Bombshell (20 page)

Although the Israelis will never release her, Ahlam has become increasingly popular while incarcerated. She is a symbol of the resistance both in her role as the leader of the female prisoners at HaSharon and by the mere fact that Israeli prison officials have targeted her for especially harsh treatment and limited her contact with the outside world. Ahlam is one of several Hamas prisoners to have been subjected to a new policy of limiting communication between Hamas representatives and the international media. Perhaps this is a result of her newfound fame in films, magazines, poems, and literature and of the fact that she received the Al Quds Mark of Honor from Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, in April 2008. In July 2009 she won general elections for Hamas's prison leadership.

THE FUTURE BOMBERS

With the name of Black Tigers—Would you see?

With a bomb which did blast the strong enemy

We march without a battalion army. We die by routing our adversary.

Our deaths become exceptional history. In them are written hundreds of victories.

There is nothing like this bravery

The gift of Life—the greatest philanthropy of all.

Marching with thoughts of not missing our aim

With prideful anger we kill the enemy. We die now for our families to enjoy their lives

In Tamil hearts—in death we still live.

Greeting the Leader's feet like thunder we blast. Drooping like a flag for Tamil Eelam to stand

The Tiger flag will flutter strong in the Motherland

And glory will engulf the global bands .

—Black Tigers' marching song, translated by Sachi Sri Kantha
¹

There was an election campaign under way in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. On May 21, 1991, Thenmuli Rajaratnam stood with many others waiting for the arrival of Rajiv Gandhi in the
industrial town of Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, where the former Indian prime minister was due to speak. Thenmuli wore horn-rimmed glasses that obscured her face and in her hands she held tightly to a garland. A pronounced bulge beneath her orange
salwar kameez
(the traditional Hindu tunic worn over baggy pants) suggested that she was pregnant. The appearance was deceptive: in fact, Thenmuli, whose code name was Dhanu, had been fitted with a denim vest containing an improvised explosive device. A large cylinder positioned under her breasts was filled with hundreds of three-millimeter steel balls. Underneath it, next to her skin, the vest held a quantity of C-4 plastic explosive. Two detonators, one on either side of her body, required only a gentle tug to be ignited.

Gandhi strode toward the podium, pausing at intervals to greet supporters. As he passed Dhanu, he clasped her hand. According to plan, she knelt before him and with her right hand activated the bomb.
²
The explosion had a lethal range of roughly a hundred feet. Gandhi, Dhanu, and sixteen others were killed instantly by the blast.

Investigations into the assassination later revealed that a policewoman had tried to prevent the assassin from reaching the former prime minister. But Gandhi had intervened, saying something like “Relax, baby”—quite possibly the last words he ever spoke.
³
Gandhi, like so many men, was blinded by Thenmuli's gender. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, to underestimate the lethality of a woman. Thenmuli's attack changed not just how counter-terrorism officials in Sri Lanka looked at Tamil women, but also how the women look at themselves.

It was widely assumed that Gandhi was assassinated on orders of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), often called simply the Tamil Tigers, in retaliation for Gandhi's “betrayal” when Indian troops sent to Sri Lanka as peacekeepers under the 1987 Indo–Sri Lankan Accord set about forcibly suppressing the rebel
organization. The way Indian forces that were meant to end a crisis only made it worse forms just one strand in the knotty history of relations between the Sinhalese and Tamil peoples in Sri Lanka.

Dhanu's assassination of Gandhi was not the first occasion on which a woman used a suicide bomb, but it was the first of many targeted assassinations by women associated with the Tamil cause.
⁴
Her sacrifice ushered in a new era of violent activism for women in the LTTE. The organization created its own division of women bombers (the Suthanthirap Paravaikal or Freedom Birds),
⁵
and cadres of women were trained for martyrdom. The degree to which the Indian “peacekeepers” had abused the Tamil population would have a long-lasting impact on Indo–Tamil relations.
⁶
Allegations abound that Dhanu had been raped by Indian soldiers. During the course of my interviews, members of the organization stated that they doubted this to be the case; nevertheless, the allegation provided great fodder for propaganda.
⁷

CEYLON'S CIVIL WAR

In ancient times, Arab traders called Sri Lanka's lush, tropical shores Serendib, the root for the word
serendipity
. However, the tear-shaped island in the Indian Ocean, formerly called Ceylon, has experienced some of the deadliest ethnic conflict in the world. During twenty-six years of civil war, in excess of 80,000 people have been killed, more than have died in all the Arab–Israeli wars and the war in Afghanistan put together. The conflict in Sri Lanka is a prime example of how ethnic differences can be constructed and manipulated by ethnic entrepreneurs and of how a state's oppressive policies can give rise to one of the deadliest terror groups that has ever existed.

Historically, the ethnic boundaries between Tamils and Sinhalese were indistinct and permeable. Both peoples originated in India. In the third century BC, the Sinhalese Kandyan kings married
women from southern India, mixing the two communities and making ethnic distinctions arbitrary.
⁸
Portugal and the Netherlands, attracted by the island's wealth in spices, coffee, and tea, colonized Ceylon in 1505. As in so many other parts of the globe, ethnic cleavages were codified and made permanent by the colonizers. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, identity on the island could change depending on the situation. The social and economic developments under the Portuguese and the Dutch, in particular the bureaucratic requirements of colonial administration, solidified previously flexible ethnic boundaries. By requiring the inhabitants to register births and deaths, the colonizers forced people to choose whether they were Tamil or Sinhalese, a designation that became sticky and permanent.

