Facts About The Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam And The Sri Lankan Civil War

LTTE has gone to great lengths in its attempt to achieve the goal of seceding from Sri Lanka to create a separate Tamil state. The group took out President Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka in 1993 and Rajiv Gandhi (pictured) - son of Indira Gandhi, India's first and only female prime minister, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, who was himself prime minister from 1984 to 1989 - in 1991.

According to the FBI, this makes LTTE the only paramilitary organization to take the lives of two world leaders.

Civil wars and turbulent secessionist movements often include asymmetrical tactics deployed by the side with fewer resources. In addition to traditional forces, the Tamil Tigers may have invented a terrifying way to inflict damage on their enemy, suicide vests.

According to a profile in Time, LTTE created the device, which can hide in plain sight while providing extreme mobility, spontaneity, and ease of access to targets. The wearer of the vest is always among those to perish, which shows the extreme dedication to the cause for those who carry out strikes. This is a powerful psychological weapon. Since the vest was introduced, terrorist groups around the world have used them to try and achieve their aims through force.

History shows the notion of wearing detonating devices against a far more well-equipped military dates to at least the Sino-Japanese War, when Chinese soldiers wore erupting belts and strapped grenades to their bodies. However, the modern version of the device was the creation of the Tamil Tigers. 

According to an article published by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Tamil Tigers have used the device in more than 200 strikes since 1987. "The organization has never been particularly mindful of the safety of passers-by and has never spared innocent bystanders who happened to be in the vicinity," the piece reads.

Insurgent groups have often pulled women into their ranks in an effort to increase participation and create a united population in support of their cause. The Tamil Tigers were no different; female soldiers were an important part of the organization. Women had their own military units. 

Niromi de Soyza joined the Tamil Tigers in 1987, when she was 17 years old, and extensively documented her experience for a piece in The Telegraph: 

The morning chill was still in the air and the dew dripped from banana leaves as we ran though fields and approached the road. As we attempted to cross it, we were ambushed from both sides in a barrage of automatic gunfire, grenades and mortars...

Everyone was screaming. We crashed to the earth as the gunfire grew heavier, now coming from behind as well. A helicopter gunship hovered above, strafing. We were surrounded. There was no cover other than a few palmyra and banana trees that dotted the landscape...

A grenade flew over from my left. As I scrambled to my hands and knees, I realised Gandhi, our area leader, was in its path. "Gandhi anna, duck!" I screamed. The grenade hit his head and exploded, ripping his skull apart and covering me with blood and tissue...

The world has changed since I left the Tigers, just as the Tigers themselves have changed. In this age of terrorism it is easy to dismiss all rebel groups as evil extremists, without considering the desperate circumstances that drive people to align themselves to such organizations.

I tell people that the only reason I joined the war was to defend my people, because I felt there was no other choice. I was not coerced to join the insurgency. As an idealistic 17-year-old, I believed in the power of the individual to make a difference.

M.I.A., or Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, is a rapper with little regard for FCC rules about flipping the bird during a live Super Bowl halftime show. In 1975, her father, Arul Pragasam, helped found a Tamil separatist organization in England called Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, or EROS. Initially designed as a Marxist intellectual movement, the group eventually became a militant organization, and was absorbed into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. 

Described as the least militant of the major Tamil liberation groups of the 1980s, EROS had connections to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and African National Congress. Its members trained at PLO camps in Lebanon, and EROS was in part supported by the Indian government, which has a history of intervention in Sri Lanka. 

Maya was born in London and moved to Sri Lanka, where she lived until she was 10, at which point her family moved to government housing in London. There, she found a love for music while she settled into her new country. While she isn't a part of a secessionist movement, M.I.A. is politically active and involved in issues like immigration, unrest in her home country, and inhumane treatment of prisoners globally. 

July 1983 is known as Black July in Sri Lanka. Previous to summer '83, conflicts between Tamil separatists and the government were limited to local strikes and occasional guerilla activity on the part of LTTE or other such groups. In July '83, LTTE took out 13 government soldiers. The government retaliated with indiscriminant strikes against Tamils, during which as many as 3,000 people perished. From that point forward, the conflict was a full scale war. 

In an interview with an Indian magazine in 1984, LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran said, "The '83 July holocaust has united all sections of the Tamil masses."

The conflict between LTTE and the Sri Lankan government is commonly referred to as the Sri Lankan Civil War, which started July 1983. At the height of the conflict, LTTE controlled vast swaths of Sri Lanka, administering a judiciary system and levying taxes, among other things. The organization was one party in a globally recognized conflict. 

Though no strict definition of terrorism exists, it's commonly accepted that two parties engaged in a full-on war are enemy combatants, not terrorists. Terrorist organizations don't typically engage in warfare or develop complex government structures (most definitions exempt all state-based organizations). Though every definition seems to involve a political component, and LTTE certainly had that, calling LTTE a strictly terrorist organization plays into traditional narratives of state power. 

This pattern of the state dictating a narrative that describes one party as legitimate and the other as extremist and immoral is seen time and again in modern history. Take, for example, the conflict between the IRA, pro-British loyalist groups, and the British government in Northern Ireland. The IRA destroyed a lot of property and felled a number of civilians and British government personnel, but was not markedly more vicious than the British government or loyalist groups, and provisional IRA activity only began as a reaction to anti-Catholic discrimination on the part of the British government. 

Thus, a movement described by state narrative as terrorism arose as a reaction to state-inflicted turbulence, which allowed the state to justify its actions both before and after the emergence of an opposition party. To apply this to the context of Sri Lanka, LTTE emerged in reaction to government rejection of attempts by Tamil people to use the political system to enact change. The state reaction to LTTE was just as vicious, if not more so, than the campaign waged by the Tigers. Yet the Tigers, in being dismissed as a terrorist organization despite engaging in a full-scale military conflict with the government, had already been undermined in the eyes of the global public. 

