NEW DELHI, Jan 25 — The Tamil Tigers are on the run, and the Sri Lankan army is hot on their heels.

“We have surrounded them on all sides,” said the triumphant army chief, Lieutenant-General Sarath Fonseka. “The only option for them is to jump into the sea because they still have 40km of coastline.”

That would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Until recently, most analysts and even Sri Lankan leaders had viewed the conflict as a no-win situation.

Now, many of the same observers say that the Tigers have been rendered toothless, and the bloodshed is near an end.

That would mean the writ of the Sri Lankan government — which had all these years watched helplessly as the Tigers took control of a large swathe of territory and ran a parallel administration — would run across

the island.

The development marks a dramatic turnaround in a war that has raged for 25 years and claimed nearly 100,000 lives, making it one of the world’s deadliest.

Militants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the official name of the rebel group, have been fighting for the creation of a separate state they call Tamil Eelam for the minority Tamils in the island’s north-east, where they are concentrated.

The coastal Mullaitivu district is the only remaining stronghold of the group, but government forces have boxed them in there.

Notably, the LTTE’s elusive cult leader, the portly Velupillai Prabhakaran, 54, who introduced deadly suicide bombings into the terrorists’ armoury, may have already fled Sri Lanka, said Lt-Gen Fonseka, who himself suffered grievous injuries in a suicide attack.

Some believe Prabhakaran may now be somewhere in South-east Asia.

How did the army turn the tables on the Tigers, once considered invincible? And is this really the end of a terrorist group that has in the past managed to regroup and return with all guns blazing?

“There’s no question of a bounce-back from this one for the LTTE,” said retired Major-General Ashok Mehta, who served in Sri Lanka when Indian troops went there in the late 1980s. Their mission was to restore peace between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils but they ended up fighting the Tigers instead.

“This is not a defeat, this is a rout,” he said, noting that the LTTE has been the only rebel group in the world that had an army, navy and air wing.

Much of the credit for driving the rebels out of most of the northeast and cornering them in Mullaitivu is reserved for President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

“No Sri Lankan leader in the past has single-mindedly fought the LTTE

because no leader believed that they could be defeated,” said Mr Dharmalingam Sitharthan, the leader of an erstwhile Tamil militant group that gave up arms and joined the democratic mainstream.

In the past, every time the LTTE was militarily weak, the island’s leaders gave in to pressures from various quarters to declare a truce. The Tigers used those periods to re-arm and regroup themselves and return to renewed hostilities, he related.

Retired Sri Lankan army brigadier Vipul Boteju said the President had shown “remarkable leadership” in prosecuting the war.

“They (the Tigers) are on the verge of collapse and the army is determined to destroy their carefully built-up war infrastructure over the years,” he told.

Prof Jayadeva Uyangoda, who teaches political science at Colombo University, said that the changed global and regional situation in the wake of the “war on terror” would not allow the rebels to rebuild the kind of strategic military power they had before.

Analysts say the Sri Lankan experience has lessons for the region and the rest of the world in dealing with recalcitrant terrorist groups.

But the war has been a costly affair. In addition to a death toll estimated at 100,000, defence expenditure this year will shoot up to 177 billion rupees (RM5.6 billion), from about 44 billion rupees a decade ago and 750 million rupees before the Tamil militancy escalated in the 1980s.

Tamils make up 11.9 per cent of the population of 19 million, and complain of discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.

But Mr Varatharaja Perumal, the only Tamil leader to hold the post of chief minister of the island’s north-eastern province and a bitter rival of the LTTE, said that too is changing. The defeat of the rebels would open up the scope for a political solution to the ethnic problem, he said.

“The LTTE has been a hindrance and impediment to any political solution,” said Mr Perumal, who lives in India. “As long as the LTTE was there, everyone said ‘talk to the LTTE’, though the Tigers were never interested in talks.”

There was no possibility that the Tigers would lay down arms and that Prabhakaran would turn to a democratic path, like Nepal’s Maoists did, he said.

“Prachanda has not killed 10,000 of his people,’ he said, referring to Nepal’s elected Maoist Prime Minister. On the other hand, Prabhakaran was responsible for the deaths of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Tamils and the community would never forgive him for the crime, he charged.

Indeed, the Tamils, who once considered the Tigers as their saviours, now regarded them as the biggest hindrance to peace.

“They are losing territory and whatever support they had of the Tamil people,” Mr Perumal said.

Tamil leaders themselves say that if reports about Prabhakaran fleeing the country are true, that would be the end of the LTTE.

“Prabhakaran did not groom anyone to succeed him,” said one official. “In fact, he eliminated anyone he thought was a potential challenge to his leadership.”

They said the LTTE would disintegrate and that its cadres would resort to anti-social activities, like kidnapping, extortion and other crimes, for money to maintain the lifestyle they had gotten used to.

According to Lt-Gen Fonseka, there were only 1,000 Tigers left and they are confined to a 30 sq km area in Mullaitivu.

All in all, with the LTTE on the retreat, analysts say the Sri Lankan government has its task cut out to resolve the Tamil problem permanently.

“Every government in the past had used the LTTE as an excuse to deny devolution of powers to the Tamils,” said Mr Sitharthan. “The government should now seriously move in that direction.”

Prof Uyangoda noted that the ethnic conflict in the island had two components, military and political.

“If the military component is overcome,” he said, “the government should quickly address the political component by giving powers of self-rule to the Tamil and Muslim minorities in a ‘united Sri Lanka’ and undertake a massive developmental effort in the war-ravaged north-east.”

President Rajapaksa told visiting Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon last Sunday that while his government would deal with terrorism firmly and militarily, it is equally firmly committed to finding a negotiated political solution to the ‘problem of ethnic relations’ on the island. — Straits Times