The new LTTE leadership’s plan to form a transnational eelam government came a cropper when about ninety percent of the Tamil Diaspora members showed their contempt by abstaining from voting for the proposed outfit. Nediyavan, who succeeded KP as the new LTTE leader, was in for total disappointment when Tamils in Norway rejected his leadership on Sunday.

The Norway based LTTE leader decided to hold the first phase of Eelam Transnational ‘government’ election in Norway itself hoping for a resounding victory to force Oslo to recognise the separatist outfit. But only 2,667 out of a total of 27,000 Tamils in Norway voted.

The LTTE candidate lost and Vijaya Shankar, a South Indian Tamil from Chennai, came first with 1,864 votes.

As the Norwegian media and bureaucracy accepted the verdict of Tamil Diaspora’s outright rejection of the LTTE, an infuriated LTTE website, TamilNet, launched a frontal attack on the Norwegian Government. It said that Norway was now trying to mend fences with the Sri Lankan government. "Norway is out to appease Colombo as the Tamil Tigers are out of the picture and the only way to do this is abetting Colombo’s discrimination of Tamils in the line of Iran, Burma and China, writes Professor Øivind Fuglerud of the University of Oslo adding that a revealing cue comes from Norway insensitively sponsoring a Buddhist organisation to conduct a music festival on 27th November in Galle, timed to humiliate Tamils on the Heroes’ Day," TamilNet said.

The website added that Norway had ‘sat silently like a mouse’ in the final phase of the war. Now its ‘humanitarian’ aid helped the ‘internment camps of captivity and death’. In future, Norway’s aid might be integral to Colombo’s military complex cum Buddhist temple infrastructure to dominate Tamil areas, TamilNet said.

"The LTTE has selected Norway for its first phase of the election as they believed they had the best chance of winning in Norway," said Rajan Rajasingham of the Norway branch of PLOTE. "But the Tamil Diaspora in Norway rejected the idea of so-called transnational government". Rajasingham said that the idea of transnational government would not even get off the ground in any of the western countries where a sizable Tamil population is present.

Norway’s leading news agency, NTB, on Monday came out with an accurate analysis of the first ever election of Diaspora Tamils. It pointed out that the Diaspora had rejected the LTTE terrorism and now called for reconciliation.

According to a TamilNet article, the LTTE-Solheim honeymoon seemed over. The pro-LTTE website said that Development Minister Erik Solheim, the Norwegian facilitator of the Sri Lankan peace process between the period from 2002 and 2008, was quoted by NRK journalist Sverre Tom Radøy as saying, "Sri Lanka is the country where Norway has played its most significant role since the times of the Vikings."

The LTTE website accused Norway of being "totally absent in the international news-picture when it comes to the opinion on the situation in Sri Lanka today."