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For 20 years, the Tamil Tigers have fought a vicious, separatist
war against
the Sri Lankan government. Can a tenuous ceasefire last?
Jaffna,
Sri Lanka—Sri Lanka’s newly renamed “Highway for Peace and Unity” is a
cratered strip of asphalt that runs 100 miles due north to Jaffna, straight
through the heart of Tamil Tiger country. The road is lined with thousands
of unexploded landmines and the charred stumps of palmyra trees. Just
off the highway, behind a fence of twisted barbed wire, glass-wing butterflies
and blue magpies dance among the rusting hulks of tanks and armored personnel
carriers. Skull-and-crossbones landmine warnings, ominously grinning mementos,
are placed every 50 feet.
For
20 years this road has been closed to the Sri Lankan public, as the secessionist
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a brutal war for a separate
Tamil state in the country’s northeast. The road’s opening in February
2002 was a huge step in reconnecting the divided country. But one suspects
the government committee that settled on the highway’s name inhabits a
world of either naïve hopefulness or dark irony.
In
February, Sri Lanka celebrated one year of ceasefire. But the peace talks
have been mired in acrimony and mutual distrust after a series of setbacks,
including an incident in March when the Sri Lankan navy blew up an LTTE
vessel, killing 11 “Sea Tigers.” Throughout the ceasefire, both the Sri
Lankan Army (SLA) and the LTTE continued to recruit soldiers and stockpile
arms. The LTTE says the government has done nothing to resettle Tamils
displaced by the war, and the Tamil people have yet to see the dividends
of peace. In late April, the LTTE unilaterally pulled out of peace talks.
Guns have not yet been fired, but the country is once again poised for
war.
The
mostly Hindu Tamils are the largest minority in this mostly Sinhalese
and Buddhist country. South of India, the teardrop-shaped island of Sri
Lanka was once an idyllic tourist haven, with long beaches, tropical jungles,
and the ruins of ancient Buddhist cities. More than 64,000 lives were
lost in two decades of conflict, out of a population of only 20 million.
Now many Sri Lankans call the island “the Buddha’s teardrop.”
Relentless
shelling rendered much of northern Sri Lanka a no-man’s-land and crippled
the Sri Lankan economy, but it did not bring the Tigers autonomy. Although
the LTTE holds some territory, it never regained control of the Jaffna
peninsula on the island’s northern tip, taken by the army in 1995.
When
the LTTE—notorious for car-bombing, political assassination, and suicide
attacks on civilian targets—first agreed to holster its guns and discuss
alternatives to its chief aim of a separate Tamil state, the group shocked
Sri Lanka. But after the United States, Britain and India added the Tamil
Tigers to their lists of foreign terrorist organizations, the LTTE realized
world public opinion was shifting against them. Their main source of funds
from Indian Tamils and the Tamil diaspora became largely inaccessible,
frozen in accounts in Britain and India.
Teitur
Torkelsson, spokesman for the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission overseeing
the ceasefire, believes 9/11 was a turning point for the Tigers. “The
international environment no longer has tolerance for armed conflict,”
he says. “What the LTTE very much longs for is international recognition.
And you cannot have that now with an armed struggle—especially when it
uses suicide bombing techniques, child recruitment or any other violation
of human rights.”
After
Sri Lanka gained its independence from Britain in 1948, the newly democratic
state began discriminating against the mostly Hindu Tamil people, who
make up 18 percent of the island’s population. The state made Sinhala
the sole official language, forced many Tamils out of government jobs,
and began regular attacks on Tamils. To Villupillai Prabakaran, a teen-aged
smuggler and car thief, an independent Tamil state was the only option.
So in 1976, he and his friends, steeped in the revolutionary theory of
Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, founded the LTTE.
The
conflict exploded in 1983, when hundreds of Tamil civilians were killed
in state-sanctioned pogroms after the Tigers ambushed an SLA patrol. The
slaughter helped win widespread support for Prabakaran’s armed struggle.
Under his military direction from deep inside the northern jungles, the
LTTE quickly established itself as one of the most brutally efficient
guerrilla groups in the world.
The
north of Sri Lanka is made up of lush, arable wetlands and jungles lapped
by the ocean and seared by an equatorial sun. It is perfect land for cultivating
rice, coconuts and bananas, and for fishing in the Indian Ocean. As the
Tigers discovered, it is also ideal guerrilla territory. With homemade
plastic explosives and tanks captured from the SLA, the LTTE managed to
beat back government forces again and again. Despite the SLA’s modern
armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, and multibarrel rocket
launchers—and despite assistance to Sri Lanka from Indian and even U.S.
forces—the LTTE has caused immeasurable destruction against the state.
