Sri Lanka Rebels Cripple International Airport

July 24, 2001 -- Sri Lankan rebels launched one of their boldest and most damaging actions today, decimating the country's international airport and putting its main source of revenue — tourism — at stake.

Nine rebels stormed Bandaranaike International Airport outside the capital, Colombo, and using suicide bombers, mortars, guns and explosives, destroyed eight military and five passenger aircraft.

They also killed five military personnel and injured 14 before being shot dead or blowing themselves up.

The attack is expected to further weaken the government's resources, already battered from 18 years of civil war between the country's majority Sinhalese population and Tamil separatists.

Tourism has continued in the country's south and west despite fighting in the north and east. But today's attack on the airport where all international tourists arrive is sure to make visits even rarer.

More than 63,000 people have been killed in the conflict, and the 130,000-strong Sri Lankan army has suffered from immense desertion rates — numbering up to 30,000.

The problem has become so intense that last month, the country's prime minister said the government would give bonuses to large families for their potential personnel contribution to the nation's military.

Money for the Cause

Meanwhile, the Tamil rebels have become increasingly resourceful in their quest for funding — finding much of it overseas in the million-odd overseas Sri Lankan Tamil population scattered over neighboring India, Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States.

At least some of the money comes from expatriate gatherings.

Earlier this year in a senior citizen's center in a New Jersey suburb, about 200 Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants gathered to hear a guest speaker, a Tamil Roman Catholic priest, talk about the atrocities of the civil war.

It could have been any one of numerous immigrant gatherings in the U.S., except that the funds being gathered that evening would eventually end up — through a complicated financial network and a web of international bank accounts — in the pockets of one of the world's most high-profile organizations employing terrorist tactics.

Founded in 1972, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is known to be a sophisticated, tightly-knit group that count in their ranks, some 9,000 guerrillas including a notoriously professional suicide bomber squad.

Popularly called the Tamil Tigers, or just plain Tigers, the group's military arsenal has included anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons and a small naval unit.

Looking Abroad

The bulk of the Tigers' financing, according to Rohan Gunaratna, from the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University, Scotland and author of Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crises and National Security, comes from an expansive business empire that includes shipping lines, export firms and the jewelry businesses.

Another important source of overseas funding comes from sympathetic members of the Tamil Diaspora, about 30,000 of whom live in the United States. Canada hosts the largest numbers of overseas Sri Lankan Tamils in North America with, around 200,000 Tamils living mostly in and around the Toronto metropolitan area.

Although many Sri Lankan Tamils do not support the Tigers and the bulk of Tamils in the West are desperately poor asylum seekers, many of the better-off overseas Tamils who immigrated in the 1980s and early 1990s knowingly or unknowingly contribute to the Tigers' coffers.

Gunaratna estimates that around $6 million raised by the overseas Sri Lankan Tamil community ends up in the pockets of the LTTE every year.

Outlawing Fund-raising

In the U.S., since the LTTE is on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), fund-raising for the Tigers is illegal.

But Canada has no such prohibitions. "We believe that some Tamils may be giving money to Tigers, although most Tamils in Canada have no allegiance to the Tigers," said a spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "But because fund-raising for the Tigers is not a criminal offense, we do not devote our resources there."

Until recently, the international operations of the LTTE were conducted from their international headquarters in London, but following a British ban on the LTTE and 20 other terrorist groups in line with new anti-terrorism laws that went into effect on Feb. 19, the organization has moved its international offices to an undisclosed location.

The LTTE has warned that the move would seriously hamper the Norwegian-brokered peace initiative that is currently in deadlock as the government and the LTTE haggle over conditions for talks.

The peace talks took a serious turn last month when the Sri Lankan government, in an unusually strong statement, declared a full-scale war was the only way to fight the Tigers.

The statement was released two days after the government launched air strikes on Tiger bases in the northern Jaffna peninsular in a bid to stop the rebels from regaining control of the strategic Jaffna City.

In Sheep’s Clothing

But even as the noose tightens, the Tigers have proved to be adept at forming front organizations through which funds are funneled back home.

At the New Jersey senior citizens center visited by ABCNEWS.com, the participants were at pains to note they were not abetting a formally recognized terrorist organization.

"I am not working for a terrorist organization. I am doing volunteer work to spread the truth about what is going on back home," said a Sri Lankan Tamil doctor who preferred not to disclose his name. "We have so much here in the West, we have to do our bit for our brothers suffering at home."

But experts say LTTE front organizations include an organization running relief operations in Sri Lanka. According to Gunaratna, although the funds raised in the West do go into rehabilitation work, the relief services are controlled by the Tigers. But some of the funds, Gunaratna said, goes towards the LTTE's military procurement budget.

Certainly many of the fund-raisers at the senior citizens center that evening made no secret of their support for a separate homeland, or Eelam as the Tamils call it. "I would say 100 percent of all Tamils want to see Eelam," said one.

Sometimes unsuspecting overseas Sri Lankan Tamils find themselves unwitting contributors to a terrorist cause. "I recently went for a Tamil film screening," said a New York-based Sri Lankan who declined to have his name printed. "I later learned that the proceeds for the show would wind up with some front organization of the Tigers and I was not at all happy with that."