Suicide bombings: An evil phenomenon

Sriram KHE

Iraq and Sri Lanka are thousands of miles apart and have distinct cultures, but they have at least one thing in common: suicide bombing.

Persian and Arab maritime explorers gave Sri Lanka the name Serendip, because of how this enchanting land suddenly came out of nowhere. It was from the same idea that, centuries later, Sir Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” to signify something fantastic that we chance upon while searching for something else.

These days, Sri Lanka is often in the news because of a 25-year-old conflict that does not seem likely to end anytime soon.

A Sri Lankan graduate student was my first apartment-mate when I came to the United States. The few events that he shared with me - such as stories of his friend literally jumping over walls and fleeing mobs that were torching buildings and killing people - seemed Hollywoodesque. Sadly, they were real.

As the regional big brother, India attempted to mediate a solution in 1987. It sent a military contingent to Sri Lanka to oversee the disarming of the rebels and to ensure that the government would hold to a Ceasefire Agreement - one of many over the years.

As has been the case with many countries that have attempted to straighten out another country’s affairs - an experience we in the United States know all too well - the Indian Peacekeeping Force itself came to be seen as the bad guys and found itself fighting the rebels, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The dramatic turnaround from peacekeeping to direct conflict did not go well - neither in India nor in Sri Lanka. The shift in India’s role led a friend from my undergraduate days, who was then an officer in India’s air force, to quit the military in the middle of his contract, fully aware that he would lose all the benefits he had accrued over the years.

The lack of support all around led Indian forces to start packing their bags a little more than two years after the first deployment. However, the departure of the Indian forces apparently did not do enough to unlink India from the rebels, who continued to harbor ill feelings toward the Indian government.

In May 1991, an LTTE suicide bomber detonated a powerful blast that killed the former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, who had authorised the peacekeeping mission.

At a campaign event, the female bomber approached Gandhi to touch his feet, not an uncommon act in India, and set off the explosive.

Thus, reports of suicide bombers in Iraq always remind me of Sri Lanka and the LTTE.

Though the LTTE did not invent the idea of suicide bombing, this group perfected the insanely evil strategy of using people, and women in particular, as bomb delivery mechanisms. According to some estimates, more than a third of LTTE suicide bombers are female.

The latest was on February 3, a day before the 60th anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain. A female suicide bomber set off explosives, killing herself and 14 people at the main railway station in Colombo, the country’s capital.

Compared to the Sri Lankan civil war, the chaos in Iraq appears to be even more intense and widespread. From my rudimentary understanding of the Sri Lankan situation, I had always feared that it would be only a matter of time before militants in Iraq started using female suicide bombers in large numbers.

Last week brought a horror of the lowest order when Iraqi militants reportedly used two mentally handicapped women as bombers.

It is difficult to see the silver lining in such dark clouds over Sri Lanka or Iraq. In his own way, Rodney King summarised it best during the riots in Los Angeles in 1992: “Can’t we all get along?” I hope the answer to this rhetorical question is something far, far better than suicide bombers.

Sriram Khe of Eugene is an associate professor and director of the honors programme at Western Oregon University in Monmouth, US