A short history of LTTE

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers, are a separatist group in Sri Lanka, led by Vellupillai Prabhakaran . The LTTE had been agitating for a homeland for ethnic Tamils, who felt persecuted by Sri Lanka's ethnic majority, the Sinhalese since the 1980’s.  For the last twenty six years the group has been blamed for a dozen high-level assassinations, over two hundred suicide attacks, and its war against the government which has cost more than seventy thousand lives.

Sri Lanka, an island in the Indian Ocean off the southeast coast of India, gained its independence in 1948. The Ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists make up about three-quarters of the island's population; Tamils, both Indian and Sri Lankan, are the next largest ethnic group out of which most are Hindu. The Tamils are an ethnic group that live in southern India (mainly in the state of Tamil Nadu) hand on Sri Lanka, an island of 21 million people off the southern tip of India. Most Tamils live in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, and they comprise approximately 10 percent of the island's population. Their religion and Tamil language set them apart from the four-fifths of Sri Lankans who are Sinhalese—members of a largely Buddhist, Sinhala-speaking ethnic group. When Sri Lanka was ruled as Ceylon by the British, most Sri Lankans regarded the Tamil minority as collaborators with imperial rule and resented the Tamil's perceived preferential treatment. But since Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, the Sinhalese majority has dominated the country. The remainder of Sri Lanka's population includes ethnic Muslims, as well as Tamil and Sinhalese Christians. The Tamils in Sri Lanka number just 3.2 million, but they have close links to a far larger Tamil population just a few miles across the sea in southern India, where they benefit from sanctuary and financial support. Their grievances run deep, with roots in the British colonial administration that favored the Hindu Tamils as bureaucratic administrators. Many Tamils say they are discriminated against in jobs and education in favor of the Buddhist Sinhalese majority, who make up three quarters of the population.