By M K Bhadrakumar Equally, they are fantastic practitioners of diplomacy. We suspect that they may in fact have an edge over us on this front, for, unlike us who are dissimulating from day to day as if we're a responsible regional power, and dissipating our energies in pastimes such as hunting down Somali pirates in distant seas, they are a highly focused lot.
They have the grit because they are fighting for the preservation of their country's future identity as a Buddhist nation.
Only last week, they showed their diplomatic skill by getting the Russians and the Chinese to stall a move in the United Nations Security Council to pressure them.
The Europeans fancy they can try the Sinhalese for war crimes. What naivety!
The Man Who Destroyed Eelam
Prabakaran had everything: territory, international support and committed fighters. Senior journalist SHYAM TEKWANI, who has covered the LTTE and Sri Lanka for almost three decades tracks the alarming rise and astonishing fall of a man who sought to live to fight another day, but found only death at the hands of his nemesis.
MEETING HIS MATCH
The other factor that led to his precipitous defeat is that Prabakaran did not count on the troika (the President, the Army Chief and the Defence Secretary) calling his bluff. His elaborate deceptions of invincibility had begun cracking — first, with the exit of Karuna and then by the steady inroads that the specially trained units of the Sri Lankan Army’s commandos were making. The chronic political oneupmanship in Colombo over the Eelam war between the two national parties — the UNP and the SLFP — which had contributed largely to the growth of the LTTE and the prolongation of the war, was contained by the Rajapakse administration. The Rajapakse brothers pulled out a page from the Bush counter-terrorism doctrine — niceties be damned.
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