JOURNAL: Flying Tigers?

The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, provided a strange incident in their war with the government, they used a light aircraft to bomb the international airport and military airbase in Colombo. The use of this aircraft in an attack, one of four smuggled into the country as parts and reassembled, has initiated the establishment of the Tamil air force. Of course, this is more likely a sign of devolution than innovation since the Tamils are following the Maoist model of guerrilla warfare: they are moving to replace the state by building a capability for conventional warfare. The modern and much more effective approach, in contrast, is to stay a non-state force and keep the state in perpetual failure. It's hard to do that with conventional aircraft.

Comments

[Cavolonero]

Ooo Mao Mao
Papa Ooo Mao Mao ~

[Friendly Fire]

I read that report this morning, thinking WTF!!

If the Tamils were Islamist's this would have been all over the news channels 24/7 today.

Sri Lanka's forces must be piss poor to let this happen and not knowing enough about the region to comment fully, I suspect India are eyeing old tourism interests. aka a New Cuba on the doorstep.

[londamium]

Considering that the LTTE have had a navy for quite some time, this would seem to be a logical next step. I'd analyse it in terms of improving their force-projection capabilities against military targets - they've always had the capacity to detonate large truck bombs in civilian areas, but they seem to be keener to hit explicitly military and political targets these days; the first time I went to Colombo I arrived the day after they'd pulled off an IRA-style CBD spectacular downtown, which provided a handy excuse for some bureaucratic problems which arose on leaving.

That said, the LTTE did try to pull off a social Systempunkt spectacular a few years back when they drove a truck bomb into the Temple of the Tooth - probably the most important Buddhist shrine in the world - in Kandy; for some reason this disappeared into the memory hole as it predates 9/11. From memory, which is a little hazy, they followed this up a few years later with an attack at Anuradhapura, another key tourist destination, and a culturally important site for Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalists.

Then again, the LTTE don't fit - and likely never will - into your GG paradigm as they are an "old-fashioned" separatist/national liberation movement that is seeking to "become" the state, with all its appurtenances, in the Tamil regions of Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka; the concept of remaining a "non-state" force requires one to totally dismiss their long-standing political goals.

FF

As regards the tourist aspect of the Sri Lankan economy - it's a combination of European sun-seekers and Japanese/East Asian Buddhists on pilgrimage tours who predominate. It's not, and never has been, a big tourist destination for Indians. That said, India does a lot of business with Sri Lanka.

Back in the early 1980's the Indian army intervened in Sri Lanka - and it was an utter disaster which resulted in the then-PM, Rajiv Ghandi, being blown up by an LTTE suicide bomber in, IIRC, 1989. This led to considerable repression/dismantling of LTTE support networks that had hitherto been allowed to flourish in Tamil Nadu. Haven't been in the region for a while, but when I was living/travelling in the region 9-10 years ago the LTTE had all but disappeared as a factor in state politics in Tamil Nadu.