Sri Lanka Conflict - Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

A war that has been waged for more than two decades ensued between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka despite a Ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2002. The Ceasefire agreement was terminated by the government in 2008. The war finally ceased in May 2009 with the Tamils in defeat (Robinson, B. A., 1999; Government of Sri Lanka, 2008).

All the ministers of the Cabinet under Prime Minister Bandaranaike's rule were Sinhalese. In 1957 Bandaranaike announced that a major naval and air force base in Ceylon, which had been under the British for 150 years, had now been taken over by the Ceylonese. Thousands of Tamil labourers who had been employed by the British to work at the base lost their jobs. However, Bandaranaike did not offer any compensation or alternative employment to these thousands of Tamil workers, leaving them jobless (Rajasingham, 2001). These, among others, were some of the unfair treatment which the Tamil minority suffered under the pro-Sinhalese government.

In 1972, two new terrorist groups were formed as extensions to the original military movement formed by students in 1970, resulting in an escalation of violence due to the increase in terrorist activities. In 1974, the police blamed several acts of violence on the newly-formed Tamil New Tigers (TNT) of Prabhakaran. Bombs were thrown at a police jeep in port towns, injuring many. The first successful robbery blamed on Tamil militants took place in 1974 when 91,000 rupees was taken away from the Multipurpose Cooperative Society to Tellipallai. It was stated by a Tamil source that a group of youths were among the responsible for the robbery, while one published account attributed the raid to Prabhakaran. Around the same time one of the criminals involved slipped to Tamil Nadu and teamed up with a crowd from Valvettithurai that was camping in Salem. By the start of 1975, general strikes and other forms of protests were the order of the day in Jaffna. Time and again police cracked down on suspected militants whose number was slowly on the upswing. In 1976 the LTTE was formed - a terrorist group consisting of Tamils who campaigned for a separate homeland for the Tamils. Violence steadily escalated in defiance to the government (Singh, A. K., 2010).

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