Authors: Mia Bloom
In response to these developments (as well as to violence from the right-wing Sinhalese group, the People's Liberation Front or
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna [JVP]), the government promulgated the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in 1979. The PTA permitted the army and police to hold prisoners incommunicado for up to eighteen months without trial. It made illegal any acts that resulted in “social, religious, or communal disharmony,” essentially revoking the freedom of speech. It also annulled elements of existing British law similar to our Miranda rights, which limit what the police can and cannot do to people held in custody. Under British law, confessions obtained in police custody were admissible in court only if made in the presence of a magistrate. The new act admitted confessions made under duress or even torture. It was made retroactive, and the police and army interpreted the law as a license to arrest without warrant, search individuals at random, seize their possessions, and detain them long-term without trial or communication with their families. Over the years, increasing numbers of Tamil civilians were rounded up and detained for prolonged periods of time without access to lawyers or family.
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According to the international human rights community, the government of Sri Lanka became one of the worst violators of human rights and executed the most disappearances (abductions, illegal arrests and detentions, kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearancesâmany politically motivated or committed in the context of antiterror operations) of any country in the world.
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The PTA led to an increase rather than a reduction of Tamil violence. The government's repressive measures created a spiral of brutality. By the early 1980s, a younger, more radical generation prevailed over the older parliamentarians. The LTTE started out as the foot soldiers of the Tamil United Front but soon chose terror over ballots.
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The communal violence escalated.
In July 1983, the government declared martial law in the Tamil areas of Jaffna, Vavuniya, and Mannar. Between July 24 and August 5, widespread and destructive riots broke out in these areas.
This marked the beginning of a prolonged civil war.
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Some say that the violence erupted in retaliation for the murder of Charles Anthony, Prabhakaran's right-hand man, earlier that month by Sri Lankan forces. Others claim the trigger for the riots was the ambush of thirteen Sinhalese soldiers at Tinneveli in Jaffna.
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The city of Colombo's population was incensed when the military returned the bodies of the slain soldiers, who had been mutilated after their deaths. The government, hoping to provoke public outrage and instigate communal violence, displayed the bodies publicly in Colombo's Kanatte Cemetery in Borella and invited the people to see what the Tamils had done. This led to a three-day wave of anti-Tamil violence, during which roaming bands of Sinhalese burned homes, destroyed Tamil-owned factories and businesses, and engaged in widespread looting, pillaging, and rape. The degree of state involvement was unclear. It appeared to be disorganized mob violence, and yet the “mobs were armed with voters' lists, and detailed addresses of every Tamil-owned shop, house or factory, and their attacks were very precise.”
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They also allegedly had detailed lists of personal belongings and knew what to look for in every home. The government admitted to 360 to 400 deaths; Tamils alleged that the number of casualties and displaced people was actually in the thousands.
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This was just the beginning of anti-Tamil violence. The army ran rampant in the Jaffna area, torturing and killing hundreds of civilians. Once the soldiers were unleashed, no civilians were safe. The government introduced Emergency Regulation 15A, which allowed the security forces to bury and/or cremate people they shot without revealing their identities or carrying out inquests.
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As graphically detailed in Michael Ondaatje's 2000 novel
Anil's Ghost
, the army could kill anyone without trial or just cause and destroy the evidence. Bearing such provocation in mind, Tamil radicals felt justified in their use of any means necessary to combat the state.
President Jayewardene admitted that some of the armed forces
had participated in the riots, and that some Sinhalese people may have taken part, but he ultimately blamed the riots on a joint Communist and Naxalite conspiracy,
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implying Indian involvement.
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His government's subsequent actions did not help alleviate the crisis. The president accused the victims of bringing the violence upon themselves, claiming that “Sri Lanka is inherently and rightfully a Sinhalese state ⦠and it must be accepted as such, not a matter of opinion to be debated. For attempting to challenge this premise, Tamils have brought the wrath of Sinhalese on their own heads; they have themselves to blame.”
