By Manik de Silva
     Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger separatist rebels, defeated in May after decades of brutal fighting costing up to 100,000 lives, procured most of their arms from the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, best known as Col. Karuna Amman, told Kyodo News in a recent interview in his tightly guarded office in Colombo.
     ''The LTTE purchased most of its weapons from Ukraine,'' the stocky Karuna said, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. ''There were many other supply sources in Asia and Africa, but the main source was the Ukraine.''
     Asked if North Korea was a supplier, he said there was a lot of talk about procuring arms from the country, but those efforts never succeeded.
     But other well-informed military sources in Colombo said on condition of anonymity that the LTTE had obtained Chinese arms with North Korean end-user certificates.
     ''An investigation team from Japan was here in this connection some months ago and met with very senior officials,'' one of the sources said. ''Tokyo knows the facts.''
     Karuna said most of the arms used by the LTTE were of Russian and Chinese manufacture.
     Kumaran Pathmanathan, best known as KP, who was arrested in Malaysia and is now in the custody of the Sri Lankan government, was the chief arms procurer.
     ''The LTTE had bases in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Laos, and KP operated from these places,'' Karuna said. ''In those days it was very difficult for him to get into Europe.''
     KP is currently held at a secret location in Colombo and despite several requests by the intelligence agencies of many foreign countries to interview him, access has been denied so far.
     Karuna also said that in addition to arms, including heavy artillery, mortars and surface-to-air missiles, the LTTE also obtained explosives, including C-4, from sources that included Ukraine.
     The former LTTE military commander, now minister for National Integration and Reconciliation in President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government and a vice president of Rajapaksa's Sri Lanka Freedom Party, was born in Kiran in the Eastern Batticaloa district in 1966.
     He joined the LTTE as an 18-year-old in 1983 when communal riots rocked Sri Lanka, and was a bodyguard to LTTE leader Prabhakaran.
     He later became the eastern commander of the rebels, controlling some of its most battle-hardened troops.
     He broke with LTTE, along with many of his troops, in March 2004.
     ''I was the military commander,'' he said in the interview. ''Prabhakaran never came to the battlefield. I was always on the battlefield. That was my duty.''
     In a recent presentation, Col. R. Hariharan, a retired Indian military intelligence specialist on South Asia associated with the Chennai Center for China Studies and South Asian Analysis Group, said LTTE sympathizers, in tandem with LTTE cells, procured illegal weapons and modern arms technology from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.
     ''The list of countries includes China, North Korea, Hong Kong, Cambodia and Thailand. Vietnam, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia; Ukraine and Bulgaria in Eastern Europe; Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean; and Eritrea, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe in Africa,'' Hariharan said.
     Karuna said Prabhakaran made four big mistakes.
     The first, he said, was he did not go along with the India-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 to end the war and fought with the Indian army sent to Sri Lanka as a peacekeeping force by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
     ''The second big mistake was killing Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. That made India ban the LTTE, and 26 other countries followed suit. The third big mistake was rejecting a federal solution (to Sri Lanka's ethnic problem) when that prospect emerged (during negotiations in Oslo in December 2002).''
     Karuna, laughing, said the fourth big mistake was ''losing me.''
==Kyodo