Introduction

For the last two decades Sri Lanka has been a cauldron of political violence. The racial antagonism that surfaced between the Tamil and Sinhala nations since the independence of the island has evolved into a fully-fledged armed conflict. The parties in the conflict are the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Both the parties command standing armies and are embroiled in a bloody war.

The consequences of the war are devastating. The Tamil civilians face the brunt of the conflict because the war is waged in the Tamil homeland. Already 50,000 Tamils have perished and hundreds of thousands have either fled the country or are internally displaced. Yet the war continues with unabating ferocity, destroying life and property with every passing day.

The Sri Lanka government attempts to present the complexity of the problem with simplistic logic. The magnitude of the conflict is reduced to a simple phenomenon of terrorism. In the perspective of the Sinhala Government, the LTTE is a small band of bloodthirsty terrorists bent on anarchism. The answer to the problem on the government's side is also simplistic. The elimination of the LTTE by sustained war, it is argued, will automatically resolve the Tamil conflict.

A well orchestrated international propaganda campaign has been launched by Sri Lanka to convince the world community that the Tamil struggle is nothing other than a spectre of terrorism. Playing on the sensibilities and anxieties of Western nations about global terrorism, Sri Lanka has been propagating a view that she is also a victim of a similar phenomenon. Under the guidance of a Machiavellian Tamil minister, Sri Lankan diplomatic missions abroad have been working overtime in transposing an internal interracial conflict into a global terror. This disinformation campaign is intended to discredit the Tamil armed struggle and to seek sympathy and support for a massive war effort in the Tamil homeland. In the diplomatic language of Sri Lanka, this war is an exercise for peace and has noble intentions of 'liberating Tamils from the scourge of terrorism'. Such false propaganda has created a great deal of confusion and misconception in the international political and diplomatic arena about the Tamil struggle in general and the armed struggle in particular. Furthermore, the ongoing violence and counter-violence that characterize the Tamil conflict have given rise to various misrepresentations about the aims and objectives of the Tamil armed freedom movement.

This political document attempts to clarify some of the misconceptions surrounding the armed struggle of the Tamils. While examining the historical conditions that gave rise to the armed resistance movement, we argue that the Tamils reserve the right to armed defence against the military repression and genocide. Countering Sri Lanka's false propaganda that the Tamil struggle is a mode of terrorism, we explain that the armed campaign is a form of legitimate political struggle for self-determination. In brief, the document Sets out the position of the Tamils based on their quest for political independence and self-government.