LONDON: It’s thanks to Sri Lanka’s overseas Tamils — people like engineer S. Vijayadeva or accountant Kana Naheerathan — that the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) can afford to keep up its insurgency.

For two decades, the Tamil Tigers have fought for an ethnic Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka’s north and east. They say they are the only legitimate representatives of the Tamil people, but several countries, including Britain, regard them as terrorists.

“Tamils have no power in the political system,” 69-year-old Vijayadeva told Reuters at a protest in London. “The state is supplied with modern weapons. Where can the LTTE go for arms and money? They must go to the people.”

Diplomats blame the Tigers for a string of recent attacks on the military and majority Sinhalese civilians, including suicide strikes on naval vessels and on army headquarters.

A mine blast on Thursday killed 64 civilians, including children and women, on a bus in the worst attack since a 2002 ceasefire, prompting retaliatory air strikes on Tiger territory. Few believe the LTTE’s denials of responsibility. Most diplomats expect further escalation.

Around 600 people have been killed this year as the violence intensified, leading the European Union to follow Britain, the US, India and Canada in listing the rebels as terrorists.

The Tigers say the Tamil diaspora of an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people — many of whom are professionals such as doctors, engineers, and accountants now living in Canada, Scandanavia, and Northern Europe — only give money for development in rebel areas, funding the Tigers’ police force, courts, banking system and political offices, but not its weapons.

The Tigers say taxes from rebel areas are used to fund their military, consisting of an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 fighters — including some child soldiers, according to the United Nations — as well as a navy and fledgling air force.

Analysts say the rebels have spent $30 million to $40 million on weaponry since 2002, but figures are hard to come by.

Sri Lanka’s government says drug and arms smuggling also play a role in the funding — a charge the rebels deny.

But most analysts say they believe the bulk of the money comes from expatriate Tamils, many of whom fled alleged discrimination under the majority Sinhalese following independence from Britain in 1948. Others left after brutal riots in the 1980s.

“We need war,” said Naheerathan, 39, who left the northern Tamil-dominated city of Jaffna in 1994 just before it fell to government forces. “Otherwise we cannot get independence.”

Some overseas Tamils say they no longer dare visit the country of their birth. Their only contact is through family, news reports, and Tiger-made DVDs which show alleged military atrocities and skirt the issue of suspected Tiger attacks.

Others do visit rebel territory, where they are shown demonstrations of the Tigers’ military might and are put up at the rebels’ finest guesthouse in their headquarters Kilinochchi.

No one doubts that some expatriate Tamils enthusiastically support the idea of a new war for a separate state. One told Reuters that with some 64,000 dead in the war so far, another 10,000 or so new deaths would make little or no difference.

US-based Human Rights Watch says not everyone gives voluntarily and that the LTTE has used extortion and threats to raise funds for a “Final War”.

“Some families have received as many as three visits in a single week,” the rights group said in a report this year.

“Fundraisers may refuse to leave the house without a pledge of money, and have told individuals who claim not to have funds available to borrow” on their credit cards or by re-mortgaging their homes, the report said.

Tamil families and businesses in Britain might be asked to pay 2,000 pounds to 100,000 pounds ($3,700 to $184,700), the report said. Overseas Tamils who visit rebel-held areas can be detained and their passports confiscated if they don’t pay up.

“I know several people who refused to pay, and nothing happened to them,” said Tamil accountant and British councillor Thaya Idaikkadar, who went on a five-day hunger strike to draw attention to alleged government abuses in Sri Lanka.

Analysts say it is hard to know just how much of the money is given freely, but many believe that some or most overseas Tamils, who feel guilty about leaving their homeland, give voluntarily.

The European Union’s listing of the LTTE as a banned terrorist group alongside Al Qaeda theoretically makes funding them illegal. “We cannot get every penny, but we are making it more expensive and difficult for them to raise funds,” said one Western official.

But Sri Lankan officials say that as the Tigers do not pose a direct threat to Western nations, countries such as Britain are unlikely to take police or intelligence resources off investigating possible Islamist bomb attacks to hunt LTTE money.

Sri Lanka’s government says stopping the transfer of Tiger funds could help end the conflict permanently, but the Tigers say the EU ban will simply encourage the government to act against both civilian Tamils and the rebels.

And few expatriate Tamils say the ban will be effective. “It’s like abortion,” said councillor Idaikkadar. “If you ban it, it will just go onto the back streets. If people want to do something, they will still do it.”—Reuters