar to those in Pol Pot's Cambodia and made people go through hell by terrorising and exploiting them in every conceivable way.
A generation of Tamils the LTTE kept behind the iron curtain and brought up on a diet of racial hatred so as to maintain a pool of child soldiers and suicide bombers is beginning to enjoy freedom, which the Jaffna youth savoured during the past few days, especially at the musical shows which were part of the Future Minds programme.
Thus, it may be seen that there is much more to the on-going war than the military offensives in the Vanni. None are so blind as those who refuse to see the other prongs of Sri Lanka's anti-terror strategy and criticise her military campaign against terrorism.
What is needed at this juncture is not expending time and energy on some political pie in the sky. Over the past two and a half decades, all experiments with devolution have failed. Not even the Indian model took root due to the LTTE's intransigence. The LTTE has rejected, as the EU Parliament pointed out in its resolution to ban the outfit a few years ago, devolution at the provincial level (Provincial Councils), devolution at the regional level (Regional Councils) and devolution at the national level (federalism). What else remains to be offered to the LTTE? It is only a separate state!
So, those who are pressing for talks with the LTTE are, either wittingly or unwittingly, advocating Sri Lanka's dismemberment. If anyone is confident that the conflict could be resolved through a political solution without eliminating the LTTE, he or she ought to first get an assurance from Prabhakaran--and not from any lesser minion
like Nadesan--that the LTTE is willing to give up Eelam. The public mood in Jaffna as seen in the recent past is proof that the country's war against terrorism is paying dividends and the LTTE is fast losing whatever popular base it may have had in the North.
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