SLA exerts pressure on ex-LTTE members to act as informants after Easter attacks

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 April 2019, 23:12 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala Army in Jaffna is trying to set Tamils against the Muslims in the peninsula by attempting to recruit former LTTE members to work as informants. On Tuesday, more than fifty ex-LTTE members were instructed to attend a meeting at the SL Army's 512 Brigade camp at the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya in the city of Jaffna. The SLA officers were offering biscuits with a soothing talk, an ex-LTTE member who attended the meeting said. A former LTTE political division member openly stated in the meeting that he had joined the movement to serve the cause of the people and not to operate against any people. However, the SLA officers were attempting to turn the argument to their favour saying that the Tiger members knew their society well and it should be in their interest to serve the public interest by detecting the strangers, who were infiltrating to seek safe havens in the North.

The Emergency Regulations and the notorious PTA clauses would be used to intimidate them if they declined to attend such meetings, the ex-LTTE member said.

The SL military intelligence has been instructing the ex-LTTE members for similar meetings also in other places of Vanni.



In the meantime, the SLA search and cordon units were creating fear psychosis among the Tamil-speaking Muslims in Jaffna by claiming that the search operations were coming after complaints from Tamils.

The SL military deployed a paramilitary force, known as the Muslim home-guards, against the Tamils in the East during the times of war. The advice to do that was coming from the Israeli intelligence services which started to train the SL military intelligence on ‘counter-insurgency’ (COIN) strategy. The Israeli interest section at the US embassy in Colombo introduced the programme during the times of the presidency of the late J.R. Jayewardene (UNP) in the 1980s.

During the Cold War era, India leaning towards the Soviet Union was providing training to the Tamil armed movements as a measure to exert pressure on Jayawardene's regime to bring the US-friendly government in Colombo under its strategic control, which manifested in the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987.

Even though the sides and alliances change, it is the very same geostrategic access to the ports, which is the main game of the outside powers as far as the island is concerned.

The Eezham Tamils, who have witnessed how the geopolitical powers, locked in a race for strategic access, introduced and shaped the dangerous ‘paramilitary’ violence culture in the past, must be cautious of the current deception coming from the occupying Sinhala military, commented Tamil political observers in Jaffna.



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