Three kilometres down the road to Karaikal from the ancient Tamil Nadu town of Kumbakonam, a couple of hundred men occupying the makeshift camp have no time for passing traffic. Dressed in shorts, young men - often holding lathis - are intent on their drills and exercises. The uninitiated could easily mistake it for a typical RSS

But the locals know better. The odd one among them has had a glimpse of rifles being carried in bundles by the camp inmates who seem to be rather fond of leaving in small batches for long journeys. These are no ordinary excursions.

The batches, led by seasoned guerrillas or retired Indian military officers, make for the obscure forests and wastelands along the coast in Ramanathapuram district. There, among the casuarinas, the real training and battle innoculation begins.

For, insurgents, there could not have been a better sanctuary. The local Tamil politician is sympathetic to the Sri Lankan Tamils and if ever the Central Government decided to disown them, it would raise a hornets' nest in the ethnically conscious state. With telephones, post office boxes and even colour calendars proclaiming their cause, they must be some of the queerest insurgents in the world.



The vast, sparsely populated stretch along the coast has now become a veritable guerrilla area. But unlike the tribal bush-fighters in the North-east, their guns are not trained on India.

Their target is Sri Lanka. Or more precisely, the northern Tamil majority region. Their objective: an independent, sovereign territory of Tamil Eelam.

In both geographic and strategic terms', they could not have chosen a better training ground. The terrain is the same as on their home ground and there is no need of simulation. In the words of a rebel leader: "The region is obscure, people and government sympathetic and our dreamland of Eelam right across the sea, just two hours by motorboat. Could we have found a better place?"

In fact, from Point Calimere which sticks out into the Indian Ocean like a dagger midway through the Ramanathapuram coast, Jaffna - the Tamil heartland in Sri Lanka - is just a little over an hour away in a good motorboat. And the rebels have plenty of these as is evident from the regular boat traffic between Jaffna and the Indian coast, running cargoes of guns and men.

The camp near Kumbakonam, like the one close to Meenambakkam on the outskirts of Madras, is just one of the dozens set up by the Sri Lankan Tamil insurgents deep inside Tamil Nadu, where new recruits get ideological grounding by rebel theoreticians and elementary lessons in the use of firearms.

Initial lessons over, they are split into small batches and sent for advanced training to the coast. Underground and Indian intelligence sources estimate that nearly 2,000 armed men, belonging to the various groups of Tamil insurgents, are now ready for battle.

"We must unite now. For almost 18 months we were not even on talking terms. But now we have established contact with some of the Tigers."

- Uma Maheswaran, leader of the People's Liberation Organisation of Tamileelam (PLOT)



Yet another 2,000-3,000 have been trained, but wait for arms shipments from "foreign sources", basically the Soviet-backed leftist guerrilla groups like the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Zimbabwean radicals.

Armed with Kalashnikovs and G-3 rifles and driven by a strong emotion of ethnicity with a dash of left revolutionary fervour, they are keyed up to strike. Inside Madras, the only thing not visible are the guns. But the city abounds with Sri Lankan Tamil insurgents of numerous denominations running training camps in' the Tamil Nadu hinterland and plotting to force an armed showdown with the Government in Sri Lanka, scarred by repeated Sinhala-Tamil ethnic violence.

The rebels, most of whom escaped by boats from Jaffna in the wake of the July 1983 massacres, are now all over Tamil Nadu. For their leaders, Madras has become a kind of tactical headquarters. They operate out of rooms in the legislators' hostel, allotted in the names of sympathetic MLA's and privately hired houses, while the Government is most accommodating about visa and immigration regulations - some of them even go abroad on Indian passports.

The desolate, unguarded coastline along the Ramanathapuram district in Tamil Nadu is their playground. Rebels of various groups run regular motor-boat ferries between the Indian cost and Jaffna, using the Palk Straits unmolested. The Sri Lankan Navy has just six seaworthy gunboats which generally confine themselves to Trincomalee.

