The Ceylon News

The Tamil Tigers' air attack on Colombo is unlikely to herald a return to fortune for them [Reuters]

It will be tempting to assume that the audacious air raid on Colombo by the Tamil Tigers signals the start of a dramatic revival of Sri Lanka's deadly separatist group after a string of losses.

But the bombing, in the centre of Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city, which killed two people and wounded another 50, will not derail the military's relentless and ruthless push into rebel territory.

With just 100sq km of mostly rugged terrain still under its control, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) can expect only bleaker times as weeks and months roll by.

How all this happened is a remarkable story.

Seven years ago, the LTTE was on top, having scored spectacular military victories that forced Colombo to seek out a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire with the Tigers.

That was in February 2002, when Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE founder and leader, was the undeclared king of Sri Lanka's north and east.

Many Tamils argue today that Prabhakaran, now 55, should have used the favourable times to graduate from a military leader to a politician, for the sake of the Tamil community.

The safari suit that Prabhakaran traded for his military fatigues in order to address journalists in the northern town of Kilinochchi in April 2002 - his last press conference - gave an impression that he was ready to make a change.

But that did not happen - and with disastrous consequences.

Intransigence

As Colombo and the LTTE met around the world for six rounds of seemingly promising peace talks, Prabhakaran remained adamant that he would settle for nothing less than an independent state for the Tamils.

This amounted to political hara-kiri.

Ever since he stepped into the world of militancy as a young man in the 1970s, opportunity and luck helped Prabhakaran gain stature.

But by 2004, the good fortune appeared to be deserting him.

In March that year, Karuna, one of his closest lieutenants who commanded the entire eastern region of Sri Lanka for the LTTE, broke away with thousands of fighters to create a deep chasm in the otherwise regimented outfit.

Thousands of soldiers have been killed in the campaign Rajapaksa launched in 2006 [AFP]

Two months later, neighbouring India elected the Congress party, bringing to power the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, who Prabhakaran had widowed in 1991 when he ordered the suicide bombing of Rajiv Gandhi, her husband and former Indian prime minister.

No one realised then how the change in government in New Delhi would one day prove detrimental to the LTTE.

Prabhakaran refused to compromise, continued his use of assassinations to further his cause and moved to turn the LTTE territory in parts of the island's northeast into a de-facto state.

Lost efficacy

This undid the peace process, isolated its broker Norway (which many Sinhalese said was biased towards the LTTE), weakened the government that had signed a peace deal with him and eventually turned many countries against the rebel leader.

In the process, the LTTE's arguments about Colombo's political insincerity, some of them valid, lost efficacy.

The cold-blooded killing of Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's foreign minister, in August 2005 by a LTTE sniper, was a turning point.

Prabhakaran also told Tamils to boycott the presidential election in November 2005, thus ensuring the victory of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has become the LTTE's nemesis.

Prabhakaran's reasoning was that a Sinhalese hardliner would help widen the ethnic divide and further the separatist drive.

Even Tamils sympathetic to the LTTE admit that the boycott decision was his biggest political blunder after the Gandhi assassination.

Aid agencies say 230,000 civilians, mostly ethnic Tamils, are trapped in Mullaitivu [AFP]

Within a month of Rajapaksa's victory, Prabhakaran began provoking the military, which by then had teamed up with the breakaway LTTE leader Karuna.

In April 2006, a female LTTE suicide bomber almost blew up Sri Lanka's army chief, Sarath Fonseka, leaving him badly wounded.

He returned to his post with a vengeance.

Within months, the LTTE tried to assassinate Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother and the spearhead of Colombo's war against the Tigers. He also survived.

The end result was a hardened Sri Lanka, which decided to formally ditch the Norway-brokered peace process and go for the kill.

Provocations

LTTE's provocations sparked off a full-scale war in 2006 that the Tigers initially thought they would be able to win.

But luck was no longer with the man who had chased the dream of an independent Tamil state from his teenage years.

