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Who Is Feeding The Tigers?
The Genesis Of A Suicide Bomber

By Rohini Hensman

07 December, 2007
The Colombo Post

On 27 November, Kilinochchi was the venue for the
annual Great Heroes' Day event, at which LTTE
leader Velupillai Prabhakaran paid tribute to the
'martyrs' he himself had sent to their deaths.
Much of his speech was a tirade against the
international community,which he accused of
turning against the LTTE, thus indirectly paying
tribute to the efficacy of the pro-democracy and
human rights campaigns of Tamil activists and
Lakshman Kadirgamar, and contradicting
allegations that the international community is
supporting the Tigers. He vowed to continue the
struggle until his goal of a separate Tamil state
had been achieved, and demonstrated how serious
he was the very next day, with two deadly
terrorist attacks in Colombo and Nugegoda that
killed and injured dozens of innocent civilians.

The only realistic characterisation of the
current military situation is that it is a
stalemate. Both the government and the LTTE can
win some battles, but neither can win the war. We
need only look at Iraq and Palestine, where the
US and Israel with their overwhelming military
superiority are unable to quell the Iraqi and
Palestinian insurgencies, to realize that a
purely military strategy in Sri Lanka will never
defeat the LTTE. How do such movements survive in
the face of a militarily superior adversary? How
do they keep recruiting young people ready to
give their lives to the cause?

In his brilliant film 'Paradise Now,' Palestinian
director Hany Abu-Assad follows two young men,
Said and Khaled, as they prepare to become
suicide bombers. Said has suffered the loss and
stigma that comes from being the son of a
Palestinian executed for collaboration with the
Israelis, as well as the daily oppression
inflicted by the Israeli occupation. Based on
extensive research, the film makes one hope
against hope that the men will change their
minds, as indeed Khaled does at the last minute;
even Said refrains from bombing a bus full of
civilians including children, climbing instead on
to one full of soldiers.

The people who really make one's flesh creep in
this film are those who give pep talks and make
'martyr's videos' of the men before turning them
into human bombs. An interview with failed LTTE
suicide bomber Menake, published in the fashion
magazine Marie Claire, tells a similar story. Her
grandparents rescued her from an abusive father,
who killed her mother and raped her repeatedly as
a child, but they died when she was fifteen years
old. Her aunt and uncle took her in reluctantly,
only to give her away to the Tigers during one of
their conscription drives. She volunteered to
become a suicide bomber in order to give her life
some purpose.

There are common elements in the stories: an
unhappy past, an intolerable present under a
repressive state, and an unscrupulous terrorist
group that takes advantage of vulnerable young
people to use them for its own ends. Humiliation,
privation and bereavement inflicted by a hostile
state are crucial ingredients, driving young
people into the arms of terrorist groups. It is
impossible to put an end to terrorism without
cutting off this source of new recruits, the
life-blood of such groups. So who are the
recruiting agents of the LTTE in Sri Lanka?

The President and the SLFP

The prime culprits are the President and current
leadership of the SLFP. Mahinda Rajapaksa came to
power courtesy the LTTE: without its enforced
boycott of the Presidential elections in the
North and East, he would not have been elected.
He and his hard-line Sinhala chauvinist allies
within the SLFP, JHU and MEP have repaid the
favour many times over. Prabhakaran wanted war
because he cannot survive a just peace,
andPresident Rajapaksa has given him what he
wanted. The LTTE needs human rights abuses and a
refusal to implement a just political solution to
justify its call for a separate state, and there,
too the President has obliged them. The
government adamantly refuses to accept the help
offered by the UN to improve its abysmal human
rights record, and thus helps Prabhakaran to
recruit his suicide bombers. And the only measure
initiated by the President that could lead to the
final defeat of the LTTE - the All Party
Representative Committee (APRC) process to
formulate proposals for political reform - has
been delayed and sabotaged time and again by none
other than the President himself and his party,
the SLFP. Prabhakaran is no fool: he referred to
the APRC's failure to put forward a solution in
his speech. The President's bizarre statement
that he represents the Sinhalese who voted for
him but not the Tamils of the North-East further
supports the LTTE's struggle for a separate
state: after all, if the Sri Lankan head of state
doesn't represent the Tamils of the North-East,
then they are entitled to their own state! Even
his claim that a unitary state was demanded by a
majority of the Sinhalese people simply does not
hold water.

