Moves are reportedly underway down under to ban the LTTE as a terrorist organization. Although the Australian government has not officially announced its position on the matter, The Australian has reported that the government is working towards the proscription. The LTTE fronts are vehemently campaigning against the reported move. If the ban comes through, the LTTE will be ranked alongside 19 other proscribed groups such as Al-Qa’ida and Jemmah Islamiah.

What has the LTTE achieved after twenty years of fighting? It is, no doubt, a formidable guerrilla outfit. But, it has not got anywhere near its goal and is losing whatever support it may have enjoyed from the world community. Locally, it has turned the areas under its control into a hellhole, which the people want to flee but are forcibly kept in. On the military front, it is losing ground. It may resort to terror tactics such as blasting civilian targets but given the resilience of the state, they are bound to fail. They will only help the government present a stronger case for its military campaign against the outfit.

The area that the LTTE now claims to control is very much less in extent than what former President Chandrika Kumaratunga offered Prabhakaran in 1994. She offered the entire North to him sans any elections for a period of ten years. He spurned the offer and chose to fight for more.

The LTTE fronts going hell for leather to extricate the outfit from a possible ban in Australia are trotting out various excuses for its violent campaign, the main being that it is fighting for the liberation of Tamils. If so, the question is why it has killed so many Tamils and is using unbridled terror to make them fall in line. Of course, it has a following among some dyed-in-the-wool types driven by racist hatred but the ordinary citizens have been given a choice between compliance and death.

Each and every terror group has a liberation façade. The Al-Qa’ida wants to liberate the Muslims; the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) notorious for crimes against children and women claims to be on a campaign to turn Uganda into a country governed according to the Ten Commandments, and the FARC, which is engaged in narcotics trade, peddles a socialist agenda. Pol Pot committed genocide on the pretext of creating a Utopia. Terrorist groups seem to have taken a leaf out of the book of transnational companies that flaunt the mask of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to give a human face to their blatant exploitation. Nothing could be stupider than to miss the real agenda of the terror groups for those facades.

It is a misconception that terror groups pose a threat only to the states that bear the brunt of their violence. Terrorism is no longer a phenomenon which is military in character. It has evolved to be multi-faceted. It has made inroads into the global economy as evident from its entry into stock exchanges around the world. How disastrous the impact of terror-related rackets on the economies of the countries harbouring terrorist groups could be seen from the fallout of the LTTE credit card scam in the UK. The day may not be far off when terror groups will be in a position to manipulate stock markets the world over through systematic infiltration thereof with the help of front organizations.

They are also in a position to have political control over the governments of the host countries. What is happening in Britain is a case in point. Some of the Labour Party MPs with their popularity among the natives on the wane have become dependent on the so-called block votes that the LTTE claims to have at its disposal. Although it has never been established whether the LTTE is capable of delivering those votes en bloc to a party of its choice, the Labour parliamentarians seem to have taken that claim seriously. Hence, their campaign to further its interests despite its proscription in Britain and the EU! Al Qu’ida has gone a step ahead and is using British Muslims to launch terror attacks. What plans other terrorist groups have for Britain is anyone’s guess.

So, if Australia bans the LTTE, it is her purpose that will be served more than that of Sri Lanka. Such action will have no impact on Sri Lanka’s ‘peace process,’ which is non-existent. After all, the LTTE sticks to its goal of dismembering Sri Lanka, which the international community including Australia does not subscribe to. Its violence has entered a vicious cycle and now it has no alternative but to unleash terror for survival, masquerading as a liberation organisation.