Word: ltte
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What will it take to bring peace to tiny, tortured Sri Lanka, now in the 19th year of a conflict that has taken 65,000 lives? More than anything, the cooperation of one man, Velupillai Prabhakaran, supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), one of the most enduring and deadly rebel groups in the world. Prabhakaran emerged from the jungles of northern Sri Lanka last week to hold his first press conference in 12 years and talk some very uncharacteristic talk: of peace. If the right deal is offered, he announced, he will call off the rebellion, collect...
...clearly demonstrates that in terms of their long-term mission of building capability, there has been no change." Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe concurs: "From the intelligence we have, their network is functioning," he says. "That doesn't surprise me at all." Prabhakaran insisted last week that the LTTE were no longer recruiting child soldiers, but Time has seen internal LTTE documents, which record the names of at least six "recently recruited" fighters under age 15. And one LTTE soldier told Time last week that even today, the price of quitting the Tigers is execution?hardly the policy...
...draw parallels with, say, the Tamils and LTTE," another official explains, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been waging a bloody campaign for two decades for an independent state in Sri Lanka. "If Tamils set up businesses in Sri Lanka and then support the Tamil Tigers, what can the Sri Lankan government do? It can only monitor these businessmen but cannot arrest them without concrete proof. It's the same here. Al-Qaeda representatives are sent to ensure the radical groups in the region have the necessary funding to buy arms and don't have...
Which is a problem, since unlike other conventional armies that find themselves confounded by poorly armed but elusive guerrilla opponents, the Sri Lankans are now outgunned by their guerrilla enemies. "The LTTE is better armed than the Sri Lankan army," says TIME New Delhi correspondent Meenakshi Ganguly. "In fact, a lot of their weapons once belonged to the army and were usurped by the Tigers when they overran the camps. The Tigers are also much more motivated than the army, which is facing problems of desertion and low recruitment because of the heavy casualties it has suffered in this conflict...
...last week's setback wipes out years of painstaking territorial gains against the guerrillas. Now the government of Chandrika Kumaratunga, which has made taking a hard line against the guerrillas the centerpiece of its tenure, faces the humiliating prospect of having to negotiate a cease-fire with the LTTE in order to save thousands of its soldiers. And the rebels, who are fighting for independence for the mostly Tamil northern provinces they refer to as Eelam (the Hindu Tamil form about 20 percent of Sri Lanka's population, with the majority Sinhalese, who are largely Buddhist, making up about...