In July 2001, they virtually attacked the country’s international airport,
blowing up half its commercial fleet as it sat on the tarmac.
At
the sixth and latest round of peace talks, the LTTE hoped the Tamils would
be assured of regional autonomy. Anton Balasingham, the LTTE’s chief negotiator,
has repeatedly staked the success of the peace talks on three demands
of the Tigers: official recognition of the Tamil homeland, nationality
and right to self-determination. But the question that dogs the LTTE is
whether it can transform from a cultlike terrorist organization into a
mainstream political entity.
In
the Singhalese-majority south, many find the idea of Prabakaran becoming
a legitimate politician laughable. Prabakaran is wanted in India for orchestrating
the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. In November,
he was convicted in absentia to 200 years in prison by a Sri Lankan court
for a 1996 attack on the Central Bank of Colombo, which killed nearly
100 people. Interpol has also issued an alert for Prabakaran’s arrest.
He has consolidated his power for almost 30 years by eliminating rival
groups and establishing a cult of personality that borders on deification.
At
the Tigers’ first press conference in almost two decades—after signing
the 2002 ceasefire agreement—Prabakaran claimed he and his organization
were democratizing. For the first time in years, he said, they were meeting
with other political organizations and explaining their actions to the
Sri Lankan government. Many involved in the peace talks say that despite
the stops and starts, Sri Lanka simply has to believe the Tigers are able
to change.
“The
LTTE has taken actions in the past which are fascistic and terroristic
in nature, there are no two ways about that,” says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu,
an advisor to the peace talks. “The challenge to the LTTE is whether they
can make that transition, or whether that process is too painful and leads
to self-destruction. But what is important is to yoke the two sides into
a just and peaceful political settlement.”
The
territory of the Tamils cuts a boomerang-shaped swath across the north
and east of the island. The Tamil people say they have inhabited this
land since 237 B.C. “The Sinhalese community has no legitimate power over
the Tamils, neither by conquest nor by consent,” according to Father Bernard,
a Tamil Catholic priest in Jaffna. “We were an independent nation, we
had our kings and our kingdoms before the British came. So it’s a matter
of regaining a lost territory.” Like many, Bernard initially opposed the
Tamils taking up arms. But the mass torture, rape and disappearing of
Tamil youth by Sri Lankan forces in the ’80s and ’90s convinced him otherwise.
“If the language of nonviolence is not understood, then we are forced
to speak a language that is understood,” he insists.
Amnesty
International has repeatedly condemned both the Tigers and the Sri Lankan
government for human rights violations. In Jaffna, Cerlil Vilsami is still
waiting for the return of his son, who has been missing since the SLA
detained him over five years ago: “He must be here, I think, but we don’t
know where. The government is not giving us any answers. What are we to
do?” After Vilsami’s son disappeared, his daughter joined the LTTE to
avenge her brother. She was killed in battle six months later.
But
the civilian population of northern Sri Lanka continues to suffer the
most from the fallout of war. The local infrastructure has been completely
destroyed. More than 200,000 people have fled the country to live as refugees
in India or the West. Almost a million Sri Lankans, mostly fishermen and
farmers, have been internally displaced by the war. Many can’t return
to their land because of unexploded ordnance; others have had their land
expropriated by the SLA for so-called High Security Zones. Some have been
living in refugee camps for more than a decade. The Jaffna peninsula is
now a web of SLA military installations, with 40,000 troops keeping a
lid on the heart of Tamil culture.
The
train line stops just south of the Tamil region. To cross into rebel-held
territory, you must pass through a series of high security SLA checkpoints,
flanked by machine gun stands. Troops wielding Kalashnikovs unload every
passenger from commuter buses to check their papers. They hold up trucks
for hours to empty out their cargoes of lumber or rice. This is the beginning
of the Highway for Peace and Unity.
Half
a mile down the road, the trucks have to unload their cargo all over again
at the LTTE checkpoint. Although there is no pretense of peace or unity
at the checkpoint, there are also no guns. The slim, young Tamil border
guards wear Madras shirts and chinos, or belted shirts and trousers for
the women. They look like particularly fastidious college students. You
would never guess that they are one of the most feared and ruthless guerrilla
armies in the world.
Once
you pass through the LTTE checkpoint, you leave Sri Lanka and enter Tamil
Eelam, the unofficial nation the Tigers have created. Tamil Eelam runs
on a different time zone (Indian time); they have their own Tamil police
force, jails, judicial system, and semi-extortionate system of tax collection.
