Can you please tell me what the right way is, in tackling a separatist organisation that uses terroristic methods listed as the most ruthless terrorist org ( even surpassing Al Qaeda) by FBI which has killed more than 3000 people in your cities by suicide bombing, massacred civilians in border villages and killed your President, important ministers in your government? Do you have any other way in tackling it? We did not wage war, war was upon us.
We took 30 years to end the war with LTTE for several reasons. One, We had a ceremonial armed force when the war initially started. In 80s when we had only 10000-25000 strong army, LTTE had 30000 cardes. Two, Tamils are not a small minority, they are a significant minority being 15% of the population. And India which has a much larger Tamil population which is 4 times that of the Sri Lankan population next to Sri Lanka bordering the war zone. And as everyone knows India did intervene militarily and politically in favor of the LTTE. So at one point Sri Lanka was facing weight of India along with LTTE. Since 94, our government was a peace talks oriented government. Sri Lanka wasted its opportunities going after peace talks which LTTE ditched everytime with an attack against the SLn state. Our policy was to go for peace talks and always get deceived by the LTTE.
The extent to which SLn government put blind faith on LTTE can be shown in 1990, Policemen death incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_massacre_of_Sri_Lankan_Police_officers
In 1990, president Premadasa started peace talks with LTTE. LTTE top members were invited into Colombo and were given top treatment by the government in a hotel in Colombo. When LTTE members were in Colombo, and government was carrying out peace talks, LTTE surrounded all the police stations in Eastern province and demanded surrender. After getting to know the situation, idiotic irrational SLG ordered 650 policemen in East to surrender to LTTE thinking they would not harm them. Because it was a period of peace talks. What did LTTE do? They killed all the surrendered 650 policemen when government was talking peace. That was how our second attempt at peace talks failed. Our stupid gov did not stop at that. We continued to have talks and ended up with an egg on the face. So there was no policy level decision, strategic plan and political leadership to tackle LTTE terrorism. Only in 2006 this changed and the new government took only 3 years to finish it off.
And most importantly we are NOT at war with any minority now. For the first time in history we are taking steps to tackle Radical Islam. We are nipping the problem in the bud ( hopefully) and Muslims are supporting these steps. That is exactly why we have been successful in finding safe houses of terrorists and raid these people. What everyone in SL wants, including Muslims is freedom to live practicing whatever their religion without any harm from anyone.
Sri Lanka has given complete freedom when it comes to practicing their religion. This is from a Sri Lankan Muslim.
https://twitter.com/search?q=Muslim Sri Lanka&src=typd&lang=en
The biggest Shariah university in Asia being built in Sri Lanka with Saudi money, which has irked many in the country.
Sri Lanka allows Muslim only schools, private Shariah banking ( not available even in India with 200 million Muslims), Quasi courts, Muslim marriage laws with 4 wives, marrying under 12 permitted. Sri Lanka has no check on how Saudi funds are spent in SL. Sri Lanka did not have any idea when the terrorist group, National Thawheed Jamath functioned under its very nose radicalizing youth. So we need to build our intelligence field again (Since 2015, January we did not have a defence ministry and intelligence services were not working), share intel from countries that suffer from Islamic radicalisation and save the country from this menace. We are not going for war, as we need not.
And there are powerful Muslim ministers in the government who are rumored to have aided these organisations but survive because of vote bank politics in the country. We need to fix these things.