"India's security is linked to our liberation. So while India determines the politics, we play the role of the good soldiers."

- Sri Sabaratnam alias Tall Sri, leader of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO)



Besides, the width of the Palk Straits is just about 35 km - the maritime boundaries overlap - and the Sri Lankans barely have a chance. The Indian Navy and Coast Guard, it seems, couldn't care less.

While the Government turns a Nelson's eye to the goings-on, the Sri Lankan rebels have also, in a way, helped resettle Indian Tamil ex-servicemen. A large number of them, particularly those who served in combat units, have been hired as instructors at the camps, and at higher salaries, in some cases, than they drew from the Indian Army.

For insurgents, there could not have been a better sanctuary. The local Tamil politician is sympathetic towards the Sri Lankan Tamils and if ever the Central Government decided to disown them, it would raise a hornets' nest in the ethnically conscious state.

With telephones, post office box numbers and even multi-page colour calendars proclaiming their cause, the Sri Lankan Tamils must be some of the queerest insurgents in the world. But there is no underestimating their capabilities and indications are that at least the Sri Lanka Government is not making that mistake.

Across the Palk Straits, the Sri Lanka Government is preparing to meet a full-scale, guerrilla conflagration. A strong indication is the posting to Jaffna last fortnight of Brigadier Nalin Seneviratne - a tough soldier - as the coordinating officer, with a brief to flush out the rebels.

"Silent support is hardly sufficient when the Sinhala Government is out to annihilate all the Tamils."

- Era Janarthanan, former chief whip of the AIADMK



The Government also proposes to replace Devanesan Nessiah, a Tamil, with Sinhala Camillius Fernando, for "better coordination". The buildup is reflected in the arrest of five Eelam guerrillas, allegedly trained in India in "battlecraft, sabotage and marine commando warfare".

Even more tellingly, news came in of the killing, in quick succession, of at least six guerrillas by the recently formed anti-terrorist squads of the Sri Lanka Army. The feverish Sri Lankan efforts were part of a hurriedly prepared plan to meet the growing threat.

The guerrillas have the potential to raise an underground army of about 5,000 in a few months. This could give gory expression to the long-standing secessionist spirit in the island state, heightened by the July 1983 riots in which thousands of Tamils were killed by armed Sinhala mobs, including mutinous soldiers.

That, indeed, was the turning point, when even those Tamils who had been sceptical of the prospects of secessionism began to take the rebellion more seriously. It was in a realistic appreciation of this growing menace that the Sri Lanka Government, after raising the bogey of Indian armed intervention the world over, sought Mrs Gandhi's assistance for a negotiated solution to the Tamil problem.

Tamil Tigers leader Prabhakaran in Jaffna: Extreme militancy Tamil Tigers leader Prabhakaran in Jaffna: Extreme militancy

India responded by assigning top-flight diplomat, G. Parthasarathi, to organise tripartite talks involving Jayewardene's United National Party (UNP), Mrs Bandaranaike's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). But now, with the withdrawal of the SLFP; the talks are in the doldrums and even the pacifist minority among Tamil leaders are talking increasingly of extreme solutions.

Yet, while bank-heists and hit-and-run attacks are on the increase, the rebels do not seem to want a frontal fight right away. With the intensification of guerrilla training and gun-running, they were in a hurry to complete the buildup before the Sri Lankan Government forced a showdown in order to draw them out while they were still ill-prepared and divided, or block conduits linking Jaffna with Tamil Nadu.

The rebels were digging in, militarily and politically. Typical of their extreme leftist orientation, they wanted to do adequate political groundwork to create conditions where India could be forced to actively aid their campaign.

For the moment, the rebel strategy is to build up military strength while intensifying its propaganda war against not just the Sri Lanka Government but also the TULF and the round-table conference. "We couldn't care less about both the TULF and the Government," said rebel ideologue S. Ruthramoorthy, adding for effect: "The problem is the TULF are election-oriented while we are liberation-oriented."

