Bombshell (23 page)

Perry's depiction is spot-on. In every Tamil home I visited there was a large portrait of Prabhakaran, garlanded, surrounded by incense, and set in a place of honor. Having one's photo taken with the Leader was a great source of pride. Darshika and her friend Puhalchudar venerated Prabhakaran like a deity. Before he was slain, S.P. Tamilselvan, the second-in-command of the LTTE, told me, “They love him and adore him as mother, father, brother or god.” The organization encouraged and fostered Prabhakaran's cult-like status through imagery, poetry, and songs. Prabhakaran was like a sun. Nobody could even think of eclipsing him.
⁶³

PUHALCHUDAR

For best friends Darshika and Puhalchudar, membership in the movement was a huge honor. The girls embraced every challenge together and looked forward to the day when they would be called upon to conduct their final mission. Darshika said that they went often to the cemetery to remember and celebrate fallen LTTE war heroes. They left garlands and burned incense at the grave sites. They did not fear death for themselves.

In conversation, they were almost cavalier about the inevitability of their deaths. In describing a possible suicide attack, they waxed poetic about what would happen to their remains. They knew that when they blew themselves up they would likely be reduced to hundreds of pieces scattered all around, a piece here, a body part there. There would be nothing left for either their families or the authorities to identify. But if the battle was won, the organization would build a tomb at the site to honor them; if not, the LTTE would build a small memorial elsewhere, or the girls would be commemorated by a picture during the Heroes' Day celebrations every November.
⁶⁴

The LTTE International Secretariat issued a glossy booklet, the
Sooriya Puthalvargal Memorial Souvenir
, every few years with the photos and details of the fallen martyrs. The booklets were distributed at events around the Tamil diaspora and listed the Tigers' noms de guerre and their stats (including how many of the enemy they had killed). The 2003 edition of the
Sooriya Puthalvargal Memorial Souvenir
contained ninety-six pages in which the most “daring military maneuvers in contemporary warfare” performed by 240 Black Tigers were described. Some were shown smiling, some were stern-looking, and some even appeared aloof. For average Tamils, the fighters on the pages of the
Sooriya Puthalvargal
were superheroes of the highest order. Tamils regarded them as part of their extended family.
⁶⁵

Darshika and Puhalchudar were consumed by thoughts of battle against their enemy. Whenever they closed their eyes, they said, they dreamed of battles. In their dreams, they shot at the enemy but their bullets had no effect. Darshika explained it this way:

In our dreams, the bullets never come. The soldiers don't die. The more we shoot, the more they keep coming. In reality, when we have no bullets left, we can't do anything … we have our cyanide capsules. If we bite it in our sleep, we won't wake up. Once you put the cyanide capsule in your mouth and bite it, the glass breaks and cuts your tongue. The poison seeps into your blood. This way, even if the girls are injured, and they cannot bite down onto the capsule, they can still break it and pour it directly into their wounds. The poison in the glass cylinder mixes with your blood, that's it.
⁶⁶

Puhalchudar was thirteen years old when her family was permanently displaced. The army had kicked them out of their house in Jaffna and they lost everything. They wandered around for weeks, staying with family or distant relatives to escape the violence. Puhalchudar had to quit school and stop studying. She remembered how upset she was not to be able to go to school. During the day it was too dangerous for the girls to leave the house. During the evenings there was heavy fighting all around them. The family lived in a simple shelter built by her parents adjacent to a big army base. Her parents would sit outside all night, watching and waiting to see whether this was the night they would have to pack up the kids and make a run for it. When the twenty-millimeter shells started falling in front of their house, they decided that the war was too close for comfort. They, along with thousands of other refugees, fled for their lives.

