The Tamil Tiger guerrillas used peace talks as a cover to rearm and prepare for a return to war in Sri Lanka, according to the group's former military commander Colonel Karuna. In an interview the ex-rebel fighter, who broke with the Tigers in 2004, said he was told by the guerrillas' supreme leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, to "drag these talks out for about five years, somehow let the time pass by. Meanwhile I will purchase arms and we will be ready for the next stage of fighting."The former Tamil Tiger, who was a member of the peace talks team, told the BBC the rebels never had any commitment to ending the war. Col Karuna left the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) saying his troops were being used as cannon fodder for the northern leadership. He now wants to enter politics and has formed the TMVP or the Tamil People's Liberation Party. In Batticaloa, a palm-fringed coastal town that is now home to more than 150,000 refugees fleeing from a full-scale war between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan military, Col Karuna's "boys" openly carry weapons and man checkposts.
These fighters spar for control of the town with the LTTE, say locals, using blackmail, kidnappings and murders. Human rights groups say the Tigers and the Karuna "faction" have been forcibly recruiting child soldiers into their ranks.
One family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said their eldest son, aged 18, had been kidnapped last November by two armed men from the Karuna group. Their youngest son was 15 when the LTTE bundled him into a fishing boat in December 2005. Both have been given guns and trained to fight.
"What can we do?" a tearful mother said. "I have begged both sides to release my children but they say no. My sons may die fighting each other but we have two more boys and we have to stay alive to provide for them."
Col Karuna, whose real name is Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, told the Guardian there were "shortcomings" among his men but blamed the "gun culture" on the ingrained militarism of the LTTE, from which they came. His cadres would lay down their weapons "the day the LTTE is defeated". "I am in the process of changing my cadres who were engaged in a long war and trying to change them to bring them into mainstream politics. This killing culture, this 'Prabhakaran' gun culture should come to a stop."
The LTTE has been fighting for a separate homeland for the island's 3 million-strong Tamil minority for more than two decades, saying that they had been discriminated against by the majority Buddhist Sinhalese. Today, Sri Lanka's air force pounded a Tamil Tigers naval base, destroying fuel reserves.
Col Karuna said he now believed that the Tamils' best chances were with the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapakse, who is widely seen as a Sinhalese hardliner. "The president is a progressive leader. He always says that the Tamils should live with freedom and dignity. We cannot stick with the problems that we had in the past. Whenever the elections are going to be held in the east we are certainly going to contest. The LTTE is now very weak and running short of men and material."