> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # “All LTTE Activities Will Go Through Us,” Says Ex-Combatant Reviving Tigers’ Party - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/all-ltte-activities-will-go-through-us-says-ex-combatant-reviving-tigers-party/ - Published: 2026-11-02T01:53:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T01:53:11.000Z - Author: Our Reporter - Tags: November 2026 **JAFFNA, Sri Lanka:** November is the month Tamils set aside to remember fallen fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. On its first day, a group of former LTTE combatants announced the revival of the People’s Front of Liberation Tigers, the political party the rebel movement created during peace talks in 1989\. They declared that the party would, from now on, act for the LTTE in the Tamil homeland. E. Kathir, a former general secretary of the Democratic Fighters Party, made the announcement on Sunday at the Jaffna Press Club. He said he had taken up the post of general secretary of the revived party, and that its district and ward branches were already in place. “In future, all activities on behalf of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in our homeland will be carried out by the People’s Front of Liberation Tigers,” he said. He said he had chosen the date deliberately. November is the month of Maaveerar commemorations, he said, when Tamils honor the fighters who died and the parents who raised them. His claim to act for the LTTE would, taken at its word, extend to those commemorations, which reach their peak on Maaveerar Naal on November 27\. In September, at the same press club, Kathir accused Tamil political parties of taking over LTTE cemeteries in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Jaffna and using the commemorations for their own ends. He said the events should be left to the public and to bodies such as the Maaveerar Pani Seyalagam, which organizes them. For many Sri Lankan Tamils, Maaveerar Naal is a deeply emotional day, because many of the LTTE fighters who died were their own sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. Many former fighters say it has also become a lucrative business. Each year, they say, millions flow into Jaffna from the diaspora around the commemorations, and organizations and individuals compete over who receives the most. Jaffna Monitor asked one former LTTE member why the revival was coming now, after 17 years in which nobody had attempted it. He said a party presenting itself as the revived political wing of the LTTE would be well placed to claim a share of that money. Kathir did not bring up money on Sunday. He did ask Tamils living abroad to keep their support coming. Asked whether the move amounted to reviving the LTTE, Kathir did not dispute it. “We are not reviving the armed struggle. We are reviving the political structure of the Liberation Tigers,” he said. “We are clear that we are Tigers, that we are the Liberation Tigers. There is no change in that.” He said that after the war ended in 2009 and the LTTE’s political structure was destroyed, former fighters had worked through other parties with unsatisfactory results. “The Liberation Tigers have now taken over this politics directly and entirely,” he said. “We are not ordinary politicians. We are fighters.” The plan faces an obvious legal obstacle. The LTTE remains banned in Sri Lanka, and the government extended the ban by extraordinary gazette in 2025\. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1983, bars parties from advocating the division of the country. Kathir said the party’s goal was a federal solution and that it would pursue it by democratic means. He said registration was under way. The party’s old tiger symbol has been removed from the Elections Department’s list of approved symbols, and the group is still deciding what to use instead. He said a national convention would be announced in January, at which the party would name its central committee and publish its policies. Kathir addressed part of his message to the government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. “We do not want violence, racism or religious extremism,” he said. He welcomed its actions against racism and against those who had plundered the country, and said the unwritten rule that governments must defer to the Buddhist clergy was weakening. But he accused the government of repression “by another route.” He cited reports that Jaffna’s Deputy Inspector General of Police had written to the Jaffna Municipal Council urging the removal of the memorial to Thileepan, an LTTE political leader who died on hunger strike in 1987\. According to those reports, the letter said the memorial was illegally built and could encourage thinking about armed struggle and stir ethnic tension. Kathir said the memorial was first built in 1988 with the municipal council’s permission and had been repeatedly damaged by state forces and rival groups and then rebuilt. He pointed to military memorials in the North that Tamils had not tried to remove, among them the statue of Major General Denzil Kobbekaduwa in Vavuniya, a war memorial at Manthuvil in Puthukkudiyiruppu, and a monument in Chandran Park at Kilinochchi. Removing the Thileepan memorial, he said, would create the conflict the police say they want to prevent. He also turned on Tamil politicians. He accused senior Tamil parties of pushing people toward violence for opportunistic reasons, saying their leaders had neither fought in the struggle nor supported it, and he called for a political change in the North and East like the one that has taken place in the South. He said the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi was the only real party in the region and that the rest were political groups. He urged former fighters in other parties to leave them and join the PFLT. The move reverses the position former combatants took when they first entered electoral politics. In 2015, the founders of what became the Democratic Fighters Party stressed that they were not trying to revive or resurrect the LTTE or the PFLT. Asked on Sunday why he was forming a new party when, only months earlier, he had urged ex-combatants to unite under the Democratic Fighters Party, Kathir said he had already announced an LTTE political structure while in that party. He said it was unacceptable for others to form parties on their own instead of joining it, and that he opposed alliances with other parties and movements. ## A party formed during peace talks The PFLT was the LTTE’s only formal venture into electoral politics. The group formed it in 1989, during talks with President Ranasinghe Premadasa’s government, to show that it was serious about the negotiations and about joining the democratic mainstream. Its launch was announced at the Galadari Meridien hotel in Colombo. The LTTE’s deputy leader, Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah, known as Mahattaya, became president, and Yogaratnam Yogi, a former political commissar, became general secretary. The Election Commission recognized the party at Premadasa’s urging, and its symbol was the tiger. The party attended the All Party Conference in August 1989 as an observer and withdrew from politics when the war resumed in 1990\. Mahattaya was later arrested by the LTTE and executed in 1994 on accusations of plotting against Prabhakaran. Kathir said the party’s offices were closed “as the times required” and its work absorbed into the LTTE’s political wing. He said the leadership had decided during the final phase of the war to revive the party, and that the political team formed for that purpose was wiped out. The party stayed on the register but took no active part in politics. That changed briefly in 2008, when some candidates filed nominations on the PFLT ticket for the Eastern Provincial Council election, and the tiger symbol appeared on ballot papers in three eastern districts. The LTTE called the move a government ploy. Tamil newspapers later reported that the nominations carried forged signatures. Election officials accepted them, according to the report, because Yogi, the registered general secretary, did not object. In 2010, Britain’s Electoral Commission registered a party under the same name, with the same tiger emblem on a red flag. In Sri Lanka, the Elections Department cancelled the PFLT’s registration, along with those of the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front and the National Unity Alliance, because the parties had failed to file required documents. ## From democracy crusaders to the Tigers’ name The Democratic Fighters Party, known in English as Crusaders for Democracy, was founded in 2015 by about 300 former militants, with Nadesapillai Vidyatharan, a former Tamil newspaper editor, as convener. Its ten candidates contested the Jaffna district as an independent group under a spider symbol and won no seats. The party’s alliances have shifted since then. In January 2020, under the leadership of Ganeshalingam Chandralingam, known as Thulasi, it joined at least four other groups made up mostly of former LTTE members to form a new alliance, which said it would work with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tamil issues. By that June, Kathir was party secretary and was speaking in support of the Tamil National Alliance. That drew an open letter from V. Anandasangaree of the Tamil United Liberation Front. He accused the former fighters of falling into the hands of self-serving politicians and noted that the Tamil National Alliance had once dismissed ex-combatants as army informants. In September 2021, as general secretary, Kathir responded to the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council by calling for international legal action against Sri Lanka over violations of the laws of war. He described the 2009 offensive as genocide, called the merged North and East the Tamil homeland, and invoked the principles of the LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, whom he called the “national leader.”