Stop Tigers or it will be your problem

The problems Sri Lanka is facing with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will become the problems of wealthier countries if more isn’t done to stop the group in countries like Cambodia and developed nations of the West, Foreign Secretary Dr. Palitha Kohona said.

“Terrorism is not an issue for one country. It is an issue for the entire sea of humanity,” he said. “Terrorism is a scourge that has to be eliminated wherever it might be found.”

“The LTTE has growing links with other terrorist organisations like the al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah,” said Dr. Kohona. The Tigers have its own Navy, merchant vessels and a small Air Force.

Countries like Cambodia and Sri Lanka need help in pursuing the group, Kohona said.

“We need expertise,” he said. “We need intelligence gathering assistance.”

The US, meanwhile, has listed the Tigers as a terrorist organisation. Earlier this year, US agencies disrupted a Tiger plot to smuggle high-tech weapons, missiles, ammunition and night-vision goggles out of the US. Undercover officers acting as State Department officials also caught operatives attempting to bribe them to have the Tigers taken off the US terrorist list.

Cambodian authorities recently broke up a human smuggling network run in part by the Tigers. The involvement of the LTTE in illegal activities in Cambodia came as no surprise to experts, who have watched the sophisticated insurgency transform in Phnom Penh since it began buying Cambodian weapons in the 1990s.

“The operations in Cambodia still exist to a great extent. However, it may not be focused in the same areas that it was focused in the late ‘90s,” said Shanaka Jayasekara, a terrorism researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The LTTE, no longer need Cambodia as a place to “mop up” old weapons, Jayasekara told VOA Khmer, echoing other interviews with analysts and government officials over several weeks.

Their weapons purchases are more sophisticated now, but the criminal infrastructure put in place in the early 1990s, when Cambodia was its primary arms bazaar, is still there, enabling drugs and human smuggling, credit card fraud and money laundering.

“The LTTE has been involved in the narcotics trade for quite some time. They have also facilitated human smuggling of the Tamil diaspora through some of the Southeast Asian countries,” Jayasekara said.

Cambodia authorities say in August they broke up an operation run in part by Tigers intent on smuggling up to 250 Pakistanis and Sri Lankans to Western nations and Australia.

The bust was an indicator that efforts from Sri Lankan and Cambodian officials to unseat Tiger operations in the country had not been successful.

The Tigers earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year by collecting money from Tamil immigrant communities.

Tamil expatriates live in many Western countries, including Canada, Norway and Australia.

A lot of money comes from these groups, either by choice or through coercion, experts said.

Meanwhile, the Tigers also earn money by running guns to groups like the Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group in the Philippines. And they smuggle Tamil people into Western countries.

This helps the Tigers fill their war chest and continue their fight against the Sri Lankan government, Jayasekara says.

“It’s a kind of a business opportunity for the LTTE. They make money out of it.

They also do it to take their key operatives to certain locations and place them in vital destinations so that their international network can be run more efficiently,” Jayasekara said.

At least two Tamil operatives escaped Cambodia’s August dragnet: Ranni Lerin and his brother, Lipton Lerin, who operated their human smuggling ring out of a cafe in Phnom Penh, authorities said in September.

The Cambodian Government made a public call to Interpol to help them capture the men.

Jayasekara said the flight of the two brothers likely has not halted the group’s activities, which are now being run by a man who officials know little about.

Officials say more needs to be done to rein in the Tigers, who have invented devices-including the suicide vest-and innovated techniques that reach Islamic terrorists.

(www.dailynews.lk)