Monday, 4 July 2016

Why did Tamils join the LTTE? What was their motive?

As much as the Sri Lankan state and its supporters wish to portray the Tamil Tigers as one-dimensional ruthless terrorists hellbent on causing mayhem, it's important to explore their motives and the process of radicalization which drove them to violence.

Without any context, the Tigers are only political boogeymen far-removed from any humanness. However, a more balanced perspective requires understanding the social and political conditions that drove an otherwise peaceful people to violence. It's necessary to humanize them because the Sri Lankan state propaganda has stripped them of all their humanity and rational agency which makes it possible for this tyrannical regime to whitewash any real grievances on the part of the Tamils who became the Tigers. Thus providing the appropriate context will show that the Tamils who joined the Tigers were not irrational actors prone to mindless violence but people with real grievances who turned to violent separatism after decades of political marginalization and state sponsored pogroms.

While grievances at discriminatory laws and the government's continuous broken promises made Tamils lose faith in parliamentary democracy, perhaps nothing proved to be a more powerful force of mobilization toward armed struggle than the many recurring anti-Tamil riots in which thousands of Tamil civilians were brutally murdered and displaced often with government complicity.

What is to be expected when decades of peaceful protests are met with state sponsored violence?
When some assert that the Tamils should have tried to settle their grievances through peaceful means what they are suggesting is racial suicide, because Tamils had already tried the political solution only to be met with violence and state repression. Tamils felt they had suffered enough and any more restraint on their part would only result in the complete annihilation of their race.

Velupillai Prabhakaran, who founded the LTTE, explained this motive for his recourse to armed struggle in an interview:
"The non-violent democratic struggles of our people were met with military repression. Our just demands were totally ignored, and the oppression continued on such a scale as to threaten the very survival of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. It was these circumstances which led me to form our liberation movement. I felt that an armed struggle was the only alternative left to our people, not only to ensure our survival but ultimately to free our selves from the Sinhala oppression. ... The shocking events of the 1958 racial riots had a profound impact on me when I was a schoolboy. I heard of horrifying incidents of how our people had been mercilessly and brutally put to death by Sinhala racists. Once I met a widowed mother, a friend of my family, who related to me her agonising personal experience of this racial holocaust. During the riots a Sinhala mob attacked her house in Colombo. The rioters set fire to the house and murdered her husband. She and her children escaped with severe burn injuries. I was deeply shocked when I saw the scars on her body. I also heard stories of how young babies were roasted alive in boiling tar. When I heard such stories of cruelty I felt a deep sense of sympathy and love for my people. A great passion overwhelmed me to redeem my people from this racist system. I strongly felt that armed struggle was the only way to confront a system which employs armed might against unarmed, innocent people."
Riots May 1958 - A Tamil passenger was taken out of the vehicle and beaten up. Photo courtesy of Victor Ivan

Sumantra Bose, a professor of international politics, interviewed two other top LTTE leaders and found similar motives:
"Kittu, a peninsula Tamil of Hindu background, joined the Tigers in 1978 at the age of eighteen. When I asked him why he had done so, he cited the anguish and anger he felt when he worked as a volunteer in refugee camps established in Jaffna for Tamils who fled the south after the 1977 riots. The trauma and destitution of these innocent victims of mob violence affected him deeply, he said. In 2004 I interviewed another member of the Tiger vanguard, Sornam, a top commander who joined the movement in 1982, in his base near the strategic and multiethnic town of Trincomalee on the east coast. Sornam, an east-coast Tamil from a Roman Catholic family of fisherfolk, went, like Kittu, from high school to insurgency. When I posed the same question about the motivation driving his decision, he replied without a moment’s hesitation: "Riots."" Bose, Sumantra (2009). Contested Lands: ISRAEL–PALESTINE, KASHMIR, BOSNIA, CYPRUS, AND SRI LANKA. Harvard University Press. pp. 27–28. ISBN 9780674028562.

Anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, also known as the Black July, the largest and the most destructive act of brutality inflicted on defenseless Tamil civilians who were burned alive, raped, mutilated, tortured and massacred, finally mobilized thousands of Tamils to the armed struggle:
"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. 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 [sic] 1983, after the pogrom, the LTTE support exceeded 10,000. The Tigers drew support from marginalized Tamils who resented their second-class-citizen status and from the growing number of internally displaced people." Bloom, Mia (2011). Bombshell: Women and Terrorism. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 149. ISBN 9780812243901.
KICKS before the KILL-- Borella, Colombo 1983. Iconic image from the Black July anti-Tamil riots. A stripped naked Tamil youth sits on a concrete step at the Borella bus stand as a laughing Sinhalese mob dance around him. Later petrol is poured on the youth and he is burnt alive.

