Tigers change stripes

Sandeep UNNITHAN

Bandoliered Tigers in checked shirts, slacks, sneakers or sandals, wielding T-56 rifles engaged in a ferocious defence of their shrinking territory.

These visuals from the war in Sri Lanka-the only access to a war that is out-of-bounds for journalists-could have been taken at any point in the island republic’s endless internecine strife including their three-year battle against the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s.

But, wait a minute, what ever happened to those distinctive horizontal green and yellow striped camouflage uniforms that the Tigers proudly unveiled around a decade ago?

Indian military analysts see several possible reasons for these. The throttling of the Tiger logistics line to India owing to coordinated patrols by the Indian and Sri Lankan navy-among other contraband, consignments of uniform cloth have also been intercepted from Rameshwaram.

A second, more plausible reason, says Colonel R Hariharan a former military intelligence official, is because “wearing civvies allows the Tigers to melt into the population.”

One of the most haunting visuals from the second Iraq war five years back was of piles of green uniforms and military boots as Saddam Hussein’s defeated million-strong Baathist army dissolved into the population.

The distinctive striped disruptive-pattern uniforms, said to be the brainchild of Adele Ann (the Australian-born wife of late Tiger ideologue Anton Balasingham) were extensively paraded about in propaganda visuals and the pattern became the template for a host its other arms-grey stripes for the Black Tigers and sky blue for their fledgling ‘Vaanpuligal’ or Air Tigers.

Now it turns out, they were just that. Photo ops which would bring in a semblance of conventional military style legitimacy to the world’s second deadliest guerilla force. (They have since been overtaken by the Hizbollah).

International convention mandates a uniform to distinguish a soldier from a non-combatant, but for a guerilla for whom stealth and subterfuge are assets as he weaves through the population, this can be an encumbrance. Indeed, propaganda photographs, featured on pro-Tiger websites like www.tamilnet.com show a row of uniformly attired Tiger guerillas in round French military caps, with a grim-faced supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran presumably after the customary last meal with the leader. When these Black Tigers have carried out their suicide attacks as they did in Tuesday’s attack and their bodies displayed on the Lankan ministry of defence website www.defence.lk, they are usually attired in Sri Lankan military uniforms.

With the Sri Lankan military’s four-cornered push into the Tiger heartland of Kilinochchi, they can see plenty of striped uniforms along the way; sans their occupants.

India Today