Lessons in Legitimacy: The LTTE End-Game of 2007-2009

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam LTTE were arguably one of the most feared, lethal, and capable insurgent movements in the modern age. Yet despite their strength and wealth, the Sri Lankan armed forces destroyed the LTTE with a conventional army in a series of pitched battles from 2007-2009. This thesis argues that the destruction of the LTTE during the end-game of 2007-2009 was in part due to a loss of local legitimacy amongst the Sri Lankan Tamils that the movement purported to represent. This loss of local legitimacy was a product of LTTE coercion, facilitated by the enormous funding structures of the global Tamil Diaspora. As long as the Diaspora was able to provide not only funding but political legitimacy to the movement internationally, and the LTTE was able to control political space locally, this loss of legitimacy was largely irrelevant. Yet the effects of 911, combined with a Sri Lankan military offensive, not only highlighted the degree to which local legitimacy had disintegrated, it also showed just how important local legitimacy can be to an insurgent movement should the conditions suddenly take a turn for the worse. The loss of local legitimacy, and its importance to the LTTE during the end-game, is largely missing from most literature on the subject. This thesis poses the following question From the perspective of an external resource mobilization structure, what were the long-term impacts of the Diaspora upon the end-game of the LTTE The author will show a relationship between the economic and political support of the Tamil Diaspora and the legitimacy of the LTTE at the local level, that is, within the Sri Lankan Tamil communities of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. The argument here is that as the Diaspora increased its support, the LTTE reduced its reliance on local Tamils for funding or justification of the campaign, reducing LTTE legitimacy locally among the Tamils.