While it would be hard to justify the actions of LTTE in many instances, it is equally hard to justify the Sri Lankan government's action, perhaps even more so, since protecting civilians is a primary directive of governments. 

In 2008, the UN pulled its international staff out of conflict areas in Sri Lanka as the nation's army closed in on the Tamil Tigers. As the army advanced, it opened no-fire zones to 400,000 Tamil civilians promising safety. When civilians arrived in these areas, the army shelled them, taking thousands of lives.

Pushing farther into Tamil territory, soldiers from the national army indiscriminately murdered civilians, committed sexual assaults, and recorded their horrific on their cell phones. 

As many as 40,000 to 70,000 Tamils perished in the genocide. 

The Sri Lankan government wasn't alone in abusing civilians. A Human Rights Watch report from 2010 accuses Tamil Tigers of committing awful acts against civilians in areas they controlled. According to the report, as government soldiers closed in on LTTE, the separatists prevented civilians from leaving the area, and used them as human shields. Civilians perished at a devastatingly high rate in the closing days of the conflict. 

The report further alleges that LTTE and the Sri Lankan government caused death and injury to civilians by disrupting humanitarian relief efforts. The government was accused of indiscriminately shelling LTTE territory, striking hospitals in the process. The government defended its scorched earth policy by declaring anyone remaining in LTTE areas an insurgent sympathizer. The UN called the final months of the conflict a "bloodbath."

The Tamil people migrated from southern India (in and around what is now the state of Tamil Nandu) to the island of Sri Lanka under British colonial rule. At the time, the island was known as Ceylon, and the Tamils, an ethnic and religious minority on the island, were seen by the majority Sinhalese people as British collaborators who received preferential treatment. 

In 1948, the Indian subcontinent was liberated from British rule, and the Sinhala quickly took charge of Sri Lanka. The group comprises 80% of the island's population, speaks the Sinhala language, and is predominantly Buddhist. The Tamil people speak Tamil, are predominantly Hindu, and make up about 10% of the island's population.

Though tension existed between the Tamil and Sinhala people from the day Tamils first arrived in Sri Lanka, the Tamil liberation movement began in earnest in 1972, when Sinhala was declared the official language of Sri Lanka and Buddhism the official religion. Previous to this decree, English was the official language. This change essentially forced Tamil people to either learn Sinhala, start their own schools, or leave Sri Lanka. 

The Sea Tigers, the naval branch of  LTTE, was an important and formidable asset to the organization. It had what were probably North Korean-made stealth boats designed to evade radar detection and even tried building submarines. Since Sri Lanka is an island, it makes sense the organization would use naval forces. Boats helped smuggle in supplies, especially when the organization became so big it needed its own means of shipping. 

The Sea Tigers sacrificed boats and personnel in strikes on Sri Lankan boats and oil tankers. Its leader said such tactics inspired al-Qaeda's strike on the American destroyer Cole in 2000. 

Soon after British rule ended in Sri Lanka, the Tamils advocated for more political control over areas in which they had settled. Two agreements were reached to decentralize control of the island, one in 1957 and one in 1965, but neither was implemented. Under these agreements, the Tamil people sought a federal system with strong local jurisdiction. 

By the late 1970s, failure to give Tamil people the political rights and control they sought led to a loss of confidence in the national government and calls for separatism. According to a paper entitled "The Root Causes of the Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka" published by the World Bank, the failure of the agreements of '57 and '65 led to many young Tamils giving up on parliamentary politics completely, despite a major victory for local seats by the Tamil United Liberation Front in 1977. 

Episodes of turbulence between Tamils and Sri Lanka's Sinhalese population occurred throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, mostly in the form of riots. The modern era of organized military action began in earnest in 1983. 

LTTE was led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who founded Tamil New Tigers, an organization that eventually evolved into Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in  either '73 or '74. His goal lay in protesting the treatment of Tamils by the Sri Lankan government, though he quickly became militant. In 1975, he was accused of taking out the mayor of Jaffna, in the far north of Sri Lanka, after the deaths of several protesters weeks before.

Prabhakaran amassed tens of thousands of followers as LTTE became militarized and extremist. He was said to wear a cyanide pill around his neck in case of impending capture, a tactic emulated by his acolytes. He allegedly ordered the hit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself, showing his hands-on involvement in the political tactics of LTTE. He also allegedly ordered the 1996 strike on the Central Bank of Colombo, during which 90 people died and 1,400 more were injured.

He died in 2009, in the final months of the Sri Lankan Civil War. 

In 2002, Prabhakaran and LTTE reached a ceasefire agreement with the Sri Lankan government. At that time, LTTE controlled a third of the country, and administered its own court system, public infrastructure, and taxes. The organization was so vast, it was overseen by a Central Governing Committee, which was tasked with directing the two major branches of LTTE - military and civilian.

The Committee, which was led by Prabhakaran, made final decisions on military strategy, while controlling its vast bureaucratic infrastructure, which, in addition to aforementioned roads, taxes, and courts, included a police force, a public planning and reconstruction office, television and radio stations, and a political wing that liaised with foreign supports and associates. 

According to a piece in Time from 2009, the organization raised an estimated $200 million per year. Its main source of revenue was Tamils living in India or as expatriates in places like Canada. LTTE also had legitimate business interests such as stock, owned grocery stores around the world, and participated in black market activities such as forgery, drug smuggling, and bank robbing.