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LTTE terrorists to invest their millions in Human Rights orgs. |
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Toronto Star Newspaper Says Part of LTTE’S Ill-gotten Money Will be Spent in Lobbying and Investing in Human Rights Organizations
(by Walter Jayawardhana)
Toronto’s Star newspaper said that the new Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leader Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP, a most wanted man by the Interpol and wanted for the Rajiv Gandhi assassination in India is a man believed to be in control between US $ 1 billion to 5 billion of LTTE’s ill gotten money.
The newspaper quoting terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratne said in the coming months the LTTE is expected to spend part of that money in international lobbying against Sri Lanka.
The Star said, “In Washington, Tamil expats have formed lobby groups such as Americans for Peace in Sri Lanka and Tamils for Justice, whose efforts to curry favour with the U.S. government is led by Bruce Fein, a former lawyer in the Reagan administration.”
"This is how the Tigers are going to go forward," Gunaratna said. "They will be lobbying and investing in human-rights organizations, trying to convince foreign governments to pressure Sri Lanka to accept change."
The following is the full report of the Star:-
Sri Lanka's government spent much of the past quarter-century on the hunt for Velupillai Prabhakaran, the short, stocky leader of the Tamil Tigers whose death last month seemed to herald an end to the island country's on-again, off-again civil war.
Yet weeks after his shattered corpse was shown on TV, Sri Lankan authorities remain on the prowl, searching for Prabhakaran's shadowy successor, a man of whom there are few photographs and who has been on Interpol's most wanted list.
His name: Kumaran Pathmanathan.
The Sri Lankan government is pressing Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Laos to help find Pathmanathan, a long-time weapons buyer for the Tigers who has become Prabhakaran's anointed successor. Indian police believe Pathmanathan was behind the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Known within Tamil circles as KP, Pathmanathan seems to travel internationally with ease, thanks to numerous identities – authorities say he has used as many as 23 aliases – and, since no one really knows what he looks like, it has not been a problem.
Canadian police say the Tigers continue to raise funds in the GTA, Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona told the Star.
Fundraisers for the Tigers go door-to-door, pressuring residents to donate to their cause, and have also started extorting low-income workers such as strawberry pickers, Kohona said.
In all, the 54-year-old Pathmanathan is believed to control cash and assets worth between $1 billion and $5 billion (U.S.), Kohona said.
"If he's smart, he'll go retire on a beach somewhere," Kohona said in a phone interview from Colombo.
But hHe is unlikely to take the easy way out.
While Prabhakaran was the public face of the Tigers for decades, building a reputation for ruthlessness, Pathmanathan was the one who helped made Prabhakaran's grisly accomplishments possible.
Born and raised in Jaffna, Pathmanathan, 54, purportedly joined the Tigers in his twenties before leaving the country in 1983.
As the head of the organization's international fundraising and weapons procurement, Pathmanathan, who speaks fluent English, French, Tamil and Sinhalese, has orchestrated the purchase of surface-to-air missiles from Cambodia, assault rifles from Afghanistan, mortar shells from the former Yugoslavia, and tons of explosives from Ukraine.
It's unclear whether Pathmanathan is trying to rekindle and re-arm militants in Sri Lanka.
In an emailed audio file circulating in the Tamil community, he says, "The struggle of the people of Tamil Eelam has reached a new stage. It is time now for us to move forward with our political vision towards our freedom."
He didn't say in his message whether the Tigers would renounce violence. The Sri Lankan government isn't taking the chance that they won't.
Even with the war officially over, the military wants to add a further 100,000 recruits to the 200,000-strong army just to make it as difficult as possible for the Tigers to re-emerge.
Earlier this month, a shipload of relief supplies sent by members of the Tamil diaspora who were suspected of being Tiger sympathizers, was refused, even though the defence ministry admitted the donors had no "dangerous" intentions.
On June 18, Sri Lankan police arrested three Tiger cadres who allegedly were plotting to assassinate President Mahindra Rajapaksa.
Sri Lankan officials have spent weeks scouring laptop computers and documents found in Tiger bunkers, using the intelligence to target the terrorist group's overseas efforts.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the Tigers would likely shift their attention to international lobbying in coming months.
"The Tigers' base of operations in Sri Lanka is dismantled and disabled," Gunaratna said. "But their global network is still powerful."
In Washington, Tamil expats have formed lobby groups such as Americans for Peace in Sri Lanka and Tamils for Justice, whose efforts to curry favour with the U.S. government is led by Bruce Fein, a former lawyer in the Reagan administration.
"This is how the Tigers are going to go forward," Gunaratna said. "They will be lobbying and investing in human-rights organizations, trying to convince foreign governments to pressure Sri Lanka to accept change."
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