The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka
The complex and long-drawn war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) ended with the defeat of the Tigers in 2009. This book provides a military history of the conflict in tracing its evolution from a battle between a ragtag guerrilla force and a mainly ceremonial army to one between an organised guerrilla force with semi-conventional capability and a state military apparatus that had morphed into a large and potent force with modern armour, aircraft and naval vessels. Using a wide range of sources, this book offers an incisive analysis of the progress and conclusion of one of the longest and most destructive wars in modern South Asia.
Comprehensive and accessible, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asia, especially Sri Lanka, military history, politics, defence and strategic studies, as well as the general reader.
Channa Wickremesekera is an independent scholar and obtained his PhD from Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Best Black Troops in the World (2002) and Kandy at War (2004).
The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka
Channa Wickremesekera
First published 2016
by Routledge
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2016 Channa Wickremesekera
The right of Channa Wickremesekera to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-18311-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64605-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Victor Melder,
without whose generosity this book would have never been written
Contents
My thanks go to Kaushik Roy for giving me the opportunity to write this book and to Victor Melder for allowing me to use the vast resources of his library.
All maps are by the author.
Map 2Jaffna Peninsula (Maps not to scale)
Map 3Area under LTTE control at the start of the Wanni Offensive in 2007 (Maps not to scale)
Map 4Jaffna and North-western Wanni, the scene of heavy fighting in 200708 (Maps not to scale)
Map 5The Eastern coastline and the interior (Maps not to scale)
On May 19 2009, the long civil war in Sri Lanka finally came to an end. The Sri Lankan armed forces that had been steadily encroaching on the Tamil Tigers de facto state for more than three years eventually cornered the Tiger leadership and wiped them out. The war that had cost more than 100,000 lives and billions of rupees was finally over.
The crushing of the Tamil Tigers by the Sri Lankan Security Forces is a rare event in the history of counter-insurgency. The insurgency that had dragged on for nearly three decades and one that had frequently been dismissed as an unwinnable war had ended with the government forces annihilating the insurgents. The defeat of the LTTE was complete. Reportedly, the top three rungs of leadership were wiped out along with almost the entire hard core of the cadres. Thousands of captured or surrendered LTTE cadres were being carefully screened to detect any hard core sympathisers among them. To date, there is no indication that any leader of note had escaped.
For a war of such a long and tortuous course and such a complete conclusion, the war between the Tamil Tigers and the government forces in Sri Lanka has attracted little attention from students of military history. To date, only three full-length monographs, C. A. Chandrapremas Gotas War the Crushing of Tamil Tiger Terrorism in Sri Lanka,1 Paul Moorcrafts The Total Destruction of Tamil Tigers and Ahmed S. Hashims When Counterinsurgency Wins: Sri Lankas Defeat of the Tamil Tigers,2 have been written on the military aspects of the conflict. One may also include H.L.D. Mendiss Assignment Peace,3 which while being supremely informative suffers terribly from a lack of objectivity and an analytical touch, not to mention the depressingly ponderous style to be ranked as a study of the conflict. There is indeed a more substantial literature on different aspects of the war, such as Narayan Swamys biography of Prabhakaran, several monographs by Rohan Gunaratna and a growing literature on the Indian Peace Keeping Forces involvement in Sri Lanka. Edgar OBallances Cyanide War 4 is one of the earliest attempts at writing a narrative history of the war even though it covers the conflict only up to the end of the Indian involvement, while Tom Marks produced several articles on the first phase of the war based on first-hand observations in the war zone. There are also a number of memoirs written by former soldiers and officers and studies by academics and military analysts on different aspects of the military conflict. The arrival of the World Wide Web has also provided scope for a considerable amount of writing by professional and amateur analysts. However, the works of Chandraprema, Moorcraft and Hashim remain the only substantial efforts to cover the entire war.
This book aims to contribute to this meagre literature. Like the other major works on the war, it too will trace the evolution of this long, brutal yet fascinating war, but it will be a different history from the ones compiled by Chandraprema, Moorcraft and Hashim. The work of Chandraprema is primarily a biography of the former secretary to the Ministry of Defence, and due to this very objective, it falls short of being a history of the war. The works of Moorcraft and Hashim while being far more professional and objective in their approach than