Nothing symbolises this buildup better than the feverish activity in a small house in a corner of the upper middle class Mahalingapuram locality in Madras. There is no signboard that says so but almost everyone around knows that No. 9, Narayanan Street, houses the Tamil Information Centre and is run by the skinny, wiry figure of S. Sivanayagam, former editor of Saturday Review, the pro-Tamil weekly that the Sri Lanka Government banned in July 1983.

A collage of photographs handed out by the rebels showing them preparing for battle in unspecified locations A collage of photographs handed out by the rebels showing them preparing for battle in unspecified locations

Sivanayagam leads a team of over a dozen men and women, mainly Tamil expatriates manning desks and typewriters churning out publicity material for distribution around the world. He sits in his first floor office, in constant touch with the leaders of various rebel groups. "We are neutral. This centre is the meeting point for everyone," he says pointing at the wall displaying the calendars of all the rebel groups.

But he is certainly not on the side of the pacifists and asserts: "The TULF are just chasing behind events. This is just a bid to sustain a fiction. They have caught the tiger by the tail." This pessimism has even seeped into the ranks of the TULF itself.

V. Yogeswaran, former TULF MP morosely admitted, sitting in his Barnaby Avenue house in Madras: "The talks were never the same once the SLFP walked out. The whole wretched thing was written on water." With this cynicism almost total, Sri Lanka seems poised on the brink of a prolonged civil strife.

Gearing up for that eventuality are the highly indoctrinated men of over half-a-dozen organisations, with varying strengths in terms of arms and manpower. The more significant ones are:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) better known as Tamil Tigers. This, the oldest, largest and militarily the most highly organised group, is led by 29-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran and boasts of widespread foreign links.

People's Liberation Organisation of Tamileelam (plot) is led by Uma Maheswaran, a former associate of Prabhakaran. Fairly large in terms of manpower, the group has a central core trained by the PLO.

Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), which came to prominence in July 1983 when its chief, Thangathurai, and military commander, Kuttimani, were killed in the prison massacre. Now led by Sri Sabaratnam, known better by his nickname, "Tall Sri", TELO is a small but well-knit outfit.

Tamil Eelam Army (TEA) is led by Thambipillai Maheswaran, a final-year engineering drop-out, educated in the United Kingdom. The relatively new and small organisation made a sensation last month with a Rs 50 million bank robbery at Kattankudy near Batticaloa last month.

Eelam Research Organisation (EROS) is a London-based body of Trotskyite expatriates who originally provided ideological content and international contacts to the Tamil insurgency under the leadership of E. Ratnasabhapati.

Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) is a body with pretensions more intellectual than military. Its more significant unit is the General Union of Eelam Students (GUES), which brings together Tamil students abroad.

Tamil Eelam Liberation Army (TELA) is another small guerrilla organisation which now operates in conjunction with PLOT.



While the leaders of each organisation make various claims, intelligence and underground sources estimate their combined strength at around 5,000 - only one-third of which is armed at present. The bulk of the armed personnel belong to the "Tigers", followed by PLOT and then the others and the majority of them are based in India. Most organisations are left-oriented and have contacts with other leftist guerrilla organisations all over the world.

Both LTTE and PLOT have central fighting cores trained by the PLO. Says Balasingham of the Tigers: "Our basic alliance is still with the PLO. But we maintain active contact with the other groups like the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the African National Congress (ANC)."

THE PLO-Tamil nexus is even more marked in the case of plot. Its chief, Uma Maheswaran, was in the first batch to go for training to Lebanon in 1978. But after he split from the Tigers, he struck his own liaison with the People's Liberation Front for Palestine (PLFP), led by George Habash which, he claims, has been useful.

But while plot still lays great store by Palestinian guerrilla training, the Tigers say they are having second thoughts. Said Balasingham: "The PLO-trained boys have not exactly proved to be an asset to our armed strength. Our terrain and conditions are different". The Tigers now claims to have developed their own training infrastructure.

