Colombo, Oct 26 (IANS) Holding a protest rally in the east against the perceived efforts by some political parties in Tamil Nadu to stop the military campaign against the Tamil Tigers in the north, renegade rebel leader Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, known as Karuna Amman, Sunday said “there should be no attempt from Tamil Nadu to rescue LTTE”.
“We welcome the support from Tamil Nadu for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, but the political parties and their leaders should not attempt to rescue the Tamil Tiger rebels, who are facing an imminent defeat in the hands of the security forces in the north,” Karuna Amman, who now heads the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Puligal (TMVP) said at the rally.
Recalling the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu, the former rebel commander had warned that “any effort by Tamil Nadu to save LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) would boomerang on them”.
The TMVP organized the rally at the Weber sports ground in the eastern Batticaloa town, located some 300 kilometers away from here, amid tight security.
Karuna Amman was appointed recently as the national list MP of the ruling coalition of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a few months after he returned to the country from Britain, where he served a nine-month imprisonment for illegal entry.
Although media reports said there is an internal problem brewing between Karuna Amman and the party’s second in-command, eastern province Chief Minister Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pillaiyan, both of them have appeared on the same stage and made the same appeal.
Commenting on the reports, Karuna Amman has stated that there were many parties with “vested interests trying to undermine the progress of the TMVP” in the east.
“The LTTE is not the only enemy we have. There are many others,” he said without naming them.
The TMVP protest has come at a time when the president sent his brother Basil Rajapaksa to New Delhi as his special envoy, aiming to clarify on India’s stated concern for safety of civilians caught in the war-zone.