30
Before 1983, the appeal of the Tamil Tigers was limited to a small segment of disaffected young men. The rural poor were ambivalent; few supported the LTTE even though they might have been sympathetic to its goals.
31
After the 1983 attacks, however, support for the LTTE increased dramatically. One observer estimated the pre-1983 membership at a maximum of 600. By March 1983, after the pogrom, LTTE support exceeded 10,000.
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The Tigers drew support from marginalized Tamils who resented their second-class-citizen status and from the growing number of internally displaced people.
The government ramped up its emergency powers when it passed the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which effectively banned the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) from parliament. The amendment outlawed any political party from advocating secession within Sri Lanka. Violating the law could have dire consequences including the forfeiture of property, loss of passport, and the loss of any professional license. All members of parliament were required to take an oath to uphold the constitution and all of its amendments. The TULF 's commitment to creating a separate state thus meant that it was now illegal. With no political parties allowed to represent the aspirations of Tamils, violence became their sole means of political action.
Significant support for the terrorists came from expatriate Tamils who had fled the country for Britain, Malaysia, India, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and the United States. The LTTE and international terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the PLO, the ANC, and the Provisional IRA cooperated and occasionally shared tactics and technology.
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However, as the LTTE became the preeminent terrorist organization in the world by virtue of its reach and effectivenessâfor a time, its forces were a match for those of the government of Sri Lankaâit increasingly resisted offers to share its lethal technology with other groups. The Tamil Tigers came to see themselves as legitimate insurgents rather than terrorists.
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Following the 1983 pogrom, more than 150,000 refugees from the northern regions of Sri Lanka fled to Tamil Nadu in southern India. Many Tamils who had previously lived among the Sinhalese in the central and southern parts of the country also migrated to the north and east of the island. This demographic shift strengthened the Tamil belief in a homeland of their own. It also established a close link between the Tamils of Sri Lanka and the Tamils of India.
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A car bomb exploded at a bus station in Colombo at the end of April 1987, killing 113 people. The government, faced with popular outrage, launched an “all-out offensive” on the Jaffna Peninsula and, by the end of May, captured it at great cost in life and property. Thousands of the area's inhabitants were displaced. As the violence escalated, India decided to send in humanitarian relief. When a flotilla of boats carrying supplies to the Tamils was turned back by the Sri Lankan navy, India dropped humanitarian relief supplies by airâin violation of Sri Lankan airspace.
Sri Lanka came under great international pressure to solve the conflict. There had been intermittent but short-lived efforts at negotiating peace over the years. The Indian government
strong-armed both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE into supporting an Indian intervention. On July 29, 1987, Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president J.R. Jayewardene signed the IndoâSri Lankan Accord.
36
The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) arrived on the island with ten thousand troops on July 30 to help protect the Tamil population. However, they eventually turned their forces loose on the civilian population. At the peak of the intervention, India deployed four divisions (almost 80,000 men), including three infantry divisions as well as paramilitary and special forces.
37
The accord was intended to provide a conceptual framework to resolve the conflict and to outline arrangements to share power between the warring communities. It declared that Sri Lanka was “a multiethnic and multilingual plural society” consisting of four ethnic groups: Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and Burghers. The accord recognized that the northern and eastern provinces had been “areas of historical habitation” of the Tamil-speaking population. “Thus without conceding the claim that the northeast constituted part of the traditional homelands of the Tamils, the accord provided cautious acknowledgement of the distinct character of the region.”
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This wording was significant because it framed a policy of bilingualism and a provincial council scheme, and called for the temporary merger of the northern and eastern provinces as a partially separate authority.