In addition to fixing how people identified themselves, the Portuguese and Dutch colonizers fomented intense rivalries between the groups by favoring some and disadvantaging others—alternating their preferences from time to time. Competition over scarce resources or over access to the benefits offered by the Europeans drove the communities apart. A Sinhalese community evolved in the central and southwestern parts of the island while the Tamil community developed in the north and on the eastern shore during colonial rule.

Relations were further complicated when the British occupied the country beginning in 1815. The British focused the economic and agricultural development of Ceylon in the central and western parts of the island, a pattern of settlement that disadvantaged the Tamils vis-à-vis the Sinhalese. With few agricultural opportunities available to them, Tamils opted instead to take advantage of the schooling offered by missionaries and colonial officials. As a result, more Tamils than Sinhalese entered the civil service and other relatively high-paying jobs. Many Tamils converted to Christianity and sent their children to Britain to be educated. These émigrés
returned and filled the expanding needs of the state services as well as staffed the hospitals, law firms, and engineering companies. The availability of employment and opportunities for upward mobility also meant that Tamils migrated from the north to the southern and central regions.
⁹
The demographic balance between the two communities was further altered when the British began to import indentured labor. The coffee and tea plantations brought more than one million Tamil workers from southern India to the island. At first, most were just seasonal migrants, but with the expansion of the tea plantations, the majority became permanent residents.
¹⁰
The addition of the Indian Tamils practically doubled the minority population.

The indigenous middle class spoke English and was genuinely multiethnic. However, Tamils and Burghers (the offspring of Portuguese, Dutch, or German/Sri Lankan mixed marriages) entered white-collar professions and the civil service in greater proportions than their population size warranted. This fed anti-Tamil rhetoric. Sinhalese leaders committed to their people's revival resented Tamil successes and manipulated the island's “origin” mythology to alienate the ethnic minority. According to the myth, Sri Lanka was the land of Dharma and Buddha. The religion, the people, and the island were all bound together in an indissoluble unity. Stories from the Buddhist text the
Mahavamasa
(“Great Chronicle”) included accounts of repeated invasions and conquests of the island by Tamils from southern India. The revivalist leaders used these texts to feed nationalist fears as Tamils were increasingly portrayed as hostile outsiders. When British colonial rule gave way peacefully to independence on February 4, 1948, discrimination against the Tamils began immediately. The new xenophobic nationalist ideology denied the multiethnic and multi-religious character of Sri Lankan society and refused to accept the collective rights of minority groups.
¹¹

In the 1950s, Sinhalese nationalism dominated the island's politics, as the majority people sought to redress the perceived imbalances created by colonialism and to diminish the advantages Tamils had enjoyed under British rule. In 1956, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SFLP), was elected to power on a “Sinhala only” platform called
swabasha
.
¹²
The Sinhalese language became the only official language, replacing English as the language of administration, employment, and higher education. The immediate (and intended) consequence of these changes was to force Tamils who worked in the civil service, and who could not speak Sinhala, to resign.
¹³
Discrimination against Tamils continued throughout the 1960s, when the government granted Buddhism primacy as the only recognized state religion in the constitution, even though the country had many Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. In the new constitution, Srimavo Bandaranaike, the first female prime minister in the world who succeeded her husband after his death, disenfranchised Tamils from government and other positions of authority. The number of Tamils employed in the state sector dwindled. For example, in 1949, the year after independence, 41 percent of government employees were Tamil and 54 percent Sinhalese; by 1963, 92 percent were Sinhalese.
¹⁴
To redress the high numbers of Tamils in white-collar professions, a quota system was imposed to limit the number of Tamils attending university.

During this period, Tamils mostly responded politically, through the Federal Party (FP) and a nonviolent protest movement. However, the 1970s gave rise to increasing calls for separation and militancy. In 1977, the leader of the United National Party (UNP), Junius Richard Jayewardene, assumed power. The party's manifesto finally acknowledged some Tamil rights. Tamils had supported Jayewardene's campaign and his promise of improved ethnic relations, but his election led to an outbreak of ferocious communal violence throughout the island.
¹⁵
More racially inspired
riots occurred in 1981 in what turned out to be a dress rehearsal for much worse violence in 1983.
¹⁶

Separatist agitation went through several phases. In the 1950s, Tamil political mobilization was peaceful, moving to civil disobedience in the 1960s, to individual violence in the 1970s, and becoming a dangerous threat in the 1980s and 1990s.
¹⁷
A plethora of Tamil political organizations emerged to represent the community. In 1972, the Tamil Federal Party (TFP), the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), the Tamil Progressive Front, and the Ceylon Worker's Congress joined forces to form the Tamil United Front (TUF), to campaign for equal rights and uniform status for the Tamil language. In May 1973, the TUF opted to work for an independent Tamil Eelam, or Tamil homeland. Not all the groups endorsed this position and those that did varied in the strategies they adopted to achieve their ultimate goal, oscillating between using the electoral process and resorting to violence.

The result of the debate about how best to achieve the Tamil homeland was the emergence of the Tamil Five—five organizations founded between 1973 and 1980 and all later designated as terrorist organizations. The Tamil Five was comprised of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), the People's Liberation Organisation for Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and the radical Tamil National Tigers (TNT). The last one emerged in 1973 under Velupillai Prabhakaran and was renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 1976, with calls for secession and violent action.
¹⁸
Prabhakaran sought to “refashion the old TNT/new LTTE into an elite, ruthlessly efficient, and highly professional fighting force.”
¹⁹