ABSTRACT
When this book was initially conceived no outside commentator could have predicted the timing or circumstances of the LTTE’s demise. The LTTE was an organization which had, over 30 years, successfully seen off the armies of both India and Sri Lanka, and which had used the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement as an opportunity to consolidate its appearance as the ruler of a separate de facto state centred on the town of Kilinochchi in the north of the island. Alongside the press conferences, and the public relations appearances of the Tamil Eelam traffic police and the Tamil Eelam judiciary, the LTTE spent the first years of the CFA quietly settling scores with old political dissenters in the Tamil community. After Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election in late 2005, the LTTE launched a major fundraising campaign in the diaspora, claiming it had a plan to drive government forces out of the north and east in a matter of months, in what it promised its supporters would be the ‘Final War’ (Human Rights Watch 2006). Yet in little more than three years the organization was militarily crushed, its territory lost, its leaders dead.
