On this day 14 years ago from Jordan, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced the final victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, ending a bloody war that had lasted 26 years.
On this occasion, the President of Sri Lanka cut short his visit and announced in a speech he delivered at the G-11 summit in Jordan that he was returning to a country “completely free from” barbaric acts.
The final victory of the government troops of Sri Lanka over the Tamil tigers was achieved after a major military operation carried out by the country’s army in the east of the island, which lasted four weeks. As a result of the operation, the Tamil militants blew up the remaining ammunition and gradually began to surrender.
Representatives of the Tamil Tigers admitted their defeat, announced their disarmament, and one of them told a pro-Tamil website: “This battle has come to a sad end.”
In a recent battle in which about 70 militants were killed, several senior leaders of the Tamil Tigers were killed, including the political leader of the Tamil Tigers, Balasingam Nadesan, and reports spoke of a mass suicide by about 700 of the movement’s insurgents. , and a representative of the Sri Lankan army said that 50 thousand civilians were in the conflict zone behind the rebels, now they are out of danger.
The UN said a recent military operation had killed 6,500 civilians and displaced some 200,000 refugees from the country’s northeast, and supporters of the Tamil Tigers staged several protests in European cities in April and May. .
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is a militant separatist group that is striving to create an independent Tamil state in the northern and eastern regions of the country, numbering 70,000 people.
The Tamil Tiger militants used guerrilla warfare against government forces and carried out terrorist attacks against military and civilian targets, including suicide bombings, and were able to kill high-ranking political and military figures in the Colombo capital. .
Among the most notorious attacks carried out by Tamil Tigers are the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasingh Premadas in 1993, with Western experts pointing out that the Tamil Tigers refrained from attacking Western tourists for fear of possible government retribution.
The Tamil Tigers reportedly had around 10,000 armed men armed with assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and flamethrowers, and had anti-aircraft weapons, armored vehicles and several tanks in their arsenal, in addition to their use. light aircraft, and managed twenty years before the last battle. From control over the entire northeast coast of Sri Lanka, they even set up checkpoints on the unofficial border line.
After the end of that brutal war, the situation in Sri Lanka stabilized, especially from an economic point of view, thanks to the transformation of the island into a tourist attraction with its picturesque beaches, as well as tea plantations and ancient cities.
Source: RT
