Sri Lanka plans foolproof security for SAARC summit

The Tamil Tigers may have announced a unilateral 10-day truce but the Sri Lankan government is leaving nothing to chance for the upcoming SAARC summit. It has deployed 19,000 additional security personnel to provide foolproof protection for the visiting leaders.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) truce between July 26 and Aug 4 was rejected by the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa as "a trap".

The 15th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) starts at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall here Aug 2. It will be attended by leaders of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

All these leaders will bring their own personnel to personally look after their security but media reports in Colombo and India indicate that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will come with scores of elite Black Cats. India is also sending helicopters and bulletproof cars.

Military spokesperson Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said the Sri Lankan police and security forces would be in charge of the security cover for the summit.

"About 19,000 additional troops, including police personnel, will be deployed for the summit. It is a well coordinated security plan to ensure the best security cover for the summit," Nanayakkara told IANS.

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He flew too close to the sun

Why Prabhakaran became so concerned about SAARC all of a sudden and declared a unilateral ceasefire must now be clear to one and all, given the damage the LTTE has suffered during the past few days. That he could have avoided that, had the government agreed to his truce, is clear.

In the past, he had managed to lure governments into truce traps and make them fight war according to his timetable. When he wanted war, he waged it and when he wanted time to regroup and rearm, he sued for peace. Thus, the conflict came to be punctuated by ceasefires at almost regular intervals, as we argued the other day.

By 2006, Prabhakaran had taken delivery of nearly a dozen shiploads of arms under the cover of a ceasefire, according to his erstwhile commander Karuna. Confident that he had enough firepower and cadres, a ceasefire-weary Prabhakaran threw down the gauntlet at Mavil Aru.

Prabhakaran may have expected the government to stop at fighting for Mavil Aru, as had been the case earlier on, so that he could drive the army away. But, that move proved to be a huge military miscalculation on his part. He let the genie out of the bottle.

Today, the LTTE is doing exactly what the army did in 1999 and 2000 in the North-running for dear life. In 1999, a series of LTTE offensives launched with the help of newly acquired small MBRLs, among other things, were so intense that the army vacated places like Oddusudan, Nedunkerni etc. in no time. Camps were crumbling like a pack of cards and the PA government did not know how to put the brakes on the LTTE's military onslaught.

The biggest debacle came in 2000, when the army lost its sprawling military complex at Elephant Pass with its big guns. The march of the LTTE had all the trappings of a cakewalk. Prabhakaran's boys and girls reached the outskirts of Jaffna, where the army was trapped. The government did frantic shopping for arms. MBRLs were rushed from Pakistan posthaste and the Tigers stopped in their tracks.

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