With crucial support from Karuna, the military won control of the entire eastern province in 2007 – after more than a decade.

The military went on the offensive in the north in 2008, spectacularly capturing territory after territory the Tigers had lorded over for 10 years and shattered the myth of LTTE's invincibility.

By the end of the year, Prabhakaran was on the run.

But the LTTE is not finished. It is down, but not out. Not yet.

Friday's bombing of Colombo by the LTTE air wing – it is the world's only insurgent group with planes - only proves that the Tigers will never give up.

Prabhakaran still has hundreds of guerrilla fighters, although cornered in a mainly forested region of the northern Mullaitivu district. While many are perhaps as fanatical as their chief, there are a significant number of child recruits.

No resurgence

It is apparent that the LTTE will never be able to bounce back to its golden days when it lorded over a large swath of land, commanding a state within a state.

In video

A look inside a camp for displaced Tamils

The military has made too many gains and seized massive quantities of arsenal, dealing crippling blows the LTTE will find it near impossible to recover from.

The global crackdown on the Tigers has also aided Colombo. It is now classified as a "terror group" in about 30 countries.

Even Norway has told the Tigers to sue for peace.

India, a key player in Sri Lanka, has gone to the extent of saying that LTTE has damaged the Tamil community and it should give up its weapons.

The LTTE does not have much of a choice.

Street protests by a section of political parties in India's Tamil Nadu state have not influenced New Delhi to lean on Colombo in support of a ceasefire, that most analysts feel would give breathing time to the gasping Tigers.

Sri Lanka is in no mood for any further talks with the LTTE and nor is it ready to halt its military onslaught.

So the LTTE will fight on with all its might.

In the process, the worst sufferers will be the mass of Tamil civilians still caught up in the war zone.

M.R. Narayan Swamy is Deputy Editor at IANS news agency based in New Delhi. He is the author of two books on the Tamil separatist fighting and writes regularly on Sri Lanka.

The daring but failed air raid on Colombo by Tamil Tiger's air wing appears to have given lie to the Sri Lankan army's lofty claims that
it has crushed the Tamil rebels and regained control of LTTE-held territory in northern Sri Lanka.

While the LTTE declared the 9/11 type attack ^ which killed two people and injured more than 50 on Friday ^ a successful suicide mission, the country's air force chief said it was a total failure as both the aircraft that tried to bomb Colombo were shot down before they could inflict any significant damage.
Analysts, however, said the attack wasn't just meant to hit the targets. They said the suicide mission by two

LTTE aircraft showed that the guerrilla group still had significant fighting capability, as well as the audacity and nerve to take the battle into the rival camp with an element of surprise.

"A key aim seems to have been to demonstrate that this is no time to call upon the LTTE to surrender or disarm," said Col (retd) R Hariharan, an experienced analyst on Sri Lanka. Several countries, including the US, European Union, Norway and Japan, besides India, have spoken of the LTTE laying down arms as a way out of the worsening humanitarian crisis created by the latest Lankan scorched earth offensive.

A day after its two Zlin-143 aircraft were shot down by anti-aircraft fire, attention fell on LTTE's claim that the mission was carried out by the 'Black Air Tigers', a term it used for the first time with reference to its air wing. Pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website reported that the aircraft dived into the Air Force headquarters in Colombo and the main military airbase in Katunayake, adjacent to Sri Lanka's only international airport, 35 km from the capital.

The web site also carried a recent picture of the two pilots, identified as Colonel Roopan and Lt. Col Siriththiran, with the Eelam chief V Prabhakaran ^ an attempt to disprove theories of his death.

The choice of legitimate military targets rather than a civilian one shows that the LTTE is keen to shore up its image even while demonstrating its capabilities. It is also seen as a signal to the Tamil diaspora that the war is far from over.

However, Sri Lanka's air force chief described the mission as a "total failure" as neither aircraft could bomb or crash into their targets.

