Kosovo is independent. A single province has broken away from an established state without prior agreement, and it has been recognised by many of the most powerful countries in the world.

Such a thing has never happened before.

Some people have celebrated it as a major victory for the right to self-determination, while others have mourned what they fear is the beginning of the end for national sovereignty, but everybody seems to agree that it sets a precedent for secessionist movements elsewhere. Prabhakaran might well be getting excited.

The LTTE is fighting for a separate state for Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, just as the KLA took up arms against the Serbian state on behalf of Albanians in Kosovo. Both have cited discrimination against a minority group, and both have claimed that no political deal with the majority community is possible.

The KLA attacked civilian as well as military targets, and it was once regarded as a terrorist organisation in the West.

Kosovo Albanians who didn’t obey its orders were also eliminated to some degree by the KLA.

The LTTE has certainly achieved rather more spectacular results with its terrorism, like blowing up a president and storming the international airport, but it is not fundamentally different in character to the KLA. In fact, the advantage in these efforts towards secession has always appeared to be with Prabhakaran.

The LTTE is considerably more organised and better trained.

The KLA was a collection of many different factions that proved very difficult to coordinate, while its cadres were often inexperienced and largely unschooled in the tactics of guerrilla warfare. Serbian forces pushed much of the KLA out of Kosovo in its offensives leading up to the ceasefire that Western governments pressed on Serbia in October 1998.

The LTTE is also much better equipped.

The KLA found it impossible to hold territory for long periods because it had very few heavy weapons, depending for much of its campaign on a collection of old guns from the disintegrating regime in Albania.

After October 1998, the KLA did get its hands on a lot of new hardware thanks to significant diaspora funding and the blind eyes of friendly neighbours, but this definitely wouldn’t have matched the resources that have been accumulated by the LTTE. Prabhakaran should perhaps reflect on why he has failed where his rivals have now so clearly triumphed.

The LTTE has been active since the early 1980s, while the KLA could still fairly convincingly be described by a Kosovo Albanian leader as a fabrication of the Serbian secret services as late as 1995.

Kosovo has become independent within little more than a decade, and one of the KLA bosses is now Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, Prabhakaran has spent more than a quarter of a century dodging death in the Vanni, yet there is still no sign of Eelam. The West is the answer, of course.

In March 1999, Western governments started bombing Serbia under the cover of NATO.

Slobodan Milosevic was called a dictator, and the world was told that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians were missing and presumed massacred by Serbian forces. Tony Blair likened the operation to Britain’s struggle against Hitler in World War II, while Bill Clinton spoke with anguish about what he eagerly called a genocide going on in Kosovo.

NATO had taken out a good deal of Serbia’s infrastructure and was preparing for a ground invasion when Slobodan Milosevic finally agreed to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo. The United Nations then stepped in to run the province with the help of NATO troops, and the United States promptly set up one of its biggest military bases anywhere in the world.

Independence for Kosovo had to wait for the pretence of talks to be completed, but it has been inevitable since that day in June 1999.

Serbia could do nothing about it, even after dumping Slobodan Milosevic and electing a pro-Western President.

Secession was simply the end desired by the West. Prabhakaran seems to think that this scenario can be replicated in Sri Lanka.

The LTTE is working hard to make life as bad as possible for as many ordinary people as it can, assuming that the existence of a dire humanitarian situation would convince the West to come and save Sri Lankans from their Government.

Eelam would then presumably emerge and Prabhakaran would thereby be delivered from his fate, just as the KLA was rescued in Kosovo.

Buses, shops and temples are being bombed, and Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese are dying.

The Government will obviously be blamed for committing excesses in response to such attacks, but it can almost equally easily be reproached for not preventing atrocities by the LTTE.

Deaths and displacements are what matters to the West, according to Prabhakaran. Kosovo, however, has another history.

After October 1998, the West had ceasefire monitors all over the province, so we know exactly what was going on in the lead up to the bombing in March 1999.

NGOs were there too.

They all agree on a number of important points.

The KLA forced the breakdown of the ceasefire with a spate of abductions and murders of some hundreds of Serbian civilians and police from December 1998.

The Serbian Army reacted in a characteristically brutal manner, but the number killed is reported to be only a few tens of Kosovo Albanians or KLA.

Serbian troops also engaged KLA fighters on the border as they attempted to return to Kosovo from training camps in Albania.

In January 1999, a single massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanians is said to have occurred at a place called Racak, although this has since been questioned in the Western mainstream media.

Serbian forces then returned to the same pattern of retaliating to KLA provocation, admittedly harshly, but still causing only a relatively small number of deaths, while the KLA continued its campaign against the police and increased attacks on Serb civilians and Kosovo Albanian dissenters. The Serbian Army started the atrocities for which it is better known only after NATO began bombing in March 1999.

Western investigators later concluded that most of the Kosovo Albanian deaths and displacements occurred in areas of KLA activity and along routes that Serbia anticipated would be used in a NATO invasion.

It is estimated that up to 10,000 Kosovo Albanians were killed in Serbia. Western leaders actually created the humanitarian imperative for intervention in Kosovo.

Europe probably just wanted to clear up a mess on its borders, and everybody remembered the lengthy sufferings of Bosnia, while nobody liked Slobodan Milosevic.

Meanwhile, the United States was keen to reassert itself over an increasingly united Europe, and military intervention was certainly a potent reminder of the need for an alliance like NATO.

Whatever, we will never be sure of the West's real motives, although we can be certain that they had nothing to do with protecting the Kosovo Albanians.

Essentially, the Western establishment had already reconciled itself to the break-up of Yugoslavia, a process that it had perhaps inadvertently set in motion through its efforts to overthrow the socialist regime and introduce market forces in the 1980s.

Kosovo was seen by many people as just another stage in a game that had started years earlier. Sri Lanka, of course, presents a much less tempting prospect.

India is far too close for comfort, and Western leaders are keen on keeping that rising power as an ally, while Serbia is quite a long way from its then somewhat down and out friend Russia. Western governments would also have a considerably harder time convincing their public that any kind of military action should be taken in a small island some thousands of miles away, and one that is quite well known there for its tea and cricket, especially when the terrorists this country is fighting employ the now universally abhorred suicide bombers.

Serbia was a lot easier to present as a villain, despite what some commentators have said about the West siding with Muslim Albanians over Serb Christians, for the Orthodox Christians of Serbia are as foreign to Western minds as their Russian counterparts.

Anyway, NATO has got its hands full at the moment, what with its other so-called humanitarian interventions still underway in Afghanistan and Iraq, while it hasn't even managed to stem the killings or prevent the violent expulsions of some hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Roma after its occupation of Kosovo in June 1999. Precedents are legal concepts.

Independence for Kosovo, however, was only a matter of power.

Those with power did what they wanted in Kosovo.

The KLA was the incidental beneficiary of their largesse, but such good fortune is not going to befall the LTTE.

Prabhakaran is on his own, I suggest, and that means no Eelam.

Let him try to declare independence, and he will immediately find out how little support the LTTE has in the West.