The acts of Sinhala racist barbarism were so inhumane that they would rouse even the most peaceful person to violence. Here are some accounts of the racial pogrom:

London’s Daily Telegraph (July 26) wrote:
Motorists were dragged from their cars to be stoned and beaten with sticks. Others were cut down with knives and axes. Mobs of Sinhala youth rampaged through the streets, ransacking homes, shops and offices, looting them and setting them ablaze, as they sought out members of the Tamil ethnic minority. A mob attacked a Tamil cyclist riding near Colombo’s eye hospital. The cyclist was hauled from his bike, drenched with petrol and set alight. As he ran screaming down the street, the mob set on him again and hacked him down with jungle knives.
 In his book, The Tragedy of Sri Lanka, William McGowan wrote:
While travelling on a bus when a mob laid siege to it, passengers watched as a small boy was hacked 'to limb-less death.' The bus driver was ordered to give up a Tamil. He pointed out a woman who was desperately trying to erase the mark on her forehead – called a kumkum – as the thugs bore down on her. The woman’s belly was ripped open with a broken bottle and she was immolated as people clapped and danced. In another incident, two sisters, one eighteen and one eleven, were decapitated and raped, the latter 'until there was nothing left to violate and no volunteers could come forward,' after which she was burned. While all this was going on, a line of Buddhist monks appeared, arms flailing, their voices raised in a delirium of exhortation, summoning the Sinhalese to put all Tamils to death.
 The London Daily Express (29 July) wrote:
Mrs Eli Skarstein, back home in Stavanger, Norway, told how she and her 15 year old daughter, Kristen witnessed one massacre. 'A mini bus full of Tamils were forced to stop in front of us in Colombo', she said. A Sinhalese mob poured petrol over the bus and set it on fire. They blocked the car door and prevented the Tamils from leaving the vehicle. 'Hundreds of spectators watched as about 20 Tamils were burnt to death.' Mrs. Skarstein added: 'We can’t believe the official casualty figures. Hundreds, maybe thousands, must have been killed already. The police force (which is 95% Sinhalese) did nothing to stop the mobs. There was no mercy. Women, children and old people were slaughtered. Police did nothing to stop the genocide.'

The government not only refused to condemn the violence but blamed the Tamils for bringing it upon themselves and some elements of the government were implicated. All of this only strengthened the Tamil conviction that the state would not protect them and the only mode of defense against state terror and racial violence was an independent state for Tamils where they could live with dignity. This state was, of course, to be achieved through armed struggle as the Sri Lankan state made it illegal to politically advocate separatism. After all this was the state that did not follow through on its promises of political autonomy for Tamils even within a unitary state.

Thus the LTTE became an established movement representing the Tamil people and the civil war was born.

As the war was escalating, Sri Lankan military committed countless massacres against civilians and continued to harass, torture and rape with impunity, which drove many more Tamils to the LTTE as many thought that they were going to die anyway and it was better to die fighting for their freedom than to die a useless death.

Margaret Trawick, a cultural anthropologist who had shortly lived in the LTTE-controlled Batticaloa region of eastern Sri Lanka for her study which was later published in a book titled, Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa, interviewed Tiger members there and writes that a certain female cadre by the name of Sita "made it quite clear that she and many other combatants were motivated to join the LTTE by frustrated anger at the death of loved ones killed by the army." (p. 82)

Sita the Tigress recounts her family tragedy at the hands of Sri Lankan government forces and explains her motive for joining the LTTE:
"In 1985, an older brother, when he was coming home from school, the STF [Special Task Force] pursued him and shot and killed him. Another brother, in 1990, was shot and killed in Vantharumulai University [in Batticaloa District]. ... We were living happily before. After my brothers died, I decided to join the movement. After my brothers were killed, bitterness and frustration [virakti] came upon me. I wanted to die as my brothers died. ... If I were at home, I could not do all these things. I have become even more ready to die. I see the suffering of the people, and I have no fear about fighting and dying for them. Even if I die today, I will be satisfied. When people in the movement die, it is a useful death. If I died in the house, there would be nothing remarkable about that." (pp. 83-84) 
 Trawick interviewed another Tigress, Malaimalli, then the head of the Batticaloa-Amparai branch of the women’s wing of the LTTE and when asked of the reason for joining the movement Malaimalli recounts a similar family tragedy:
"Her older sister saw her husband shot before eyes. Her younger sister was imprisoned and tortured: they peeled off the skin on her leg and rubbed pepper in, and pulled off her fingernails. Now she is at home but unable to do anything. Malaimalli says there are sixteen thousand widows in Batticaloa District. Why get married just to become a widow? One must go to war in search of a peaceful life ..." (p. 159)

Even children felt compelled to join the Tigers after experiencing similar tragedies at the hands of government forces. According to a Human Rights Watch report:
"children who witnessed or suffered abuses by Sri Lankan security forces often felt driven to join the LTTE. Government abuses prior to the cease-fire included unlawful detention, interrogation, torture, execution, enforced disappearances, and rape. A 1993 study of adolescents in Vaddukoddai in the North found that one quarter of the children studied had witnessed violence personally. In response, many children joined the LTTE, seeking to protect their families or to avenge real or perceived abuses."

Likewise, the Tehelka news magazine reported the motives of certain child soldiers for joining the LTTE:
"Sureka was once a regular young girl in a village in the east, but the war between the LTTE and the army caught up with her. It killed her mother, leaving her orphaned. She had no siblings; her father had died a few years earlier. Soon after, soldiers began to turn up at her house regularly to torment her. They poured boiling water on her head once and hit her on the back with sticks. It’s what drove her to join the LTTE in 2000. … Like Sureka, Easwaran was orphaned in the 1990s when his parents were killed by the Sri Lankan Army. His father, an electrician, had dared to refuse to work for free for the soldiers. They paid him back by entering his house some days later and killing him and his wife. Easwaran was eight when he saw this happen. He and his two siblings screamed for help but fear had paralysed the neighbours into silence. He joined the LTTE to avenge his parents’ death, he says. … “All I wanted is a safe place for Tamils to live,”"

There are many more stories like the ones above that go covered up, unpublicized, whitewashed or drowned out by the mass hysteria over "terrorism" which is but a symptom of a much larger problem that is state terrorism.
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List of anti-Tamil violence before Tamils took up arms:


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