Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa may have disarmed and destroyed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the island nation, but the truth is they are regrouping in every country where they live as refugees -Canada, the USA, UK, Australia and even in Tamil Nadu.
“Many former LTTE activists have been spotted moving around in Tamil Nadu. But outwardly there is no sign of any arms training and gun running as we had in the 1980s,” an official of the Intelligence Bureau told The Pioneer.The TE-SAT 2014 report published recently says that the LTTE has set up more than 300 madrasa type indoctrination schools in all European Union countries where there is a substantial population of Tamils from Sri Lanka.
“These indoctrination schools are known as Tamil Cholai and the curriculum has been devised to mould future suicide bombers and professional killers. Their main objective is to glorify terrorism and martyrdom and ferment radicalisation of Tamil youth,” said Ravinatha Aryasinha, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to UN in Geneva. “An estimated 20,000 Tamil students between the ages of 4 and 21 years study in these Tamil Cholais which are known by many other names. Many of these schools receive funding from the host Governments. But all these schools are administered directly by the LTTE,” said Aryasinha quoting the TE-SAT 2014 report.
Intelligence agencies do not rule out the possibilities of a link between LTTE and Arun Selvarajan, the Sri Lankan Tamil, who was arrested by the NIA from his Chennai flat last Wednesday. Selvarajan was caught for his links with the Pakistani ISI to whom he was providing information about sensitive installations like Madras atomic Power Station and Officers Training Academy at Chennai. Last month police in Salem had unearthed hand grenades and landmines bearing LTTE insignia from the district’s reserve forests.
What come as a shocker are the revelations by the Europol, European Union’s law enforcement agency handling criminal intelligence. According to the findings of the Europol, published as European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2014 (TE-SAT 2014), the LTTE networks remain in numerous countries and full efforts are on to rebuild its structures all over the word.
Three LTTE operatives who were wanted by the Sri Lankan Government for terrorism-related offences in the island nation had been held in Malaysia in May 2014 and were extradited to Sri Lanka. The Government of Sri Lanka was shocked when it came to know that these three hardcore LTTE terrorists had been designated refugees by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
He said all students in these schools are taking part in propaganda events organised by the LTTE and its frontal organisation. “Most of the European countries follow a policy of appeasing the Tamils because this ethnic group comes handy at the time of general elections to the Parliament of these countries. There is a large population of Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in many European countries, USA, Canada and Australia. This is the reason why the LTTE groups continue to get patronage from political parties in these countries,” he explained. Interestingly, Aryasinha’s specialisation is in ‘influence of diaspora on the foreign policy of host states’.
Lt-General Daya Ratnayake, commander of the Sri Lankan Army, had told The Pioneer in an exclusive interview in August 2014 that the LTTE is active and operating from other countries though he declined to name the countries.