On 2 January, the Sri Lanka armed forces brought the town of Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the Tamil Tigers, back under government control. The win was not entirely unexpected, as speculation that the military was attempting to recapture the town, which the government lost in 1990, was rife by November last year. LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran had, however, ridiculed Colombo's effort to capture the city, dismissing it as a daydream of President Mahinda Rajapakse. Yet Kilinochchi fell to the security forces within a span of weeks, with the LTTE's famed military machinery collapsing like a pack of cards.
What happened? How was it that an organisation once described as the most ruthless guerrilla fighting force in the world folded up so quickly? What explains the fall of Kilinochchi?
The answer lies in the Tamil people's changing perception of the LTTE. Unlike the reality in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Tamils saw the armed struggle as an extension of their political fight for equal rights, in the current context they were beginning to recognise the LTTE as part of an oppressive structure. In following his dream of supreme power in an independent Tamil Eelam nation state, Prabhakaran and the LTTE killed thousands of Tamil men and women who, though deeply committed to the cause of the Tamil people, did not espouse the LTTE ideology. Among others, Tamil intellectuals such as Rajini Thiranagama, Neelan Tiruchelvam and Appapillai Amirthalingam, as well as politicians of the calibre of Sam Thambimuttu and Yogeswaran, were all murdered.
With their cold-blooded killing of thousands and their subjugation of the organisations these individuals represented, the LTTE projected an aura of invincibility, instilling great fear in the Tamil fold. This fear drove many to blindly support any act by the LTTE, even leading some to inform on their neighbours for disloyalty to the group – encouraged acts that ultimately created an atmosphere of distrust akin to that of Nazi Germany. An absolute and abject culture of silence was soon built up within the Tamil community. Sullen and repressed, people began accepting LTTE diktat, not daring to disagree. In addition to this emotional burden, the LTTE also treated the public under their command with contempt: heaping taxes on them, instituting unreasonable laws (such as taxes on government and public servants, and even on items such as sand or bricks for construction or bricks) and forcing Tamils to perform numerous indefensible tasks, including providing a child to the organisation on pain of death.