It didn't go the way they had planned it. From the time Meena Krishnamoorthy suddenly recalled how the Sri Lankan Navy shelled from sea the Tamils fleeing the LTTE on land at Nandikanal, during the final hours of terror of the LTTE, the International Commission of Jurists-Australian Section (ICJA) called for Australia to investigate war crimes violations allegedly committed by the Sri Lankan Navy and its former commander and present Sri Lankan High Commissioner in Canberra, to the Sri Lankan-born Australian Arunachalam Jegatheeswaran filing an indictment against President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Melbourne.

He was seeking justice for alleged war crimes, hopes were raised among the pro-LTTE lobbyists, or so-called Tamil diaspora, of great achievements in humiliating the Sri Lanka President and dealing heavy blows to Sri Lanka internationally.

But it was not the week the pro-LTTE lobbyists had planned to see. While their strategies and those of their powerful allies such as the ICJA failed in Australia, with President Rajapaksa free to address a Business Forum and the Sri Lankan community at Perth, in events that were well attended, Tiger operatives in other parts of the world were also getting a beating, that was certainly not orchestrated by Sri Lanka.

Great expectations

In Australia, the great expectations of the pro-Eelamists were shattered when the Prime Minister Julia Gillard made it clear that although Australia had some concerns about Human Rights and related situations in Sri Lanka, they would not be allowed to affect or interfere with the progress of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGHM) now on in Perth.

This was given practical demonstration by the Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland stating he would not allow the case by Jegatheeswaran against President Mahinda Rajapaksa to proceed.

"The Attorney-General has refused to grant his consent, as continuation of the proceedings would be in breach of domestic law and Australia's obligations under international law," his spokesman said. He cited Australia's obligations under international law extending immunity to visiting heads of state. "Those immunities include personal inviolability including from any form of arrest or detention and immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the receiving state," the spokesman said.

This official legal position fell in the face of Jegatheeswaran's lawyer's earlier statement that diplomatic immunity was not an issue in this case and similar opinion by the jurists of the ICJA.

LTTE terror

In the event, all the TV tears shed, for the fleeing Tamil civilian victims of LTTE terror by alleged shelling by the SLN, by Meena Krishnamoorthy, doing a performance that must have been better than her usual Bharatha-Natyam skills, highlighted in a Channel 4 imitation by ABC; and Arunachalam Jegatheeswaran's blood curdling horror tales of what he claimed to have seen while helping the LTTE as a volunteer came to naught.

Jegatheeswaran said, ''People are still suffering because of what he (President Rajapaksa) did and I think the world should know,'' and declaring he was "seeking justice for thousands who perished in a series of aerial bombardments and ground attacks on shelters, schools, hospitals, orphanages and community centres."

He claimed to having seen all the horror he spoke of, as a volunteer aid worker in Sri Lanka from 2007 to 2009.
''I can't bear that the person who is responsible for all of this - who is the commander-in-chief - is coming to my country and getting off scot-free. I'm asking the highest court of justice in Australia to decide whether he is guilty or not guilty.''

European Union

It is interesting that he did not enlarge on what exactly he was doing here as an "aid worker", and who he was assisting in his work from 2007 to 2009. The problem is that a man who was obviously assisting what has been acknowledged as the world's most ruthless terrorist organization is having such concerns about alleged crimes perpetrated by a government and its leader that defeated this same terror, which Jegatheeswaran and Meena Krishnamoorthy somehow escaped and went safely back to Australia, to remain in silence until the strategies against Mahinda Rajapaksa's arrival at Perth became an unquestioned reality.

If the situation in Australia turned sour for the pro-LTTE lobbyists, there was equally bad news that came from far away Netherlands. At The Hague, a Dutch court has convicted five Tamils of raising funds for the outlawed Tigers and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from two to six years.

Prosecutors accused the five men, all of whom now have Dutch citizenship, of extorting money from the Sri Lankan (sic) diaspora in the Netherlands while also engaging in money laundering and the spread of propaganda.

The court in The Hague ruled that the five men were aware of the fact that the LTTE was on an international terrorist list and that their activities were illegal in the European Union.

Military operations

In reporting the case the Dutch an international media stated after a devastating tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2004, the LTTE diverted millions of dollars raised on humanitarian grounds to rearming ahead of a resumption of conflict in mid-2006. Since the demise of the Tamil insurgency in 2009, overseas LTTE wings have split into three factions and begun fighting over control of the assets, security officials say.

The LTTE fought for more than three decades to create a separate nation for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils in the Indian Ocean island's North and East. At the height of its powers, the LTTE was collecting between $ 200 million and $ 300 million a year from extortion of Sri Lankan Tamils living mainly in Europe, Canada and Australia, credit card fraud, gun and drug smuggling and innocuously-named charities which diverted the funds to military operations, the reports said.

Sri Lanka's government has lobbied nations with significant Sri Lankan Tamil populations to crack down on illegal activities by LTTE operatives, and has often blasted Western nations for turning a blind eye to LTTE activities on their soil.

One LTTE practice was to demand a minimum monthly payment from each Sri Lankan Tamil living abroad and threatening harm to their family living in Sri Lanka if they did not comply. So far, the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy and France have brought criminal cases against LTTE operatives.

From Down Under to the Netherlands in Europe the pro-LTTE lobbyists have not been having a good season just now. Their operations are being exposed in diverse areas of activity, and in the United States there has been new evidence emerging of how the billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, and his family, has been funding the LTTE in millions of dollars. The details are reported by Vanity Fair, and could become a cause for new legal action against him for funding a group banned as an international terrorist organization by the USA. It is clearly not plain sailing for the pro-LTTE Tamils and others abroad, although they do have a well-organized operation in most countries of the West. Yet, there are many indications that the world is slowly but surely catching up with their strategies, and how they are using the millions of Dollars, Sterling Euros, or whatever, earned for the cause of terror, as proven in the Dutch Courts and exposed in the USA.

Courtesy: Daily News