A poll sponsored by the National Peace Council
and carried out by the Marga Institute in
May/June this year showed that 70 per cent of the
respondents, who did not include Tamils, were
ready to support a three-tiered system of
devolution which came close to a federal system
and certainly could not be described as unitary.
It is time the President stopped passing off his
own bigoted views as the views of the more
enlightened Sinhalese majority. Far from
representing the Sinhalese majority, the
President has acted against their interests in
every conceivable way. The government's offensive
military strategy led to the debacle at the
Anuradhapura Air Base, in which, according to
Iqbal Athas, eightaircraft and two Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles were destroyed and many more
aircraft damaged. We must remember that this was
not a terrorist attack aimed at unarmed
civilians, but an attack on a legitimate military
target in the midst of an ongoing war. If the
President and Defence Ministry claim credit for
the victory at Thoppigala, they must also accept
blame for this defeat, in which the lives of
several military personnel were lost, along with
destruction and damage costing well over $ 30
million. It would not have occurred if they had
given priority to defending the installations and
territory controlled by the government instead of
embarking on a reckless offensive against the
LTTE in its Northern stronghold. Who will pay the
cost? The people of Sri Lanka, of course.
Inflation has been described as a way in which
the government robs the people, and that is
indeed what is going on in Sri Lanka. At a 20 per
cent rate of inflation, a wage will be worth
one-fifth less at the end of a year than it was
worth at the beginning. That is one way in which
the government funds its war. Borrowing money at
high rates of interest - which, again, the people
will have to pay - is another. Meanwhile the
garment industry - Sri Lanka's biggest foreign
exchange earner - is going down the drain.
Workers are demanding a wage increase of Rs. 2500
and there are tens of thousands of unfilled
vacancies because inflation has cut into real
wages so badly.

At the same time, hundreds of factories have
closed, and employers are complaining of
ruinously high costs, due to the same sky-high
inflation. To add to the economic problems, Sri
Lanka could lose European Union trade incentives
because of its deteriorating human rights
record.Politicians carry on their profligate
spending, the elite continue to enjoy their
expensive life-styles, corruption is rampant at
the highest levels of government, and those who
report on it are penalised. Votes and political
support are openly bought and sold. The President
hands out political posts to family members and
supporters like a feudal rulerrather than the
leader of a modern democratic nation. In this
context, COPE chairman Wijeyadasa Rajapaksha's
demands that ministers and top officials found
guilty of corruption should be fired, that the
allocation of Rs. 23.6 billion for the President
and his ministers be cut to five billion and the
rest of the money used to improve health and
education services, and that there be
transparency and accountability in government
spending, sound like eminently reasonable demands
for good governance and democracy.

The UNP and its Leader

At first sight, the UNP under its current
leadership does not seem to be guilty of helping
the LTTE in this particular way. The ceasefire of
2002 did provide a breathing space to a war-weary
population in the North-East, and Ranil
Wickremesinghe's declaration of support for a
federal solution to the conflict was a courageous
move. Yet, while in opposition, Wickremesinghe
repeatedly sabotaged earlier efforts, especially
in 1995 and 2000, to implement political reforms
that could not go through without the cooperation
of his party.

If those reforms had been implemented, the war
might have been over by now, and thousands of
lives might have been saved. Even during the
period he was Prime Minister, there was little
progress towards a political solution. When
Prabhakaran denied LTTE backing for a federal
solution, he made no effort to pursue discussions
with other representatives of minority parties.
Moreover, the provisions of the CFA and the way
in which it was implemented helped the LTTE to
murder its Tamil critics and prepare for Eelam
War IV, thus making it inevitable that war would
break out once more. More recently, his attitude
to the APRC process, which holds out the promise
of bringing about a political solution to the
conflict, has been opportunistic in the extreme.
It is understandable that he was piqued by the
SLFP poaching UNP MPs and offering them Cabinet
posts in violation of the Memorandum of
Understanding signed between the two party
leaders, but to respond by undermining the APRC
process was childish and shortsighted. In fact,
the SLFP's thoroughly unprofessional proposal,
making the district the unit of devolution and
contradicting itself on the subject of the
Executive Presidency, gave him a chance to
upstage it by declaring the UNP's support for the
consensus that was emerging in the APRC, thus
demonstrating greater political maturity than the
SLFP. Instead, he first took the UNP out of the
APRC discussions on the pretext that a final
consensus had not emerged within the deadline he
had given it, and later back-tracked on his
earlier support for a federal solution.

That in itself might not have been a problem,
since theminority parties had agreed to a state
that was neither federal nor unitary, but his
silence on this issue led to speculation that he
was contemplating an alliance with the JVP which,
of course, is insisting on a unitary state. His
failure to contradict such rumours suggests a
leader who is totally devoid of principles. Ranil
Wickremesinghe's ability to win over the
Sinhalese majority to a just political solution
is also very doubtful. His economic policies were
as callous towards the majority of the population
as those of the current government, and his
record of brutal human rights violations in an
earlier UNP administration still hangs over him.

