Word: movement
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...arms against it. "It is he who impressed on me the need for armed struggle and persuaded me to put my trust in it," Prabhakaran said. Jaffna was then considered the heart of Tamil culture and literature in Sri Lanka, and also the center of the growing Tamil nationalist movement, which called for greater autonomy for Tamil-majority areas to protest what they considered discrimination against Tamils by Sri Lanka's Sinhala-speaking majority. The most radical groups wanted complete independence and struck out at symbols of the Sri Lankan state, including fellow Tamils whom they considered collaborators...
...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 and other...
...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...
...Lanka's government radio announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed early this morning by special forces in the island's northern Karayamullavaikkal area. The 54-year-old Prabhakaran, who headed the Tamil separatist movement for 33 years, had been trying to flee the shrinking 100-m by 100-m pocket of land still under Tiger control in an ambulance when troops intercepted the vehicle, shooting those inside...
...What's next for the Tigers? The government has raised the possibility of the remnants of the LTTE regrouping into a diffuse guerrilla operation. But without its top leadership, a personality-driven movement like the LTTE is unlikely to last long. It could also continue in some form in the Tamil diaspora, though its reason for being - the creation of a Tamil homeland, or eelam - is essentially destroyed. The leadership of what remains of the Tigers - mainly its international network - is likely to be assumed by Selvarasa Pathmanathan, who now heads the global operations but who was better known...