India and Sri Lanka’s internal conflict

I never believed Prabhakaran. Whatever he said about his intentions to see the Accord in action, I don’t think he would have surrendered the arms. Even my contacts in the LTTE told me so and they were unhappy about it as they thought the Tamil Tigers should not fight India.

by Col R Hariharan-May 28, 2018

[This is an extract of unpublished notes used  in a telephone interview  with a civil society social group which aims to “promote pathways for solving the ethnic issue under a federal solution” in Sri Lanka and to address human rights violations committed during the ethnic conflict by both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. Though the interview was conducted in January 2017, its detailed contents remain valid to this day.]

( May 28, 2018, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Q1: Former Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon in his recent book, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, in the book’s chapter on Sri Lanka, Menon said the following: “The way the Sri Lankans fought the war, though criticized for its brutality in the final stages, might have taken a higher toll if delay and stalemate were brought about….Indeed, one must logically ask the question, would an earlier adoption of the more brutal methods of the last thirty months of the war have brought it to an earlier end and actually saved lives and minimized the war’s deleterious effects?  This is a recurrent problem in state craft. It is also the strongest justification for the use of atomic weapons to end World War II.” 

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