WikiLeaks: Gota Agreed To Provide US A Copy Of Prabhakaran And Karuna Tape
“Gothabaya told us that the government was sure the LTTE did not believe in a political solution. He said the GSL has recently come into possession of a videotape of a speech by Prabhakaran apparently recorded about two months after the signing of the CFA in 2002. In the video, Karuna was standing next to Prabhakaran and introduced him. Prabhakaran asserted that the LTTE knew it would never reach its goal of a Tamil Homeland (“Eelam”) through peaceful means. He told Karuna’s cadres, who were about to return to the East, that the CFA only signified a pause for the LTTE, during which they could regroup, rearm, resupply, recruit and retrain. Gothabaya agreed to provide the Embassy a copy of the tape.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
The ambassador Blake wrote; “PDAS Steven Mann, accompanied by Ambassador and Pol Chief, met Defense Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa on March 8. Gothabaya, noting that an overwhelming majority of Sinhalese Buddhists had voted for Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005, told us that his brother’s popularity among the majority community was still strong. However, Sri Lanka’s system of proportional representation in Parliament meant that the President’s party would never secure an absolute majority on its own. This, he explained, had made it necessary to create such a big cabinet to satisfy everyone. Mann responded that the President’s considerable political skills and his strong support made him the right leader to make progress on a solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem. The U.S. hoped that the new power-sharing proposals that emerge form the current consultation process would be of a quality that hadn’t been seen before.”
“Gothabaya thought the government could reach out to the Tamil people, particularly their educated technocrats. ‘People need to know that there is a normal life waiting for them after the conflict,’ he said. It was therefore important for the government to intervene immediately and do development work in the areas in the East that had recently come under its control. The Tamils also needed genuine representation, Gothabaya said. The people had no confidence in the Tamil National Alliance, which was simply a placeholder for the LTTE. On the other hand, Gothabaya asserted that previous attempts by Sri Lankan government to ‘introduce’ alternative Tamil representatives in the North and East had failed, and would not work in the future, either.” Blake further wrote.
Ambassador Blake wrote; “Gothabaya said that over the next six months, the military planned to consolidate its control over the East, then stabilize the border region adjacent to the LTTE-held Vanni. Vavuniya remained a problem, with much LTTE infiltration, which was also causing problems in an east-to-west arc toward Mannar. In order to secure unfettered access to the population in government-held Mannar, the army would seek to push the Tigers back a bit more. The government would try to deny the LTTE resupply of arms and ammunition, then put pressure on them to return to the negotiating table. Gothabaya noted that cutting off arms LTTE shipments to Sri Lanka might be easier than stemming financial flows. The Tigers didn’t need t bring the money they raised abroad to Sri Lanka he said, but used it abroad to purchase arms. While the Navy and other security forces had found i difficult enough to choke off LTTE resupply of mmunition, it was worth the effort to try to do s. While Prabhakaran, with his terrorist mentaliy, would likely never give in, his younger cadre might eventually grasp that there is no militar solution to the conflict, he thought. Prime Minister Wickremenayake had visited a number of Southeast Asian countries and concluded MoUs on cooperation against LTTE arms smuggling with sevral governments, including Indonesia and Thailand, Gothabaya noted. He added that the LTTE arms ship sunk on February 28 had refitted and replenished in an Indonesian harbor. However, Gothabaya thought that the LTTE smuggling operations were not occurring with the approval of those governments, but that certain corrupt officials were abetting them.”
