Over the past three decades, the LTTE has been portrayed as a brutal organisation, with its structure, motivations and strategies all shrouded in secrecy. Some have rejected the force as politically bankrupt and irredeemably nihilist, while others have claimed (and continue to claim) it to be the only entity that has a chance of steering the political future of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Over the last few years, however, a greater degree of sober public analysis has emerged on the LTTE. This has been due to several factors: the internationalised Norwegian-led peace process; the no-war situation, in which dissident voices from within the Tamil polity were able to bring to light some of the inner workings of the Tamil Tigers; and also the split in the organisation, with its former Eastern Command being used as a paramilitary arm of the government against the LTTE. Few will disagree, however, that the Tigers have radically changed the security situation and the political landscape in Sri Lanka, mainly through its military strategies and guerrilla tactics. Indeed, the LTTE's growth and survival over the last 30 years were solely dependent on its singular focus on militarism. In this context, the organisation's weakening, caused by defeats on the battlefield over the last two years, become significantly more difficult to explain, as it is its subordination of politics to conventional military efforts that could well be the cause for its seemingly irreversible decline.
During the early years of the LTTE, in the mid-1970s, the force was made up of a small group of middle-class Tamil youths, who came mostly from the Jaffna peninsula. It was inspired by the 'hit and run' tactics that had been used by sections of the anti-colonial movements in India and in Ireland. Following on the early-20th-century legacy of the militant freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, the LTTE focused on assassinations in an environment conducive to urban guerrilla warfare, where bicycle-riding youths with pistols assassinated policemen and individuals labelled as 'traitors'. These attacks, largely restricted to the Jaffna peninsula, were financed by the looting of banks. Over the next several years, state repression in response to such armed activity escalated, including the introduction of draconian measures such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the abduction and murder of politicised Tamil youths, and the burning of the Jaffna Library. Subsequently, the armed groups, especially the Tamil Tigers, took on larger operations, such as attacking police stations and army convoys. At this time, the LTTE consisted of no more than 30 fulltime members, divided into cells.
It was following the July 1983 state-sponsored riots, in which more than 2000 Tamil civilians were massacred, triggered by the LTTE's attack on an army convoy that had killed 13 soldiers, that the Tigers and other armed groups mushroomed in size and number. Suddenly, thousands of youths joined them, along with broader political and material support from the Tamil people in general. The post-1983 environment, combined with the activities of armed groups with support bases in India, led the Sri Lankan Army to be pushed back to their barracks in many parts of the north. The hit-and-run tactics were transformed into full-blown guerrilla warfare, with the support of Indian training in camps in Tamil Nadu and financial support from expatriate Tamils in the West. This period also led to a dramatic increase in killings and torture within many of the armed groups, including the LTTE, as the militant leaderships attempted to control their quickly growing organisations amidst an environment of mistrust and fear.
Third actor
Combined military gains and attempts to put forward a joint coalition of the four major armed groups – known as the Eelam National Liberation Front, or ENLF – were short lived. Much of this failure was due to the LTTE, which decided to take advantage of the internal tensions within the other armed groups by moving to eliminate the competitors. This began in April 1986 in Jaffna, with the massacre of hundreds of cadres of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO). But such an internecine war necessarily weakened the military gains that had been achieved by the rebel groups. In May 1987, the Sri Lankan armed forces made rapid gains culminating in an attack on Vadamarachy, in northern Jaffna, known as Operation Liberation, only to be halted by pressure and outright intervention by New Delhi. While the training in India of the few hundred LTTE cadres was meant to be in guerrilla warfare, it was essentially training for a conventional army. This is significant, as the LTTE attempted to face Operation Liberation on conventional military terms for the first time, and could not withstand the significant man- and firepower, and particularly the air assaults, of the Colombo government.