In Tamil Nadu, the Tamil stronghold in India, the IPKF came to be considered an invading and oppressive military force. At the same time the Indian government became alarmed at the implications of its support for a secessionist movement in Sri Lanka when there was similar agitation (for Sikhs in Khalistan) within its own borders and the possibility of a spillover effect as Sri Lankan Tamils influenced Tamils on the mainland. When the LTTE resisted the presence of the Indian troops (Prabhakaran was unhappy with this
arrangement from the get-go) there were massive Indian casualtiesâmore than a thousand. The Indian soldiers turned against the Tamils and started killing not just LTTE supporters but also Tamil civilians. More than seven thousand Tamil Tigers and thousands more civilians died in the ensuing confrontations. The Indians became guilty of all the abuses, including rape and extrajudicial killing, that they had been sent to stop. In the final analysis, India moved from being a mediator in the conflict to becoming a direct participant.
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The Indian intervention sparked reactions from both Tamils and right-wing Sinhalese groups. Both the LTTE and the JVP repudiated the accord and briefly coordinated their efforts to get Indian forces out of the country.
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Prabhakaran wrote to Gandhi several times,
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asking him to reconsider India's course of action. He told Gandhi that he was prepared to disarm in exchange for a cease-fire agreement. According to Tamil sources, “Rajiv Gandhi wanted to kill Prabhakaran and completely exterminate the entire LTTE fighting force, thus putting an end to the goal of an independent Tamil Eelam. So, far from halting the war, he inducted 150,000 more Indian soldiers into Tamil areas to execute his plan. As a result the war continued unabated.”
42
The struggle continued bloodily and without a decisive result until 1989, when the Sri Lankan government together with the LTTE requested the IPKF's withdrawal. In the years that followed, the Sri Lankan government took up the offensive, mounting successive and increasingly violent campaigns of its own against the Tigers. These took the form not only of open military engagements, but also of harassment and abuse of the civilian population. This is corroborated by several studies that showed, among other things, that the sexual nature of the government troops' harassment helped to mobilize young women into the LTTE and was one of the organization's best recruiting tools. Entire villages were razed in
remote areas of the island. The government organized a systematic campaign of “disappearances,” while turning a blind eye toward the use of rape by its own military forces. In particular, sexual abuse of Tamil women during checkpoint searches, intended to dehumanize them, was common.
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In response to these tactics, civilians joined the Tigers in droves. During a 1990 offensive, for example, the Sri Lankan army arbitrarily arrested 183 people from the village of Kokkurill, including many women and children. In the years that followed, the village sacrificed more lives for the cause than any other in Sri Lanka: one hundred of the five hundred men in the village left to fight for the rebels, never to return.
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EQUAL OPPORTUNITY MARTYRDOM
In a region where women's rights were few, the LTTE had the highest number of female suicide bombers in the world (and a significant percentage of female frontline fighters) because of its verbal support of gender equality. Military roles were gender-neutral, and the glory of martyrdom was bestowed equally upon men and women. But unlike the men, who usually sought to become martyrs for the glory of the community, some of the female bombers took on the role out of desperation or as a last resort.
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Not only did women constitute an important part of the LTTE's military leadership, but they also had their own combat divisions and participated at almost every level of fighting. They died in battle just like the men, and the Sri Lankan government targeted them for assassination regardless of their gender. From the point of view of the LTTE, there was even a psychological advantage to be gained by using women to defeat the Sri Lankan military in a country where women were seen as second-class citizens.
The organization trained the women in karate, hand-to-hand combat, the use of automatic weapons, and the techniques
of suicide bombing. They even showed the women how to walk and sit as if they were pregnant, while carrying explosives around their waists. Once the female operatives were trained, the LTTE held them in reserve, to release whenever they wanted to flex their muscles. The organization enforced a strict code of personal conduct. Cadres were forbidden to drink alcohol, take drugs, or engage in premarital sex. They were all issued a glass vial of cyanide to wear around their necks and instructed to bite down on the cylinder in the event of capture. The cadres followed these strictures willingly and esteemed Prabhakaran with an almost cult-like devotion.