Besides the leftist organisations, which had traditionally been backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba, the Tamil rebels have also had some contact with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), even though they deny it. High level intelligence men, however, have evidence of the liaison and explain that the rebels' anxiety to deny it is because they do not want Scotland Yard on their campaigners' trail in the United Kingdom.

The guerrilla leaders also baulk at questions on direct help by foreign governments, particularly India. As Uma Maheswaran of plot evasively said: "Our independence has to be achieved by our own people. We are not dependent on the others. They (India) are allowing us to operate from here, that is good enough."

The foreign factor is not just confined to leftist guerrilla organisations. A significant role is being played in the buildup by the widespread net of Eelam bodies run by expatriate Tamils the world over, particularly in the UK - where there are over 30,000 of them - the US, Australia, West Germany and Canada.

The guerrillas are benefiting from the misplaced policy of the Sri Lankan Government to systematically downgrade the Tamil population by denying them jobs under a blatantly racial Sinhala Only Act. The law drove thousands of Tamils abroad in search of education and work.

A bulk of them have taken asylum in West Germany and, though not very rich, form the hard core of the Eelam support overseas. "We expatriates are always aware of the problems back home," said S. Srinivasan, who teaches political science at the Adelaide University in Australia. He adds: "Sometimes I used to think it is easy for us, far away, to be radical . But each time I come back, I find people here more determined to achieve what they want."

The expatriates' most visible contribution is to propaganda. The rebel literature is slick and produced in expensive foreign presses. PLOT has even managed to obtain from its expatriate supporters a small transmitter which it operates from a boat off the Indian coast, making four-hour broadcasts every Saturday and Sunday in English, Tamil and Sinhala on the 41 meter band and varying the frequency between 7,000 and 7,125 megahertz to hoodwink the Government jamming experts.

Often it is possible to monitor the broadcasts in parts of Tamil Nadu. It was this propaganda blitz organised basically by the expatriates that led President Jayewardene to say some time back that the "Tamils must be the world's strongest minority".

But the expatriate help is not confined to propaganda. A bulk of the money for the rebels' arms shoppers is also raised by Eelam supporters abroad. This, along with the PLO support, has enabled them to weld a spearhead armed with Kalashnikovs - the favourite assault rifle of leftist guerrilla outfits the world over - and NATO issue G-3 rifles, whose origin is shrouded in mystery. In all likelihood, the latter were bought from mercenary arms dealers in Europe. Besides, the guerrillas have generous supplies of Sten machine-carbines, hand-guns and grenades.

But more important than the arithmetic of their current armed strength is the sense of commitment to the Eelam cause. Obviously, these are not merely paper tigers as is evident from their frequent armed strikes, one of which - by the Tigers in July 1983 - lit the spark for the ethnic riots. Besides, most of the leaders escaped in jail-breaks following the killings and have shown the inclination to fight on.

The Tigers ideologue, Parmanandan Nesan, claimed: "We even carry cyanide pills to commit suicide when there is no escape. None of our people have ever been caught." While that is still a claim that cannot be verified, the guerrilla outfits are full of people like TELO chief Sri Sabaratnam alias Tall Sri, who has a price of Rs 2 lakh on his head - he managed to escape while serving a life sentence for participation in a guerrilla raid.

His brother, Kandaswamy is still held hostage in a Sri Lanka prison. The plot publicity in-charge, Shirley Skantha, claims: "Armed training is on now and we are very close to our target of 5,000 armed men. Taking over power is no problem now. But we think in terms of mass mobilisation and crippling the state."

But, for all the claims, the lack of action in the recent past arouses suspicions about their real capability. The rebels explain it away, saying that it is vital for them to buy time. Besides, they argue, they were worried about the possibility of reprisals against the Tamil refugees in camps near Colombo.

