A senior leader of Sri Lanka’s defeated Tamil Tiger rebels has agreed to help the government in its post-war reconstruction efforts, a state-run newspaper reported Sunday.
The Sunday Observer said Selvarasa Pathmanathan, formerly the chief arms smuggler for the rebels, had already been working to convince Tiger sympathisers abroad that the fight for an independent Tamil homeland was over. Government troops defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 after decades of bloody separatist warfare on the island.
“Pathmanathan told the Sunday Observer that several Tiger activists living abroad had now begun to understand the ground realities,” the paper said under the headline: “Tamil intellectuals, ex-militant sympathisers to assist the government.”
“The ex-Tiger stalwart said that there should not be room for petty differences and all must work towards stabilising the hard earned peace,” the paper said without quoting him directly.
Pathmanathan, who is better known as KP, was appointed chief international representative of the Tigers by rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran shortly before Prabhakaran was killed in the last days of the war. The Colombo government claimed Pathmanathan was taken into custody in August following a covert operation in an unnamed southeast Asian country. Since then he has been held at an undisclosed location in Lanka.