Truth and the Tigers
John THOMPSON, National Post
No prolonged violent civil war ends quietly; and the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are squalling like, well, a cat on the
losing end of a desperate fight.
Throughout the countries that shelter the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora,
the Tigers’ activists are desperately trying to win some reprieve for
the last LTTE guerrilla force trapped in Sri Lanka. The problem is that
the Tamil Tigers began as a terrorist group; and the two main traits of
terrorists are deception and atrocity.
Terrorists try to convince both themselves and a wider audience that
their cause is righteous. It seldom is. Reformers like Martin Luther
King, Mahatma Gandhi and Lech Walesa proved that non-violent protest
works.
Terrorists are people who prefer violence; their first targets are
often the aspiring King-and Walesa-types who would lead the terrorists’
preferred audience along a gentler path.
Prabhakaran, the Tiger Supremo, began his career by murdering a
federalist Tamil politician who preferred to work within the political
system. The violence of a terrorist is a fast-track to leadership —
faster than working within a political system. The leaders of terrorist
groups are often “self-actualizing,” choosing a path that lets them
convince themselves that violence is excusable.
Few conflicts have simple causes, and descriptions of the
complexities behind the Sri Lankan war with the LTTE have filled entire
books. But most people prefer simple narratives; terrorists and their
supporters are no exception. A highly involved struggle in Sri Lanka was
slowly turned into a Sinhalese vs. Tamil epic by the Tigers, and that’s
the story they still push —even now.
Atrocity is the stock-in-trade of the terrorist who feels he has to
use outrageous violence to give truth to his lies to justify his
actions.
One basic tactic of terrorism is to goad authorities into an
overreaction which then polarizes the terrorists’ target community and
alienates them from the wider society.
The Sri Lankan civil war is widely held to have started when
Sinhalese mobs killed hundreds of Tamils and forced tens of thousands to
flee in 1983. The Tigers have used this event to justify all their
actions ever since.
What they do not discuss are the years of terrorist activity leading
up to this explosion of rage. Moreover, guerrilla forces do not manifest
overnight; the LTTE already had a guerrilla force in advance of the
outbreak of rioting.
The guerrilla war has been waged off and on for 26 years now. Yet we
are supposed to forget that the Tigers have probably killed more Tamils
than the Sri Lankan Government has; not least through their suppression
of rival Tamil perspectives.
There have been three major ceasefires in the LTTE war — each one
broken by the Tigers as soon as they had rebuilt their ranks and
restocked their war chest.
The Tigers also assassinated two Heads of State, pioneered the
suicide belt-bomb and generally established a reputation as one of the
most audacious terrorist groups the world has ever seen.
As the Tigers’ last main guerrilla force retreated to its current
position in January, they held tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at
gunpoint, using them as human shields. This hasn’t slowed down Sri
Lanka’s Army much; so now the Tigers are using their own hostages as
“proof” of alleged genocidal instincts in the Sri Lankan Government.
However, past LTTE terror tactics, like truck bombs in office
buildings and time bombs on buses, didn’t discriminate between
Sinhalese, Tamils and Sri Lanka’s minority Muslims and Burghers. If the
Tigers were that concerned about the hostages they use as human shields,
they could surrender or let them go. They show no signs of doing either.
They are eager for aid to be delivered inside their lines for the
relief of the hostages; but their own larder is also running low. For
all their squalling, the Tigers don’t deserve our sympathy, and it’s
shameless of them to demand it. - Published in the National Post on
March 5, 2009. |