Gotabhaya Rajapakse tells
NYT:|
Military has been ordered to kill Prabhakaran
By S. Venkat Narayan
Special Correspondent
Courtesy The Island 15-06-2007
NEW DELHI, June 14: The Sri Lankan military has been ordered to kill
Velupillai Prabhakaran and finish off the LTTE once and for all, Defence
Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse has disclosed.
This is perhaps for the first time in over a quarter century that an
important Sri Lankan government functionary has openly admitted that
the military has actually been ordered to kill the founder of the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The New York Times' New Delhi-based South Asia Correspondent Somini
Sengupta has quoted Rajapakse as telling her in an interview late last
month that the civil war-ravaged island-nation's military is "under
instructions to eliminate Prabhakaran and eradicate his organization
once and for all."
In a front page report, printed in the International Herald Tribune
(IHT) today, Rajapakse told the award-winning reporter: "That's
our main aim, to destroy the leadership." The job will take two
to three years, Sengupta further quoted the president's influential,
and also controversial, brother as telling her.
Owned by the New York Times (NYT), the IHT is edited and published
in Paris. It is also printed in 35 countries and circulated across the
globe. Its Indian edition is printed in Secunderabad in Andhra Pradesh.
The NYT reporter adds grimly: "Pressure from abroad, including
suspension of aid from countries like Britain and the United States,
has done little to temper Sri Lankan military ambitions."
In her Jaffna-datelined report, Sengupta says: "Jaffna is no stranger
to war. Its temples and churches bear the pockmarks of battles past.
Its people are familiar with running and dying. No other place is so
scarred because no other places carries Jaffna's special curse: it is
the heart of the homeland that the Tamil Tigers have fought to carve
out, and the trophy that soldiers and rebels have fought over all these
years."
She goes on: "Lately, a new fear stalks Jaffna, and it is more
ominous than anything its people recall from their grim past: a spate
of mysterious abductions usually carried out during curfew, when soldiers
and stray dogs rule the streets. No one is quite sure who is being taken,
for what reason, by whom. Sometimes, corpses turn up on the street.
More often, they don't turn up at all."
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