The TNA and JVP

The TNA MPs are at least honest about their
support for the LTTE. JVP MPs, on the other hand,
breathe fire and brimstone against the Tigers,
yet their opposition to a democratic political
solution acceptable to Tamil moderates sustains
the credibility of the LTTE and its effort to
divide the country: so long as Tamils are not
treated as equals in a united Sri Lanka, the
demand for a separate state where their
democratic rights will be respected has
legitimacy. Furthermore, JVP opposition to human
rights monitoring that would reduce atrocities
against Tamils helps Prabhakaran to recruit his
deadly suicide bombers.

In other ways too, the JVP's actions contradict
their claim to act in the interests of the
Sinhalese majority. They claim to defend the
living standards of workers, yet they are at the
forefront of the demands for a military solution
to the conflict which entails an endless war,
which in turn slashes workers' salaries due to
inflation; thus they must share the blame for
falling real wages. They claim to be
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, yet they
collude in the divide-and-rule policies of
capitalists and imperialists, with their Sinhala
nationalism and refusal to defend the rights of
Tamil workers.

This is a pity, because in other ways their
behaviour has been commendable. For example, it
has been reported that in a finance committee
meeting chaired by President Rajapaksa, two JVP
MPs had protested against political appointments
to state banks that bypassed standard
qualifications for these positions. After the
meeting, the President told the MPs that these
types of appointments were a necessary way of
rewarding 'apey minissu', and invited them to
forward the names of their supporters for
appointments as well. Much totheir credit, they
resisted the all-pervasive culture of nepotism
and corruption, and declined the offer.

What is to be done?

It is a sad fact that most of the political
parties in Sri Lanka have helped the LTTE in one
way or the other, and none of them has shown an
ability to defeat the Tigers. This was the
complaint of fifteen high-ranking former
commanders of the armed forces who met the
President to discuss the grave military and
political situation in the country. According to
a news report, 'The former service chiefs made it
clear to the President that their move was
completely non-partisan, and that they were only
worried that even after facing a challenge from
terrorism for 30 years, the country was still to
get united and draft and implement a national
plan to eliminate terrorism and bring about a
political settlement.'

The two biggest parties need to listen to the
former service chiefs, and make a joint effort to
end human rights violations and implement
democratic political reforms that address the
legitimate grievances of minorities. Once this is
done, the LTTE leadership will lose its source of
willing recruits, and the war can be ended.
Unless Mahinda Rajapaksa follows their advice, he
will face increasing popular anger and hatred as
the war drags on, the death toll mounts, and
living standards plummet.

Unless Ranil Wickremesinghe follows their advice,
he faces political oblivion: if he wants to have
the hope of winning an election in the future, he
needs to demonstrate a capacity for statesmanship
now. It is in the interests of both leaders to
put aside their egos for the moment in order to
save the country, not necessarily by forming a
national government, but by both pledging support
for the APRC proposals. If they are too selfish
to do this, their supporters should serve notice
on them that they will withdraw support unless
they do the right thing. The people of Sri Lanka
and civil society organisations too have a role
to play.

The deliberative poll conducted by the Marga
Institute is a model that should be followed more
widely, since it seeks an informed opinion from
its respondents and provides them with the
information that is required for such an opinion.
An interesting finding of this poll was that when
Sinhalese people realised that devolution could
bring government closer to the people - i.e. that
it could promote democracy - they supported it. A
three-tier system of government combined with a
Right to Information Act like the Indian one
could be a potent weapon against corruption as
well as an instrument of democracy that would
serve the interests of all the people of Sri
Lanka.

The government has to restore the rule of law,
which is all but non-existent thanks to its own
lawlessness. Restoring democratic rights and
freedoms is also essential if it wishes to
continue claiming that Sri Lanka is a democracy -
a claim that is becoming increasingly laughable
every passing day. It is already facing huge
embarrassment for breaking both Sri Lankan and
international law by giving Karuna a fake
passport and obtaining a British visa for him
under false pretences. Now UN High Commissioner
forHuman Rights Louise Arbour warns that since
members of the Human Rights Commission of Sri
Lanka were appointed directly by the President in
violation of the Constitution, its international
accreditation could be withdrawn, bringing
further shame on our country. Louise Arbour
repeated her public request that the government
of Sri Lanka consider allowing her own office to
have a presence in Sri Lanka, and APRC
proceedings are scheduled to resume in
mid-December. This time round, supporters of
democracy and opponents of the LTTE in ALL
parties should see to it that the Sinhala
nationalist recruiting agents of the LTTE in the
JVP, JHU, MEP and SLFP are not allowed to derail
progress towards justice, democracy and peace.

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