Sri Lankan Tamil expats protesting in support of the LTTE in Canada before defeat.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels are trying to rise from the ashes of their devastating battlefield defeat, swearing off violence and pledging to transform their internationally shunned terror group into a democratic movement for Tamil statehood.
Their rebranding effort faces long odds. The Tamil Tigers' self-proclaimed new leader is a wanted arms smuggler, the group has no presence inside Sri Lanka, and the government has brushed off the remaining rebels as irrelevant. It's not even clear if anyone is really in charge of the tattered and demoralized group.
"There is no LTTE now, because we have totally destroyed their capabilities and their hierarchy," Media Minister Anura Yapa said, referring to the rebels by an acronym of their formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The rebels once controlled a shadow state across northern Sri Lanka backed by thousands of guerrilla fighters, a navy, and even a nascent air force. They were finally crushed by government forces last month after a quarter century of civil war and terrorist tactics.
In the final days of the battle, the military killed much of the Tamil Tigers' leadership, including Velupillai Prabhakaran, the unquestioned ruler of the group. His dispatch of hundreds of suicide attackers — whose victims ranged from former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to commuters in a train station — landed the group on terror lists around the world.
Now, nearly 300,000 ethnic Tamil civilians from the rebels' former stronghold are being held in displacement camps in the north as security forces sweep through the rest of the country searching for remaining sleeper cells.
But the rebels also maintained a vast international support network among the estimated 800,000 Tamil expatriates living in Canada, Australia, Britain and other countries. More>>
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