Minister's method to defeat the Tigers
SRI Lanka's Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, an elegant and eloquent Oxford-educated lawyer, talked to Peter Seidlitz in Colombo. Excerpts from the interview: Question: Potential investors will ask: Can you win the war against the Tigers? Kadirgamar: Definitely we will win the war. But I want to define what winning means. Winning doesn't mean that you have to eliminate every single terrorist. No guerilla war is ever won that way.
What we will do is to debilitate the capacity of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), or Tamil Tigers, to such an extent that it will no longer be the formidable fighting machine former governments allowed it to become.
Q: Where do the Tigers get their financing from? Kadirgamar: Their war is almost entirely financed by Tamils living in countries like England, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and the Scandinavian countries.
We demand that foreign countries stop the drive from their soil to finance the war here. G7 countries are now very alert to the question of international terrorism.
After bomb attacks in many world cities, European countries and the United States government realise terrorism can't be tackled by one country, but must be fought globally. The funding of terrorism is becoming the focal point to fight terrorism.
Terrorists and the money they use don't know any borders. To fight terrorism means to stop the money flow of terrorist organisations. The United Nations General Assembly is [drafting] a convention on the matter.
Q: Where do the Tamil Tigers get their weapons from? Burma has been mentioned as an arms supplier.
Kadirgamar: No single government in the world of 185 states in the UN supports the LTTE in any way. Unfortunately, in the early 80s the Indian Government of that day did support the LTTE.
But that chapter is completely and utterly closed. The [Tigers] are supplied by sea and rely heavily on ships coming through with arms they purchased in the open arms markets in countries like the Ukraine, and also certain countries near us on the Cambodian borders.
Q: One can get the impression by reading your newspapers that the military campaign to open the road to Jaffna is stuck.
Kadirgamar: Opening the road to Jaffna is vital. We want to be able to supply the people of Jaffna. We have to supply all goods by air and sea.
Transporting cargo by air is terribly difficult as we do not have big aircraft. By sea we run into attacks by the LTTE.
They even hijack foreign-owned vessels and our ships have to be escorted by the navy, causing inconvenience because the primary task of the navy is fighting.
