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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 Kantha1
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. Ho
wever, 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
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.20 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 disappearances—many politically motivated or committed in the context of antiterror operations) of any country in the world.21
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.22 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.23 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.24 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.”25 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.26
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.27 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,28 implying Indian involvement.29 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