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WIDELY CIRCULATED LONDONS OBSERVER MAGZINE CHARGES THAT LTTE IS TARGETTING THE IMPOVERISHED WORKING PEOPLE OF SRI LANKA.By Walter JayawardhanaThe widely circulated Observer magazine distributed with the Observer
newspaper said, in a four page in-depth article, by targeting innocent
civilians the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is fast losing
whatever sympathies they had earlier. The magazine in an article entitled, Lost in Paradise said,
the Tamil Tigers are going for the softest targets of all, the
impoverished working people of Sri Lanka. Referring to Sri Lankas North, the magazine said, Here
are not only the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ( LTTE) but their
offshoot, the Black Tigers, , the suicide squads. According to Janes
information Group, between 1980-2000 the Tigers had carried out a total
of 168 suicide attacks on civilian and military targets, easily exceeding
those in the same period by Hezbollah and Hamas combined. And now today,
thwarted on their attacks on the government and the military, they are
going for the softest targets of all, the impoverished working people
of Sri Lanka. For all those decades of suicide practice, youd think they
might be getting the hang of it by now. But in Colombos Fort Railway
Station , a few weeks before my visit , it all went wrong again . A
female suicide bomber coming off a train from the South was spotted
acting oddly by police-too many clothes for the cloying heat
and fled from the turnstile back into the station. By platform three
she sat down and exploded. She took 11 others with her
.The 11
dead included half a high school baseball team, and 92 were injured,
wrote Observer staffer, Euan Ferguson. Founded in 1791 the Liberal Democratic leaning left of center publication
with a circulation of approximately 455,000 also referred to an incident
where the Tamil Tigers were not that successful in blowing up the impoverished
working civilians: one passenger, Indrani Fernando, saw a suspicious
bag left under a seat near the back. When no one claimed it I
told the crew and shouted at people to get off, she says. The
bus halted in a middle of a junction and everyone filed off and began
walking away, rather quickly and the police were called. Twenty seconds
after the driver and conductor had climbed off, the bomb exploded. Ten
passers-by were injured, among them children. Indrani later took a congratulatory
call from, the President Mahinda Rajapaksa, thanking her for her vigilance.
I go to see the bus, towed two miles away. The carcass is eviscerated,
skeletal: no one would have survived. How the Tamil Tigers have increasingly started targeting unarmed civilians
Ferguson further wrote: Just before I arrived in Sri Lanka , another
bus had been blown up a couple of kilometers outside Dambulla, an ancient
holy rest stop on the journey to the East. The 18 killed were almost
all pilgrims and included children. In the remote Southern town of Buttala
the rebels had recently failed to kill most of the passengers on a bus
with a simple bomb; so they gunned down 32 of them as they fled, in
flames. Desperate tactics have been adopted by the Tigers, but there
are increasing signs that by targeting innocent civilians they are fast
losing whatever sympathies they once had within the majority Sinhalese
population. The writer who has returned to the country after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami calls the Indian Ocean island one of the most kind places on earth despite the violence: This is one of the kindest countries on earth. Smiles, genuine, empathetic, as natural as waterfall. Even when I was here following the tsunami, I was struck repeatedly by the welcomes from those who had nothing, both the majority Sinhalese and Tamils. And, still you can head south from Colombo without a care in the world, take a breezy taxi to the beaches and beauty of Galle. |
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