But a more likely explanation is that they are realistic enough to know that there will be no taking on the Government as long as they do not achieve a measure of unity among themselves. In the past, the groups have bitterly fought each other, even killed each other's men, provoking a senior Tamil Nadu police officer to remark: "The problem is they have nothing in common except for a craving for fancy acronyms for their organisations and their leftist orientation."

But now the rebels themselves are desperate to reach some kind of unity and put an end to internecine blood-letting. Said Balasingham: "Centralised military command is what we are looking for. It is a vital aim and will be achieved."

The PLOT chief Uma Maheswaran, who in June 1982 escaped an assassination attempt by the Tigers chief Prabhakaran in Madras, displays even more keenness for unity. He pleads: "We must unite now. We are trying. For almost 18 months we were not even on talking terms. But now we have established contact with some representatives of the Tigers."

Unity in fact is one aim on which all rebel leaders agree. Asserted Tall Sri: "We must not bother about ideology now. We must unite. It is a sine qua non."

But prospect for unity are obstructed by various predilections, personal as well as ideological. The Tigers are in no mood to forgive Uma Maheswaran for his alleged indiscretions while he was with them or for his breaking away.

In the past, they have also indulged in vendetta killings against members of other organisations and even now do not rule it out. Asserted a deadpan Parmanandan Nesan, a Tigers spokesman: "Our task is not merely fighting the Sinhala army. Eliminating robbers and hardcore thieves is also our job."

A determined unity effort has been launched by some young TULF leaders, backed by expatriate Tamils and some local leaders, particularly from the DMK. For them, the stumbling block will finally be the Tigers-plot enmity, evident in Balasingham's assertion that the Tigers "will have nothing to do with anything that embarrasses the Government of India, like running a clandestine transmitter from Indian soil". The reference is obviously to the PLOT venture.

In sheer military terms, if the rebel organisations achieve some degree of unity, the Sri Lanka Army will find them a tough proposition. Defence experts say that if the Sri Lankan rebels are able to muster 6,000-7,000 armed men against the Sri Lanka Army's strength of a meagre 11,000, only super power intervention could prevent them from taking Eelam.

Claimed Balasingham: "In any case, they will not have all their army spare to fight us. We can create conditions in the south (which has a Sinhala majority) to keep them tied down there." Obviously, even the Sri Lankan Government is not underestimating the rebel threat. Nor is it in a mood to throw in the towel without fighting. Defence sources confirm that a batch of Sri Lankan officers were recently sent to Malaysia for training in counter insurgency and jungle warfare.

In the past, Sri Lankan officers have been trained in British academies. Of late, there has been evidence of the British Army's ultra-elite Special Air Service (SAS) commandos training the Sri Lankans. The Government is procuring more and faster gunboats from China to effectively patrol the Palk Straits.

Old, discarded armoured cars too are being sought from the Pakistani Army, which may not be of much use in the plains of Punjab but would present a daunting challenge in the Jaffna bush. Besides, the Government is rearming the troops with American M-16 rifles, some of which are provided with Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG's).

Interestingly, the desperate search for arms and training has sent both the guerrillas and the Sri Lanka Government shopping in the British mercenary markets, which have been regular suppliers to the African and Latin American guerrilla groups.

For the guerrillas, the quest led to the hiring, instead, of a sizeable number of retired Indian Army, Navy and BSF officers who have been training rebels. The Indian intelligence agencies have a list of such officers, some of whom have been half-heartedly warned to stay clear.

THE Guerrillas await with anxiety President Jayewardene's visit to the US in June. There is speculation that he will ask for a substantial arms aid to equip the 6,000 new recruits that will raise his army's strength by 50 per cent.

The rebels attach great importance to US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger's recent visit to Sri Lanka, though the Government dismisses the visit as routine. "What matters of strategy could he have discussed with Weinberger in just 30 minutes, that too without aides?" asked a government spokesman.