Puhalchudar and her brother got separated from the rest of the family when they found themselves on one side of a rickety bridge, their parents on the opposite. As a result of nearly constant shelling by the Sri Lankan military, the bridge had huge holes in it. The two children could not safely get across. For a time, they just stood facing the approach to the bridge while the shelling and gunfire moved closer and closer. Finally some Tigers defending the bridge offered to help the two children reach the other side. Puhalchudar was too young to understand much about the war, but she believes that they survived only because the guerrillas came to their rescue. She owed the Tigers her life. As soon as her brother was safe in her mother's arms, Puhalchudar left the family to become a Black Tiger.
⁶⁷

The women of the LTTE formed very intense friendships. Darshika and Puhalchudar had spent every day together for the seven years before their interview. They exercised together, practiced martial arts together, ate together, slept in the same room, and confided all of their secrets in one another. “Our friendship means that we share each other's happiness and sorrow. We help each other whenever help is needed. Of course we are prepared to separate, but as long as we are in the same unit, we do everything for one another.” Puhalchudar said that of everyone, Darshika was closest to her. “Also our Leader [Prabhakaran], who takes care of everything.”
⁶⁸

Their complete and utter devotion to Prabhakaran overrode their personal relationships. The women in the movement had invented a new family, one that was based not on blood or kinship but on a new identity—one of nationalism and camaraderie. Darshika and Puhalchudar prioritize loyalty to the Leader over all else. They discuss what would happen in the event of a betrayal. “Our Leader started the movement for the good of the people,” said Darshika, “but if one person betrays us, we accept losing
that person with no regret.” Puhalchudar echoed this sentiment: “Instead of losing many people, it is better to just shoot the one traitor.”
⁶⁹

The young women's comments dovetail with observations made by some outside observers. For example,
New York Times
journalist John Burns once likened Prabhakaran's firm control over the organization to a rule of terror in the city of Jaffna. “According to scores of accounts from defectors and others who have escaped Tiger tyranny, many of his own lieutenants have been murdered; Tamils who have criticized him, even mildly or in jest have been picked up and placed for years in dungeons, half starved, hauled out periodically for a beating by their guards.”
⁷⁰

Asked how they would react if one of them betrayed the cause, Darshika replied, “I would not do anything if someone said Puhalchudar was a traitor, but if it was proved, I would not hesitate to shoot her.” Puhalchudar agreed: “Everything, good or bad, goes right up to the Leader. So if we betray the movement, the Leader will be the final judge. He would probably tell someone else to do it. But if he tells me to shoot Darshika, I'll shoot her.”
⁷¹

Even for those women who survived government assassination attempts and hours-long pitched battles, life in the LTTE was difficult. They wore shapeless fatigues. They braided their hair and tucked it tightly under a military cap. Rarely were they able to wear perfume or makeup. The LTTE enforced a strict code of conduct that Darshika and Puhalchudar abided by scrupulously. Prabhakaran set the example that they and other cadres were required to follow. Like the LTTE cadres, Prabhakaran did not drink liquor or smoke tobacco. Even tea, coffee, and carbonated drinks were considered taboo. Sex outside marriage was forbidden and those cadres who violated the code were executed irrespective of seniority or personal loyalty. Gambling and financial dishonesty were also punishable by death. Homosexuality, interestingly,
was not a capital offence; however, it was dealt with by public humiliation.
⁷²
Prabhakaran initially outlawed marriage, but after he fell in love with Madhivadhani Erambu, an agricultural student kidnapped by his guerrillas, he changed his mind. They married on October 1, 1984, and had two sons and a daughter. He subsequently altered the rules to allow other senior cadres to wed.

Following Prabhakaran's example, the LTTE decreed that members could marry when women turned thirty-five and men turned forty.
⁷³
By the time a woman attained the marrying age, only another LTTE cadre would consider marrying such a battle-hardened female. And when they did get married, off came the trousers: they were expected to wear traditional female garb—colorful saris or the
salwar kameez
—grow their hair long, and look feminine again. All their efforts and accomplishments within the movement had no effect on the ways in which the women were expected to behave. The former female cadres were just like any other Tamil girl: demure, obedient, and second-class. Their sole function in Tamil society, like generations of women before them, was to give birth to future fighters.

