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Red flare warning as new northern terror group claims responsibility for Sunday’s revenge attack

The tragic death of two university students in Jaffna after police opened fire when they failed to stop at a checkpoint brought to light this Tuesday the existence of a new Tamil terror grouping which claimed responsibility for the sword attack on two police intelligence officers in Chunnakam on Sunday.
Calling themselves ‘AAVA Gangsters’, they said it was a revenge attack for the death of the two undergraduates. Posters on Jaffna walls which appeared on Tuesday warned the police and the public to expect such incidents in the future as retaliation against activities that were destroying the culture and society of Jaffna. It said: “We, as Tamils cannot witness the destruction of our culture in Jaffna which is considered “the land of culture” of Tamil Eelam.”

POSTER NEWS: How AAWA claimed responsibility for sword attack

After six years of relative peace in the north, this is the first instance when a supposedly organised terror grouping – children of the Tiger – has risen and publicly revealed their existence. Unlike their sire which came striped with its all or nothing Eelam demand and burst onto the scene in the early 80s by robbing banks, the aspirant cubs have raised their tails as good Samaritans: vigilantes forced to draw their sword to protect women from rape and violence and safeguard villages from robberies and crime and save Jaffna culture from desecration.

Their subterfuge is obvious yet ominous. They have come forward as the people’s protector, as the moral paramilitary force to wage war on those who despoil Tamil culture; and will justify every dastard deed they commit on the basis that they are acting as the guardians of the Tamil people.

The existence and emergence of this new terror grouping will also raise protests in the south against the Government’s planned withdrawal of the military presence in the north and may slow down the government’s efforts to meet its international obligations to the UN’s Human Rights Commission; and have less to say of the progress made in returning normalcy to the north with only a token military presence as required by the world body. Whether the hitherto unfamiliar AAVA is merely a front created and operated by still unidentified hands to achieve still unknown agendas are still strange factors that must be thoroughly delved into by the Government’s intelligence agencies.

Not for the first time have foreign powers, whether near or far, sought to throw a spanner in Lanka’s internal workings and thereafter claim the right and ability to fix it. The Government should probe this aspect as well and determine who is backing the new movement that has sprung like a poisonous mushroom from a seedy bed of rotting hate.

The lesson of the eighties, when Indira’s India gave military training to Tamil terrorist cadres and safe haven to wanted Tigers on Tamil Nadu soil and thereafter assumed a commanding position to not only interfere in Lanka’s internal sovereign affairs but also invade her territory at will and attempt to violate her territorial integrity as well, should serve as a constant reminder — 30 years later — of how vulnerable this small island nation is to fall victim to the sinister stratagems of external forces.
When the Tamil Tigers first raised their heads above the undergrowth 40 years ago, the defence authorities laughed and mocked at the very idea that they could ever pose a threat to national security and thus greatly underestimated their capacity to grow. Having experienced the tragic outcome of that grievous folly of treating the movement as a laughable boy scouts brigade, it will be unpardonable if an overconfident defence establishment should now commit the same error twice. The first cost us 30 years of blood and tears. The second may cost Lanka the surrender of one third of her territory to establish a Tamil Eelam.
Now that AAVA has announced its arrival in the north, it is the bounden duty of the Government to give it a quick send off to the burrowed den from whence it emerged. And, by sincerely addressing the just grievances of the Tamil minority, seal its lair permanently.

AAVA may have come, they may have attacked but the collective will of Lanka must ring aloud that they, and any other loose missile like them, will be destructed, never to return again. Violence must be nipped in the stem. Not allowed to burst into flower.

WIGNESWARAN: Day of reckoning Wignes must come clean and state where he stands When Northern Chief Minister Wigneswaran denounced last month the right of any Sinhalese to erect a Buddha statue in the north and east of Lanka and held it as a reprehensible assault on Tamil Eelam culture, perhaps he never realised how soon he would find, in the AAWA gangsters staunch comrades in arms willing to follow through his verbal denunciation with violence, both word and deed said and done in the name of protecting Jaffna culture. Would he, at least now, denounce the existence of this new sword brandishing and culture ranting grouping that he may have unwittingly spawned with his racial and religious bigotry expressed in his ‘Eluha Thamil’ letter addressed to all Tamil-speaking people on the eve of September’s ‘Rise Tamils’ march? Or would he opt to wait till the cocky cubs are weaned from swords and graduate to the T- 56? Wait until the guns are turned on him? Even as TULF leader Appapillai Amirthalingam was to discover on that fateful night of July 13, 1989 at his safe house down Bullers Road, Colombo 7 when he was gunned down by a Tiger assassin after having tea and sandwiches with him? Having now forsaken his judicial wig and gown for camouflage fatigues which blurs the distinction between the democratic politician and the rebel outcast, will he now publicly condemn armed groups taking the law unto their own hands and committing violence as they deem fit as Prabhakaran’s Tigers once did; and/or, in his belated search for Eelam martyrdom in his dotage, privately condone, even egg on, the emergence of such groups and endorse their actions as being indispensable in the quest for some utopian Tamil Eelam on Lanka soil? As chief minister of the Northern Province, he should state his position unequivocally. Having taken the Sixth Amendment oath as a lawyer, a judge and a provincial council member, pledging to uphold and defend the Sri Lankan constitution; and swearing not to ‘directly or indirectly, in or outside Sri Lanka, support, espouse, promote, finance, encourage or advocate the establishment of a separate State within the territory of Sri Lanka,” he must demonstrate whether he is a man of honour who, having once sworn, stays true to his oath and keeps his word whatever the cost or whether he prostitutes his honour and that of his forefathers — the family heirloom of honour — for political expediency and is quick to renegade on his promises whenever the wind turns north? Visit Sunday Punch 3 Visit Sunday Punch 4