Word: ltte
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Prabhakaran's life as a fugitive began in 1975, with the assassination of Alfred Duraiappah, then mayor of the northern city of Jaffna. A group calling itself the Tamil New Tigers, of which Prabhakaran was a leader, claimed responsibility. The next year, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE. What began as a guerrilla movement escalated into full-scale civil war in July 1983. The LTTE killed 13 Sri Lankan army troops in an ambush in Jaffna. In retaliation, as many as 3,000 Tamils, mainly in Colombo, were killed in several days of violence at the end of July. Human-rights groups...
...Over the following decades, Prabhakaran honed his movement into a cult of personality that glorified violence. "Armed struggle is the only way out for the emancipation of our oppressed people," he said in 1984. The LTTE steadily acquired massive caches of conventional weapons but also pioneered two of the most brutal tactics of modern guerrilla warfare: child recruitment and suicide bombing. Children as young as 10 were used to kill women and children in remote rural villages, according to a 1996 U.N. report. In combat in the 1990s, between 40% and 60% of the dead Tiger fighters in Sri Lanka...
...group's attacks continued to grow more audacious, culminating in a 2001 suicide mission at the international airport in Colombo. By the time of the 2002 cease-fire, the LTTE was essentially governing Sri Lanka's northern and eastern provinces and had the trappings of a state military complete with a rudimentary air force and navy. Prabhakaran appeared with fanfare to sign an agreement with the Sri Lankan government that year, but during four years of negotiations that followed, neither side could agree to a political compromise on autonomy for Tamil-majority areas. Confrontations between the Tigers and the government...
...transformation from running a guerrilla force to a conventional army may have been the leader's undoing. The nation's current President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, took office in 2005 and vowed to pursue a military solution. In a conventional war against an army many times its size, the LTTE was sure to be outmatched, and eventually it was. Prabhakaran never again appeared before the press after 2002, but he continued to release photos and speeches every year. "With its greed for land, Sinhalam [Sri Lanka] has entered a militaristic path of destruction," he said in his last speech in November...
...Prabhakaran was correct. The LTTE had been banned by the U.S., the European Union and several other countries as a terrorist organization, and Rajapaksa pursued what he called a "war on terror" against the LTTE despite the repeated concerns of the U.N. and other groups about human-rights violations and civilian casualties inflicted by both sides. More than 220,000 Tamil civilians are still being held in the north in internment camps, and it is not clear when they will be allowed to go home. The U.N. estimates that 40,000 to 60,000 people are en route...