MENAKE

Many young Tamils found the idea of joining the organization glamorous and an expression of dedication to the cause and the Leader. But their attitude hardly reflected the whole story. After April 1995, 60 percent of Tamil casualties in the civil war were under the age of eighteen. This number was driven in part by the LTTE's policy of forced conscription of child soldiers, and in part by the deliberate targeting of civilians (especially in schools and orphanages) by government forces. The young people in Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the violence and inhabited a world in which brutality and death were the norm. The LTTE kidnapped many young girls, giving them no option other than the life of a child soldier.

Menake did not grow up with the dream of becoming a Black Tiger. She was handed over to the organization against her will by uncaring relatives. Her home was an impoverished fishing village in the northeast of the island. Her father drank heavily and regularly beat his wife. When Menake was three her mother died from one of her father's assaults. When she was seven, her father raped her repeatedly over the course of a four-day drunken binge. Finally her grandfather rescued her from her father's abusive care; she never saw the man again. When she was fifteen, her grandparents died and her uncle and aunt took her in. They were reluctant guardians, however, and in 2000 they sacrificed her for the cause. The LTTE had levied a human tax on its constituents: every Tamil family was ordered to donate a family member, male or female, to the organization to be trained for combat.
⁷⁴
So Menake's uncle and aunt gave her up to the LTTE.
⁷⁵

Menake had cried and begged them not to take her. “I told them I didn't want to die so young. But a woman officer told me, ‘Sorry, we can't help you. Your relatives said you came here of your own volition.'”
⁷⁶
The LTTE has been cited by international observers for coercive recruitment by kidnapping, forced mobilization, and extortion. They fended off such attacks by claiming that the government had created so many orphans, and they alone were willing and able to provide for them.

Menake was forced to become a fighter, but she chose to become a would-be martyr. “I had nerve damage to my spine after falling from an LTTE tractor. The doctor said I might become paralyzed when I got older. I thought, why continue to live?” Menake felt that her life was over because she was physically damaged. Her only option was the life of a martyr. “A lot of girls were volunteering to be suicide bombers, so I thought I would, too … I felt I had no other choice. The LTTE calls its suicide missions
thatkodai
, Tamil for “gift of self.” It made me feel that life still had a purpose.”
⁷⁷
Menake, like other women in the organization, believed that death was sanctified in some way. For her, the main difference between Black Tigers and regular Tamil Tigers was that the regular Tigers didn't know when they would be killed. Black Tigers knew precisely when they would achieve their ultimate destiny.

Menake's experience contrasted with that of Darshika and Puhalchudar in significant ways. She lacked the comfort provided by friendship and definitely did not share their total devotion to the cause. Menake recalled that in her first weapons class, her group was handed sticks at first. After they had practiced with the sticks, they graduated to small arms. When they gave her a Kalashnikov, she realized that she might actually have to kill someone.

She had never really thought about whether the Sinhalese people were good or bad. She was, however, subjected to the same indoctrination—a constantly reiterated refrain that the Sri Lankan government is the enemy—that every LTTE member experienced. The terrorist organization told the cadres over and over that the government had perpetrated the worst human rights violations and that they had murdered innocent civilians. In order to take back what was rightfully theirs, the leaders told the girls, they would have to kill enemy soldiers.

Every evening, Menake and the other recruits watched military films, many of them in Chinese, along with some produced specially by the LTTE itself. The films showed the young recruits how to fight, how to use weapons, how to kill. The movies carried a consistent message, that when Tamil girls die in the service of the organization, they become heroes.
⁷⁸
But despite the training, the movies, and the constantly repeated message, for Menake, the prospect of becoming a suicide bomber remained bleak. She was consumed by sadness. She was miserable that she would never have a family of her own. She would never hold a child in her arms and have a normal life. That was her biggest sorrow.
⁷⁹