The question, however, is what will Jayewardene give the West in return? The guerrilla ideologues say, and many in South Block agree, that it can be nothing but Trincomalee, one of the world's finest natural harbours perched strategically in the Indian Ocean. Somehow this suspicion persists despite denials by the Sri Lanka Government and US State Department spokesmen.

This also makes India's foreign policy planners so deeply involved in Sri Lankan affairs. Obviously, this is the coordinate along which the rebels are working in their quest for more direct help from India. As Sabaratnam said: "India's security is linked to our liberation. So while India determines the politics we play the role of the good soldiers."

Western media reports that the Sri Lanka Government is building refueling facilities for the US Navy at Trincomalee have bolstered the rebels' position. Besides the Trincomalee question, Indian compulsions are also shaped by regional politics. The Sri Lankan Tamils have strong popular sympathy in Tamil Nadu. This puts the MGR Government in a fix. DMK President M. Karunanidhi has identified totally with the Sri Lanka Tamil cause.

MGR thus has no choice but to be soft towards the rebels, an approach transparently visible in his setting both Uma Maheswaran and Prabhakaran free from criminal charges and allowing all rebels to freely operate from Tamil Nadu.

He also pressurised the Centre to issue Indian passports to some of the important rebel leaders. The most prominent among them is Uma Maheswaran, who recently visited Mauritius carrying a, temporary Indian passport.

Yet MGR is under fire for not doing enough for the rebels. Even his party's chief whip, Era Janarthanan, has resigned in protest against the Government's "vague" policy towards the Sri Lankan Tamil cause. He says: "Silent support is hardly sufficient when the Sinhala Government is out to annihilate all the Tamils."

Normally a politician known more for his Capacity to make noise than for concrete action, Janarthanan surprised the diplomatic world in December by organising a world Tamil conference in Madras which was attended, among others, by Lim Kit Siang, an ethnic Chinese and leader of Malaysia's powerful Democratic Action Party. It is no secret that the Sri Lankan Tamils are being actively supported by the ethnic Tamil pressure groups in countries like Malaysia and Mauritius.

For the Indian Government, ethnic pressures are hard to ignore, although M.M.K Wali, Union home secretary declined to comment on the situation, saying that "the Home Ministry really has nothing to say on this". The Congress(I) has to face widespread propaganda in Tamil Nadu that while Mrs Gandhi used force so effectively to save Bengalis persecuted by the Pakistanis in 1971, she is now insensitive to Tamil suffering.

That leaves South Block on the horns of a dilemma. If they throw out the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Centre loses face in Tamil Nadu. If they don't and continue to ignore their presence, Sri Lanka will continue to embarrass India in international forums.

Even last fortnight, Prime Minister R. Premadasa told the Sri Lankan Parliament: "Tamil youths are being given terrorist training in Madras and other parts of south India. What would be the position if the Sikhs came to Sri Lanka to train in terrorism and fight for secession?"

Ideally, the way out still lies in a negotiated settlement which guarantees protection of Tamil interests under a system where they have the same rights as the Sinhalas. But as long as ethnic chauvinism holds sway, any regime that makes such a concession to the Tamils may not surrive.

The troubled island republic seems to be in for a long spell of unrest. In the words of Vettivelu Yogeswaran: "Ceylon, actually, has no future. At best we will be the Lebanon of Asia." That is the last prospect India would want to have 25 km from its shores.

TAMIL STRUGGLE: THE ORIGINS

Six hundred years before Christ, when Sri Lanka was an obscure island, sparsely inhabited by a sedate, peaceful population of Tamils an event of great significance took place. Prince Vijaya from Bihar invaded the island with his conquering armada.

According to Mahavamsa, the Sinhala historical document, he liked the island, struck up a friendship with the daughter of a local chieftain and conquered the ill-organised local population. Says Tamil lawyer and rebel ideologue S.P. Ruthramoorthy: "Vijaya's first act was a genocide of the Tamils. He slaughtered thousands. Then he founded the Sinhala race and kingdom. So deep and old is our distrust of the Sinhala people."