"They didn't deliver any bombs. They were hit by our anti-aircraft guns before they could," said Air marshal Roshan Goonatileke. Looking at the quantum of explosives in the aircraft that was downed at Katunayake, it seemed to be a suicide mission.

Asked if the aircraft may have taken off from outside the country as most of the northern territory is now under government control, he said they had come only from the "small stretch of land" still under LTTE domination.
It is not clear why the LTTE chose to lose two of its aircraft and two trained pilots. The army has said it has captured at least seven airstrips of the LTTE, and believed its air capability had been largely neutralised. The Tigers use Czech Zlin-143 light aircraft, but the exact number of their fleet is not known. Sri Lanka feels they had three, and all have now been shot down. All missions have been undertaken at night. The planes fly low to avoid radar detection and maintain radio silence. They have an improvised delivery mechanism to drop bombs. The Tiger air raids have not inflicted any significant damage so far, but have served to inspire awe among their followers and fear among foes.

The government says that the planes were shot down before reaching their targets [AFP] Footage of raids by Tamil Tiger aircraft on Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city, have been released by defence officials. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have declared the "suicide missions", during which one plane flew into a tax office building, were a success. But the government said on Sunday that its footage, part of which shows a light aircraft flying into a building and exploding, proves the two planes were brought down by anti-aircraft fire. The planes probably intended to hit the country's air force headquarters and an air base during the attack on Friday night, government authorities said. "If they [the attacks] really worked, there wouldn't have been an air force," Keheliya Rambukwella, a government spokesman, said. Aircraft crash Officials said both aircraft were hit by fire and one crashed into the tax office building near the air force headquarters and exploded, while the second was shot down near the same base north of Colombo. Focus: Sri Lanka Q&A: Sri Lanka's civil war The history of the Tamil Tigers Timeline: Conflict in Sri Lanka Four people died in the attack, including the two pilots, and 51 people were injured. David Hawkins, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Sri Lanka, said: "It was a very embarrassing attack on the nation's capital, that two planes were able to cross most of the island without being intercepted along the way." He said the military confirmed it was aware that the LTTE aircraft had taken off, but was unable to locate them before they reached Colombo "because they flew so low and so slowly". The Sri Lankan government has stepped up its air defences, with police and military officials saying they expect more LTTE attacks as the group appears to be steadily losing territory to advancing government forces in the north. "This particular air raid has not come as a big surprise," Murali Reddy, a Sri Lankan journalist, told Al Jazeera. "The surprise element is only that the government, or the military, was not able to intercept these two aircraft between the north and the capital, but everybody was expecting some kind of action from the Tigers as they cling on to their last bastion in Mullaitivu." Defiant attack The government says it has the Tigers confined in an area of less than 100sq km along a coastal jungle stretch in the northeast. In video A look inside a camp for displaced Tamils But the Tiger's defiant air attack showed the fighters retain the ability to launch raids across the country, even while their ground forces are under attack. Reports of high civilian casualties in the conflict have prompted criticisms from human rights groups and the UN. Human Rights Watch has said that up to 2,000 non-combatants have been killed and has accused both sides of war crimes, calling on them to immediately stop "the ongoing slaughter of civilians". The UN also said that it was deeply concerned for thousands of people trapped in the island's northeast. Tamil video Al Jazeera also received footage from a pro-Tamil group that said it showed Sri Lankan government forces bombing a civilian safe zone. The group claimed the images, which showed dead bodies and distraught people, were scenes of the aftermath of a government raid in the country's northeast. The group's claim could not be independently verified. Government officials have told Al Jazeera that they stopped carrying out air attacks one week ago in order to protect civilians. Speaking at the end of a three-day visit to Sri Lanka on Saturday, John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, expressed concern about the heavy military presence at refugee camps set up for the more than 30,000 civilians who have fled the war zone. "I fear the reality is that significant numbers of people are still killed and injured every day in that pocket," he said. The LTTE is fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka's north, claiming Tamils have suffered years of discrimination by the country's Sinhalese majority. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the fighting since Sri Lanka's civil war began in 1983.