Chapter 1 Sri Lanka

  Perhaps the 20th century was a century of national awakening and ideological confrontation for the whole world, under the intense collision of various political forces, there were constantly countries that had been colonized becoming independent or seeking independence.

  In the past, colonial powers such as Britain, France, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other European powers, due to their weakened national strength, were unable to suppress the independence trend of the colonies, and had no choice but to withdraw.

  But in order to maximize their own interests, the European powers adopted a strategy of sowing discord and division in the original colonies: that is, giving relatively small nations greater rights or territory, or intentionally adopting ambiguous strategies on the division of power to create misunderstandings beneficial to them between conflicting parties.

  Each colony often fell into a state of civil war, and because the two sides were evenly matched, such civil wars would often drag on for many years before subsiding.

  The root cause of the civil war in Sri Lanka also lies here: when Sri Lanka gained independence from its colonial overlord Britain, it deliberately elevated the political status of the Tamil minority, while the majority Sinhalese people later over-corrected and greatly suppressed the political survival space of the Tamils.

  To get back to the point, most of Sri Lanka's Tamils are immigrants from India across the sea. There are 60 million Tamils in Tamil Nadu, India. In the eyes of the Sinhalese, the Tamils are not guests who refuse to leave. Why should they be given power?

  This is the cause of the Sri Lankan Civil War: The Sinhalese consider themselves to be the true masters of Sri Lanka, they quickly took back from the Tamils the rights that had been given to them by the British and did not intend to share these rights with the Hindu Tamils.

  From the beginning of Sri Lanka's independence, Tamils realized that the hope for a political solution to their political and national rights was almost zero.

  The Tamil youth believe that the only way to regain their rightful place in the political mainstream is through armed struggle, and the ultimate solution to the problem is the establishment of an independent Tamil state.

  The civil war in Sri Lanka was brutal, with the Tamil Tigers growing from a small force to a powerful one, eventually controlling the Jaffna Peninsula where Tamils were the majority. The Sri Lankan government forces had the same problems as other armies in South and East Asia, resulting in low combat effectiveness.

  The largest supporters of the Sri Lankan Tamils came from Tamil Nadu in India, who crossed over to provide extensive support including funding and weapons, as well as medicine to the LTTE. No government military could quickly win against guerrilla forces that were able to receive full supplies.

  So the government of Sri Lanka had to ask for help from the government of the Southern Federal Republic, either by imposing a sea blockade or by sending troops to quell the rebellion.

  The government of the Republic of South Africa, on the other hand, has been extremely ambiguous in its attitude towards the Tamil rebel organisations. On the one hand, support for Sri Lanka's territorial integrity is a position that the government of the Republic of South Africa must proclaim and uphold.

  On the other hand, Sri Lanka's Tamils are pawns in their own right, helping the Sri Lankan government military to strike Tamil rebel organizations without getting anything that is obviously unacceptable.

  So, on the one hand, the government of the Federal Republic of South Africa provided necessary assistance to the Sri Lankan government forces, and on the other hand, it turned a blind eye to the activities of the Tigers in South Africa, which objectively played a role in prolonging the civil war in Sri Lanka.

  Why has the Sri Lankan government been unable to defeat the Tigers in recent years? The real reason is not that the Sri Lankan government is incompetent, but rather that guerrilla warfare often proves more effective than conventional military tactics.

  Here's where we have to talk about the necessity of the existence of the Man Tiger organization:

  The LTTE represented the political aspirations of Tamils in Sri Lanka, whether it was independence or autonomy, and what the LTTE pursued was also their own pursuit.

  2. Under the rule of the LTTE, Tamils were freed from the so-called persecution by the Sinhalese.

  Based on these two points, the Tigers have achieved a fish-and-water relationship with the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, and members of the Tigers have truly blended in with civilians.

  So the Sri Lankan government troops in their operations to clear out the Tigers could not see, hear or find the rebels but bullets came at them from deadly corners all the time.

  Now let's talk about why the LTTE's war for independence failed?

  For a long time, the Sri Lankan government has seen its military operations to eliminate the Tigers fail one after another, and domestic development has stagnated. It had no choice but to put aside its pride and try to make peace with the Tigers, seeking a peaceful solution to the civil war.

  But the government's bottom line is not allowing Tamil independence, so negotiations are clearly unable to achieve their goals.

  To put pressure on the Sri Lankan government, the Tigers expanded their suicide attacks to include even the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka Solomon Bandaranaike who was killed in a suicide attack.

