Pakistan-based Islamic group eyes eastern Sri Lanka - analyst

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 15 June 2004, 12:17 GMT]
Pakistan’s plans to appoint a former Director of its Intelligence Bureau (IB) as Ambassador to Sri Lanka "could have serious implications for the national security of India" a senior Indian analyst said this week, citing Colombo's importance as a base for Pakistani agents and a Pakistan backed militant group's increasing activities in Sri Lanka's eastern districts.

B. Raman, a former senior civil servant, argues in the latest issue of the weekly magazine Outlook that India must urge Sri Lanka to reject the planned appointment of [Col (retd) Bashir Wali] which was reported by Jang, a Pakistani Urdu daily.

Raman, Director of the Institute for Topical Studies in Chennai says a gradual militarisation of the internal IB, formerly a police organization, “has made it for all practical purposes a wing of the ISI” [Inter-Services Intelligence].

“There has been no evidence so far of the ISI using Colombo as a base for covert actions directed against India. However the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) has been showing increasing interest in taking jihad to the Muslims of the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka,” he says.

The LET, a Pakistan-based Kashimiri group, is described as the armed wing of the Markaz Dawa-Wal-Irshad, an Islamic fundamentalist organization.

Pakistan denies assisting LET, whose ideology, according to some analysts, goes beyond Kashmiri independence to the establishment of Islamic rule over all parts of India.

“There have been persistent reports of the beginning of a radicalisation of small sections of the Tamil-speaking Muslim youth of the Eastern Province [of Sri Lanka],” Raman says.

He cites the activities of the ‘Osama Brigade’ amidst the communal clashes in the Eastern province in 2002 and reports that Tamil Nadu police had arrested some members of a local organisation called the Muslim Defence Force who said they had planned meetings with the LET in eastern Sri Lanka.

“The LET is very close to the ISI and it would not have taken its initial moves to explore the possibility of using Sri Lanka as a clandestine base for its activities and for creating sleeper cells there without the knowledge and prior clearance of the ISI,” Raman feels.

“In the past, the ISI had posted its officers in junior and middle level clerical posts as well as in diplomatic posts in the Pakistani High Commission in Colombo [but] it had never posted its officers as the head of the Pakistani diplomatic mission [though] a journalist who was allegedly close to the ISI [was],” he says.

“Past evidence indicated that the main interest of the ISI in using Colombo as a base was to collect intelligence about developments in sensitive Indian nuclear and missile establishments, many of which are located in South India, particularly in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.”

“For collecting intelligence about these establishments, the ISI generally uses Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking Muslims visiting India as well as South Indians visiting Colombo,” Raman says.

“Colombo also serves as a convenient transit point for arranging clandestine visits of Indians co-operating with the ISI to Karachi by the flights of the Pakistan International Airlines without any entry of their visits in their passports.”

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Comment: Their man in Colombo