Sitting over the well-endowed war chest of the decapitated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the organisation’s arms procurer and international fund manager, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, is now trying to take over its leadership, informed sources say.

 

But Pathmanathan, better known by his earlier name Kumaran Pathmanathan or KP, is reportedly opposed by Manivannan alias Castro, who had also dealt with the LTTE’s finances overseas earlier.

The opponents of Pathmanathan are said to be exploiting the fact that the slain Tiger chieftain, Velupillai Prabhakaran, had sidelined KP for some time and had recalled him only recently, a short while before the final debacle earlier this month.

The suave Pathmanathan, fluent in several European languages, and with contacts with the movers and shakers in the world, has chosen to portray the post-Prabhakaran LTTE as a democratic organisation wanting to fight for the rights of the Sri Lankan Tamils in a peaceful and democratic way.

This approach is expected to attract the support of the western governments keen on keeping the Tamil resistance alive in Sri Lanka in the post- Prabhakaran period if only to check the rising power of the ultra nationalistic Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The war-mongers among the LTTE’s leadership abroad oppose KP’s plan.

They had castigated him for announcing that Prabhakaran was dead. The warmongers are said to be a formidable group because at this point of time at least, the Tamil diaspora believes in the efficacy of war. The diaspora wants armed resistance to go on and are afraid that KP may deny this project the necessary funds.

Intelligence sources say that there is also a class cleavage in the LTTE which had been hidden in the past because of the over-arching presence of Prabhakaran.

Prabhakaran had preferred loyal persons to educated and sophisticated persons who might not be unquestioningly loyal. For example, Prabhakaran preferred Tamilchelvan to Balasingham, and Nadesan to Yogi. He kept the ideologue V Balakumaran always in the background.

But with the exit of Prabhakaran, persons like V Rudrakumaran in the US see a chance for themselves if the organisations were to become democratic and acceptable to the west.

- ExpressBuzz