The man behind the Tamil Tigers’ retreat (Great Gota)

The man behind the Tamil Tigers’ retreat

The Man Behind the War : Gotabaya Rajapakse

A former computer systems administrator from suburban Southern California is today leading the charge in Asia’s longest running civil war and these are among his new treasures: This fishing village of empty pummeled houses; a secret cove nearby the ethnic separatist guerrillas are said to have used to smuggle fuel; and a martyrs cemetery a few kilometers down the road containing two generations of slain rebels.

For the first time in a decade the Sri Lankan military has wrested this strategic swath in the country northwest from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the rebel group that has fought for more than 25 years to carve out a separate Tamil homeland. At the helm of that military advance is Gotabaya Rajapakse, a naturalised US citizen who is today Sri Lanka’s feared and influential Secretary of Defence.

Defence budget soars

Rajapakse has repeatedly rejected the rebels’ offers of a ceasefire. He has dismissed calls from his nation’s allies including the United States to negotiate a political solution to the ethnic conflict. The defence budget has soared during his three year tenure even as the nation’s economy has sputtered.

The military has recruited heavily and over the past year it has bombed rebel strongholds, sent in commandos to execute high profile rebel leaders, and passed steadily into the Tamil Tigers territory prompting an estimated 250,000 ethnic Tamil civilians to flee deeper into rebel land under apparently perilous conditions.

Today the rebels hold less than half of the land they administered under the last ceasefire agreement signed in 2002. The army says it is on the outskirts of Kilinochchi, the guerillas’ de facto capital which a recent visitor described as a ghost town.