Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers

The bad blood goes back at least a thousand years to a time when a powerful Tamil dynasty in India invaded the island of Sri Lanka and pushed the Sinhalese natives deep into the south. The conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese has ebbed and flowed ever since, but today it rages more violently than ever — only with artillery and automatic rifles rather than swords and spears. The stakes would have been familiar to Sri Lankans at any point in the past 10 centuries: the minority Tamil population wants independence from the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo. They speak a different language, and they look to different gods: the Tamils to the Hindu pantheon and the Sinhalese to Buddha. At this stage, they fight not so much because of those differences as because blood begets blood, and talk of peace treads dangerously close to a betrayal of the cause that calls for total victory.

In July the eight-year-old war, which has mainly been a guerrilla conflict, suddenly turned into an even more bloody set-piece struggle. Tamil fighters, known as Tigers, dropped their usual tactics of ambush and evasion to launch a 3,000-strong force against a government base controlling Elephant Pass, a narrow, one-mile causeway, surrounded by marsh, beaches and sand dunes, that connects the mainland with the Tigers’ heartland, the Jaffna Peninsula.

The assault was on the verge of succeeding, when the government surprised the Tigers with an amphibious landing of 8,000 troops on a beach six miles away. The soldiers fought their way to relieve the garrison, and after 24 days, there was little doubt about the issue. The government forces suffered 200 dead and still held the base, while the Tigers had lost an unprecedented 564 according to their own reports and three times that according to government sources. The army immediately declared it had the Tigers on the run and launched an ambitious offensive dubbed Lightning Strike, aimed at Base One-Four, a major Tiger camp deep in the jungles of northern Sri Lanka. Says Major General Denzil Kobbekaduwa: “Nothing is going to stop us now. Our mission is to seek them out and kill as many as possible.”

In eight years of conflict between the Tamils and the government, 18,000 people have died. But that is only the beginning of the carnage. Much of Sri Lanka’s north and east have been devastated economically, and the murderous campaigns of both sides have shattered any hope of trust between Tamils and Sinhalese perhaps for generations. Both sides butcher their enemies, and an Amnesty International report claims that the Sri Lankan army killed thousands of civilians in Tamil areas last year. In less than a decade, the island has become heavily militarized. In the early 1980s, it had a small army of 16,000 and a defense budget of $30 million (2.5% of government spending). Today it has an army of 70,000 and a budget of $308 million (12% of spending).

The war has also claimed casualties outside the theater of Sinhalese-Tamil bloodletting. The Tigers were supported by the government of India in the early 1980s, until Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi changed the policy and attempted to make peace. A 70,000-man Indian peacekeeping force went to the Tamil areas in 1987 at Colombo’s invitation, only to wind up warring with the Tigers. The confrontation ended in a humiliating withdrawal of the Indians last year after more than 1,000 of their soldiers died. The headstrong Tiger leader, Vilupillai Prabhakaran, never forgives his enemies, and in May he got even with the former Indian Prime Minister when one of his operatives assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bombing.

Sometimes violence burns itself out when the sheer exhaustion of killing makes room for thoughts of peace. Even the Islamic zeal of the Iranian revolutionaries faltered after eight years of holy war with Iraq. But the Sri Lankan civil war shows no sign of flagging. The Tiger cult around Prabhakaran is as strong as ever, and young Tamil recruits still flock to his banner, eager to embrace the austere, fanatical mind-set of a Tiger.

The young recruits say good-bye to their families and embrace their AK-47 rifle as their most precious belonging, strictly following a rule that it should never touch the ground. They sit through long hours of indoctrination that covers everything from grisly photographs of Tamils tortured and butchered by the Sri Lankan army to glories of the Tamil kings of the Chola dynasty, which in the 11th century conquered Sri Lanka. There is no more frightening measure of the Tigers’ commitment than the fact that to avoid capture at least 600 Tigers have ended their own lives by biting into the cyanide vial they all carry on a string around their neck. But their first job is to kill the enemy. Says Kanthi, a young girl recruit with the Tigers: “I don’t mind dying so long as I can kill a few Sri Lankan soldiers first.”