Recently the Tigers inaugurated the first Bank of Tamil Eelam. Everyone
here is Tamil, and everyone is working for the LTTE movement. Hand-painted
propaganda posters dot the scarred landscape. One billboard depicts the
two choices the LTTE claims Tamil women have: being raped and murdered
by Sri Lankan soldiers or joining the Tiger movement, armed with a Chinese-made
T-56 in the jungle.
In
true Maoist fashion, the Tigers are masters of propaganda. Only since
the ceasefire have they begun to speak to the media; visits to their jungle
training camps are still completely out of the question, and minders follow
journalists wherever they go. When you do speak to the Tiger cadres, they
have the eerie habit of repeating each other, and constantly refer to
“our leader,” meaning Prabakaran.
“If
our leader says war there is war, and if he says peace, there is peace,”
asserts Thami Larasu, a tall, shy 22-year-old in the LTTE’s political
wing. The Tigers speak of Prabakaran in almost godlike terms. In fact,
organized religion is discouraged, and every morning, Tiger cadres salute
an image of Prabakaran while reciting the LTTE pledge. Their flag is like
a post-apocalyptic high school football banner: a roaring tiger backed
by a pair of crossed Kalashnikovs, pouncing with claws bared from a cartoonish
explosion.
Ask
anyone in Tamil territory what makes the Tigers effective, and they will
make the same gesture: They clutch an imaginary vial around their neck.
Even after one year of ceasefire, the mandatory ornament of every LTTE
member is a vial of cyanide on a necklace. If captured alive, they will
bite on the cyanide capsule, dying in two minutes of unimaginable pain.
The
suicide culture of the Tigers is clearly what drives its success. Military
analysts believe that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda have studied the
tactics of the LTTE, especially their ruthless use of suicide bombers,
or Black Tigers. Becoming a Black Tiger is considered the highest of honors
by the LTTE. The night before they embark on their mission, the Black
Tigers eat their “last supper” with Prabakaran. After their rice and curry,
they pose for a snapshot with the leader. The photo memorializing them
is hung on the wall of martyrs that night, even before they blow themselves
up. There is no going back.
The
Tigers videotape and archive everything for fundraising and recruiting:
lost battles and failed suicide missions as well as military victories.
They create videos of each Black Tiger before they are sent to their death.
These “memory tapes” are surreal music videos starring the suicide-bomber-to-be.
The Black Tigers, in LTTE uniform, pose in the grass or smile coyly back
at the camera from a boat, the wind ruffling their hair, soft music dubbed
over the soundtrack. What follows is a hand-held video clip of the human
torpedo carrying out his or her deadly mission.
One
of the LTTE’s greatest military strengths is its unnerving discipline.
Drinking and smoking are banned on pain of expulsion, and love affairs
are forbidden before the age of 25 for women and 28 for men. A militant
Maoist version of feminism also characterizes the Tigers. Unlike in Sri
Lanka proper, dowry is illegal in Tamil Eelam. Adultery and rape are considered
the worst of crimes, and are punishable by death. In Tamil Eelam, four
men have been executed for rape in the past several years. Every Tamil
will remind you that whatever atrocities the Tigers are guilty of, rape
is not one of them.
In
the LTTE “martyrs’ cemetery” in Kilinochchi, thousands of markers line
the ground. Most of the graves are without bodies, and none mentions the
birth date of the fighter. The LTTE says more than 17,600 Tigers have
been killed. Sitting under a tree near the graves of his comrades, Larasu
explains that he joined the movement when he was 16, after his school
was shelled by Indian forces. Like most Tigers, he says he joined voluntarily.
The LTTE leadership claims that the Sri Lankan forces did most of their
recruiting for them. Many women say it was the rape and torture of their
family members that drove them to the LTTE as teenagers, or younger.
But
in the south, it is rumored that the LTTE has doubled the size of its
forces since the ceasefire began. And in villages across rebel-held Sri
Lanka, parents whisper of their children being coerced or forced to join
the LTTE. Few dare to speak of child recruitment publicly. UNICEF has
recorded 700 complaints of child conscription since the ceasefire came
into effect, though there is little it can do to change the practice.
The
fallout of a war that has trained a generation of children to kill will
be felt on this island for decades to come. In Kilinochchi, the wooden
markers of the Black Tigers’ empty graves bleach in the sun to the color
of bone.
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OTR Dispatches - March, 2004