Sri Lanka: End of the Tiger hunt

Colombo: The beleaguered Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka may have well have fired their last shot as an organised rebel force with unconfirmed reports suggesting that their leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran, his son Charles Anthony and political head Balasingham Nadesan may all have been killed in and around their last holdout near Mullaitivu. According to reports, Prabhakaran's body along with two aides has been recovered from inside an ambulance which they were using to flee from their last holdout before dawn.

The body of Charles Anthony is already on display and that of Prabhakaran may be exhibited after clearance from the political leadership.

 The head of the Tigers' peace secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan, and their eastern leader, S Ramesh were also said to be among the dead.

Senior military officers were quoted as saying that commando units and other crack government troops were engaged in heavy combat with ''a couple of hundred'' of Tiger fighters hunkered down in fortified bunkers. They said the fighting was now restricted to a patch of land just 100 metres by 100 metres.

Earlier on Saturday, the Tigers had finally offered to lay down arms. The call went unheeded by the Sri Lankan government which saw no reason to provide any escape routes for a rebel leadership which had run out of all options - military and political.   

Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country's president, is expected to give a proclamation of victory in Parliament today or tomorrow.

The end of Eelam

The end of the Tamil Tigers will not just bring an end to one of the longest running insurgencies in the world, but also mark the demise of a guerrilla force that grew in strength to take on the dimensions of an army, even as its leadership ran a de facto government in the northern half of the country.

The Tamil Tigers will certainly go down in the history books as one of the most motivated, innovative and deadly of all fighters in the history of guerrilla warfare, even as they strove to battle for an independent ''Eelam'' or Tamil homeland.

The campaign for an ethnic Tamil homeland owed its origins to an oppressed minority Tamil community fighting to free itself from the oppression of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese Buddhist majority.

It is estimated that the conflict would have cost more than 70,000 lives over 26 years.

The undoing of the Tigers would have come about because of various reasons, but certainly analysts are wondering if the Tigers didn't make the classic mistake of forgetting their origins as a guerrilla force and assuming the trappings of a regular army.

They may well have been overwhelmed by the resources that the Sri Lankan government brought to bear against them in a conventional war.

On the political front they undoubtedly paid a heavy price for assassinating Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The cool response of the Indian government to the travails of the Tigers, even as it fought a losing war with the Sri Lankan army, denied the insurgents vital strategic support. This hands-off approach may have only encouraged the Sri Lankans to spurn all offers of a negotiated settlement with the Tigers.

Rajiv Gandhi's widow, Sonia Gandhi, has just brought her party, the Indian National Congress, to a historic victory in the 2009 parliamentary elections.

There may be poetic justice of sorts in the fact that even as the badly cornered Tigers were making their last desperate call for surrender on Saturday, election results coming in on the same day in India indicated an unprecedented triumph for the widow of the late prime minister.

Sonia, an unassuming housewife at the time of the assassination, was compelled to inherit the political legacy of her husband. Even as a sorry chapter comes to a close in Sri Lanka, she and her party now rise to a position of unmatched political influence within the country.