For a 26-century history of ethnic distrust, the story of armed strife, surprisingly, seems rather short and of fairly recent origin. It began with the formation of the Tamil United Front (TUF) in May 14, 1972, when three parties joined hands at a meeting in the predominantly Tamilian port town of Trincomalee: the Federal Party, the Tamil Congress and Ceylon Workers Congress of Thondaman, a leader of Indian expatriate plantation workers. But to begin with, the TUF confined itself to an idea of autonomy within the Ceylonese entity.

The more radical ideas meanwhile were being propounded by the left-oriented Tamil Students Federation (TSF). Says an underground document tracing the growth of the secessionist movement: "The political structure of the TUF, founded on a conservative bourgeois ideology could not provide the basis for the articulation of the revolutionary politics... Confronted with this political vacuum and caught up in a revolutionary situation created by the concrete conditions of intolerable national oppression the Tamil revolutionary youth sought desperately to create a revolutionary political organisation to advance the task of national liberation."

Velupillai Prabhakaran was one such "revolutionary" youth who, in search of direct action formed a small organisation called Tamil New Tigers with the suggestive acronym of TNT. This was the precursor of the Tiger movement and, by and large, of all other insurgent organisations which came up later.

After four years of ideological and political metamorphosis both the TNT and the TUF decided on a major change of strategy in May 1976. The TNT was renamed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) backed now with a certain amount of armed strength. Similarly, at a national convention at Vaddokoddai in the Tamil region the TUF converted itself into the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and openly demanded creation of an independent sovereign Tamil Eelam.

In fact in the 1977 general election the TULF manifesto sought popular mandate to "establish an independent, sovereign, secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam that includes all the geographically contiguous areas that have been the traditional homelands of the Tamil-speaking people in this country".

The election led to a clear ethnic polarisation with the right-wing United National Party (UNP) of President Jayewardene winning 85 per cent of the seats in Parliament and the TULF with a handful of seats from the Tamil areas the only opposition. This was reflected in racial riots immediately afterwards resulting in the deaths of a large numer of Tamils, the destruction of property and in driving more Tamil youth to insurgency. The "Tigers" had by now established training camps.

On April 7, 1978 a police party led by an Inspector Bastiampillai organised an ambush on a Tiger training camp but was caught in a counter-ambush organised by "Lieutenant" Chelvanayagam. The Tigers killed four policemen, including the inspector and captured their weapons. This marked the beginning of ethnic insurgency in Sri Lanka. Exactly five months later, as Jayewardene introduced a new Constitution giving him omnibus powers the Tigers delivered their second blow by burning Air Ceylon's Avro airliner at Jaffna Airport.

This was followed by frequent hit-and-run attacks forcing the Government to promulgate the widely criticised Prevention of Terrorism Act under which the armed forces were given additional powers. In the following months, the rebel strength increased despite strong counter-measures by the Government aided, in no small measure, by the frequent racial riots which increasingly drove the Tamil population to the wall.

But in the process the Tigers organisation too underwent several changes. Many factions broke away and organised themselves into new groups with the same objectives but often working at cross-purposes.

While most of the groups are at the moment running training camps on Indian soil, the Tigers (LTTE) are perhaps the only ones active on Sri Lankan soil. But even the staunchest of the rebel supporters admit that the Tigers have no chance against government forces as long as the various groups operate independently of each other.

With the prospects of unity among them still elusive all the rebel groups are, at the moment, caught in a wait-and-watch situation. As Tigers theoretician A.S. Balasingham said: "We are in no great rush to strike. We are not just going to attack without any planning. It will have to be a very well-coordinated war strategy. Without that there will be no final assault."

With all the groups basically keen on unity that may not exactly be a distant possibility. Once it is realised there will be no stopping a long-drawn-out guerrilla war in the Tamil-dominated northern Sri Lanka.