Sri Lanka’s Embassy in Rome during the past one year has done more damage to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) than any other mission. The efforts of the Embassy have borne fruit and the Tigers and their sympathizers have been cornered with no means to escape.

This was not the case earlier. In 2004, Sri Lankans in Italy would as a rule meet at birthday parties and musical evenings. This was the only way they could meet and socialize. But they had earned notoriety for ending rough in drunken stupor, as liquor is cheap in Italy. They drank to their hearts content and ended up fighting each other. Now the Italians refuse to lend their halls to Sri Lankans. In Rome, the only hall available to the Sri Lankan community is known as ‘Pietralatha’.

In January 2004, there was a party for a Sri Lankan child and the host decided not to serve liquor as the occasion was to celebrate the birthday of a five-year-old child born in Italy. But, during the party a few Sri Lankans got on to the stage, started waving the Sri Lanka flag and singing Sinhala songs in praise of the Sri Lanka Security Forces. From nowhere, about 30 Tamil youths, who were not invited to the party, got on stage and forcibly took away the Lion Flag and the microphone from the hapless compere and started singing Tamil songs praising Prabhakaran. After the recital they got away unscathed.

The LTTE was very active throughout Italy and has created many fund raising cells. No one challenged them. It was only the JVP and few Buddhist monks who were able to gather youth under the Lion Flag and demonstrate to show solidarity with the Sri Lankan Government. But, the demonstrations were few and far between as there was infighting amongst the Sri Lankan Associations. The Mahaweera Day was one of the most important days in the LTTE calendar and they splashed the walls of Italy with posters. Unlike the posters in Sinhala, these posters were in Tamil and Italian. No one challenged them. In Palermore and Catania, where there are large concentrations of Tamils, they rented the largest hall in town for their Mahaweera Day. At the beginning, Eelam flags was hoisted and speeches were made by many Tamils and Italians exhorting the greatness of Prabhakaran and calling the Sri Lankan Government a racist entity which had robbed the Tamil people of their birthright.

The Italian Police were unaware or did not care that the LTTE was proscribed in Italy. They believed that the LTTE flag was the National Flag of Tamil Eelam. Many Sri Lankans had a hard time convincing the Italians about the situation in Sri Lanka. Programmes were shown on Mahaweera Day on local TV stations in Italian and stories in favour of the Tamil struggle were reported in the newspapers and journals of that area. After Mahaweera Day the Sri Lankans had great difficulty in answering questions posed by their employees, especially those concerning the Tamil struggle in Sri Lanka.

Italians were convinced that Sri Lanka was a country originally inhabited by the Tamils and the Sinhalese who had settled in small areas in the South took up weapons and drove the innocent peace loving Tamils away from their homeland and they are now confined to the North and East.

Our Embassy or the Ambassadors were never heard countering this propaganda. They never had any dialogue with the Sri Lankan Diaspora. The Sinhala expatriates placidly stomached the insults directed at them.

In addition to that ‘L’ Osservatore Romano’, the official Vatican newspaper, carried many articles which were supportive of the LTTE terrorists.

Even after a devastating suicide bomber killed many civilians, the news item ended with two paragraphs quoting that 65,000 people have died and the LTTE has been fighting a war of liberation against the Sri Lankan Government. Even after the LTTE was banned as a terrorist organization, and even after the devastating attack on the twin towers, the opinion had not changed in Italy.

This year, the Heroes’ Day speech and the Mahaweera celebrations in Palermore, Catania and Reggio Emillia were on such a low-key that no one knew where it was held.

Now the LTTE is on the run in Italy. Some of their master-minds, who escaped arrest in the July crack-down, have left Italian soil and have gone to other European countries where there is protection. The first noted change was when the LTTE decided to shift their broadcasting station from France to Italy. The Government of Italy is slow to take up such issues, which do not affect them. And, mainly because this station broadcast in the Tamil Language it did not affect them. The LTTE terrorism was a phenomenon that affects a tiny island called Sri Lanka. The LTTE won the propaganda war without facing any opposition. So they thought that Milan would be a safe haven from where to broadcast their propaganda, by uploading it to the satellite from there. It is a very well known fact that within a very short time the Sri Lanka Embassy in Italy took a series of important steps and the LTTE TV transmission was closed within a few days of its commencing the Test broadcast.