ABSTRACT
The sea had always been important to the Tigers. The state of Ealam as envisaged by the Tamil separatists included a long shoreline, stretching from Halawatha on the west coast to the borders of the Hambantota District in the east. Even though the marked the furthest extents and most ambitious projections of the so-called Tamil homeland, even the coastline of the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka, the real bone of contention between the Sri Lankan government and the separatists, was very long. Since the late 1980s, the land route to Jaffna Peninsula had been under increasing threat from the rebels in the Wanni, and as a result, the garrisons in the Jaffna were coming to depend heavily on supply by the air force and the navy. The emergence of the Sea Tigers as a separate and deadly arm of the rebels posed a serious challenge to the operations of the Sri Lankan navy.