  This series of attacks pitted the Sinhalese against the Tamils, turning what was originally a war between the LTTE and government forces into a war between the Sinhalese and Tamils.

  This caused the Tamil armed factions to begin splitting, with some important leaders even surrendering their troops to the government, greatly weakening the Tigers' ability to resist the military.

  As the Sri Lankan government forces continued to suffer defeats on the Jaffna Peninsula, the Sri Lankan government led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike was willing to grant a high degree of autonomy to the Tamils in negotiations, even considering changing the form of organization of the state into a federal one.

  Unfortunately, the Tamils gave up such a good opportunity and eventually forced the Sri Lankan government to a point of no return.

  From 1960 onwards, the newly appointed Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Mrs. Bandaranaike, launched a nationwide mobilization, massively expanding the military and preparing to gradually retake the peripheral provinces occupied by the Tigers, with government forces treating every Tamil as a suspected rebel and filtering them out one by one in the process of clearing.

  On land, gradually capture the LTTE controlled areas, slowly and steadily push forward the battle lines, at sea strengthen the blockade line, cut off the supply of Tamils, eliminate the LTTE naval forces.

  Internationally, winning the support of major countries, although Western countries did not actually support the Sri Lankan government's actions to quell the Tamil armed forces, they also did not actively oppose it, thereby enabling the Sri Lankan government to ultimately resolve the separatist issue through force.

  A long motorcade of the government delegation of the Federal Republic of South Vietnam appeared on the streets of Colombo, including Foreign Minister Bui Diem and a marshal who was known for not wearing military uniform - now civilian Defense Minister Tran Van Don.

  Sri Lanka is an island country located in the Indian Ocean, formerly known as Ceylon.

  Sri Lanka is known as the land of bliss and the land of light and prosperity in the Sinhalese language.

  Sri Lanka is known as the Kingdom of Jewels and the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, even the great traveler Marco Polo considered it to be the most beautiful island in the world.

  Sri Lanka is a tropical island nation, with the majority of its people being Sinhalese and Tamils. The Sinhalese make up about 74% of the population and are concentrated in the western, southwestern coastal areas and central highlands, where they dominate politics.

  Hindus of Tamil ethnicity make up only 18% of the population, mainly concentrated in the Jaffna Peninsula and the eastern coastal areas.

  However, after the British colonialists withdrew from Sri Lanka in 1948, the status of Tamils was severely weakened, and the majority Sinhalese took control of Sri Lanka's politics.

  Especially after entering the 1960s, Tamils gradually became extremely dissatisfied with some laws promulgated by the Sinhalese government and being treated as second-class citizens, eventually leading to contradictions evolving into conflicts.

  The Tamils, on the other hand, are Hindus. In Sri Lanka, which was a British colony 150 years ago, as an island nation, only a small number of troops were stationed on the island by the British army. In order to effectively control the entire island, the British colonizers brought in large numbers of Tamil laborers from neighboring India.

  The British brought 1 million people to northern Sri Lanka by ship and adopted a policy of divide and rule, secretly instigating and alienating the ethnic contradictions between Singhalese and Tamil, thus laying the seeds for future civil war between the two nations.

  Outside of this war, the role of the South African Federation has been exaggerated and the threat from India has been ignored: The South African Federation did indeed provide a large amount of aid to the Sri Lankan government army, but it was not decisive.

  The South African Federal Republic began to doubt that the Sri Lankan government would provide military ports in exchange for aid, knowing that deploying troops to a sovereign state is a taboo topic and will inevitably face strong opposition from the people of the country, even if it is as powerful as the United States or protected Japan.

  The opening remarks by the Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of South Africa, Pik Botha, sent shock waves among Sri Lankan officials. "One factor that will inevitably lead to the failure of the Tigers is that the war is being fought on Tamil soil. While it may be difficult for the Sri Lankan government forces to eliminate the Tigers from their own soil, the Tigers too cannot expand their living space."

  If the war dragged on for many years, the replenishment of manpower and equipment for the Tiger Organization became increasingly difficult, and the lives of the people in the blockade zone became more and more miserable, making it impossible for the people to see hope for the future and losing the courage to wage war.

  The main failure of the LTTE was thus political rather than military: Tamils sought independence, but there was no single unified Tamil political force.

  The Tamils sought independence but did not speak of the means and methods of struggle, completely rejecting peaceful means and resorting to terrorist tactics to suppress their opponents, ultimately pushing the entire Sinhalese people to the opposing side.

  "Faced with a population and military strength that has an absolute advantage over the Sinhalese people, the defeat of the LTTE is just a matter of time."