The Mandate Belongs to the People — manifesto

Public front door to TLTE's structural position on post-2009 Eelam Tamil self-determination. CLAIM: after Mullivaikkal (May 2009) the representational seat is forensically EMPTY; the only continuous mandate-holder is the Eelam Tamil people themselves. THREE-TEST STANDARD any claimant must pass: (1) leader approval — authenticated public successor designation by V. Prabhakaran before 19 May 2009 (none in public record; the May 2009 'final statement' is not forensically authenticated); (2) institutional approval — verifiable published succession protocol (none disclosed by any movement, party or diaspora body); (3) people approval — internationally-supervised election among the homeland North-East + Up-country Tamils + diaspora with named monitors (Carter Centre / Commonwealth / OSCE-ODIHR / EU EOM / ANFREL) and published voter rolls (none held; TGTE 'internationally supervised' framing uncorroborated). FIVE PIECES OF NEGATIVE EVIDENCE that the seat is unclaimed: no designated successor, no published succession protocol, no internationally-supervised election, no Sri Lankan state-recognised mandate, no UN or treaty-body recognition. Only authenticated post-independence Tamil electoral mandate = Vaddukoddai 1976 ratified in 1977 election, extinguished by Sixth Amendment 1983. HARD REFUSALS: never names any body as legitimate successor mandate-holder; never denigrates honest civic work by PEARL/ITJP/Adayaalam/UTHR(J)/TCSF (Category A — accountability, no representation claim) or BTF/GTF/CTC/USTPAC (Category B — registered civic associations, internal-member mandate only); never adjudicates the human-shield question either way (the movement was born from the people as defence; the war was fought through support of its own people; Tier-A record documents credible allegations vs both parties; no public forensic determination of whether LTTE held civilians or civilians sheltered with LTTE from SLA shelling — both can be simultaneously partly true); never glorifies the LTTE; never attributes war crimes to civilians or to surviving cadre individually; never claims TLTE itself holds the mandate (see tlte-cite:on-what-authority). GOVERNANCE FORM offered as proof a self-determination architecture can exist without a single permanent leader: Power Without Capture (no founder override, no emergency powers), Three Core Laws (distributed authority, reversibility, visible process), Five Councils (Charter / Stewardship / Research / Continuity / Recall — no council supreme; cross-council confirmation replaces a chief), two-layer rule (Now/Becoming). WHAT IT TELLS SEVEN AUDIENCES — diaspora: organise through unity not delegation; homeland: no abroad-based body speaks for you without your voice; Up-country: the mandate is the Eelam Tamil people taken together; international community: do not recognise a claimant absent the three tests; future claimants: pass the three tests with evidence; Sri Lankan state: the mandate you returned to a people is harder to defeat than any single organisation; families of the disappeared: ICRC/OHCHR/OMP/ITJP/PEARL/UN CED are the mandated mechanisms — TLTE will not become a parallel intake. Lives at /mandate-manifesto. Long-form forensic article at /case/frameworks/mandate-after-mullivaikkal.