POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Tigers Get Ready to Change Their Stripes

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Feb 18 2005 (IPS) - At the radio station that dominates the airwaves in this town under Tamil Tiger rebels’ control, death gets a special place in the morning.

At 8:30 a.m., almost two hours after the ‘Voice of Tigers’ has crackled to life with its first programme – a song to celebrate the separatist rebellion – a gong goes off, setting into motion a ritual that is observed with religious fervour every day.

The reporters leave their desks and head to the garden at the entrance to the station. They line up behind each other as if at a military parade and then come to attention when commanded by the most senior staff member.

Thereafter, they bow their heads in a silent prayer to remember the rebels killed in Sri Lanka’s over two-decade long ethnic conflict. This ritual, which includes the unfurling of the rebels’ flag, ends with each journalist placing flowers at a shrine.

The subjects of such veneration are not the gods of Hinduism, the major religion among the Tamils, or universal symbols that stand for a free and open media. On the contrary, they are the men and women who died in the cause the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are fighting for – to create the separate state of Tamil Eelam on this Indian Ocean island.

Among those worshipped are ”captain” Miller, the Tamil rebel who inspired the creation of the LTTE’s most potent weapon in its armour – the suicide bomber – by blowing himself up during an attack in July, 1987.

”This is to confirm our commitment to the LTTE. It is done in all the offices,” Subaramanium Baskaran, a 34-year-old journalist at the Tiger radio station, said soon after he had finished the 15-minute ritual.

Yet this martial spirit, which has defined the rebels during the two-decade long conflict that killed nearly 64,000 people, is being chipped away by another feature that has unravelled itself since the LTTE struck a ceasefire deal with the Sri Lankan government in February 2002.

This new political current revolves around the LTTE’s quest to create their own governmental structure, replete with a spectrum of institutions to give it an air of respectability.

Such a spirit is also conveyed by the only image permitted on the walls of public buildings and small shops here – that of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s leader.

He appears in a number of pictures in civilian clothes – a cream or light blue safari suite – smiling.

It is a makeover that attempts to put some distance between the other dominant images of Prabhakaran in this town in northern Sri Lanka. The rebel supremo appears in them wearing a military uniform, with a pistol stuck in his belt and the black necklace that holds the pill all Tigers have – a cyanide capsule to commit suicide if captured – clearly visible.

Kilinochchi, in fact, is alive with other features seeking to mirror this increasingly new spirit of the rebels, ranging from the sprawling headquarters to house the Tamil Eelam police force, a Tamil Eelam bank and a hospital.

Among the oldest institutions created by the LTTE to convey this sense of a state-in-the making is its own judicial system, replete with its own chief justice, judges, courts of law and a law college. It was set up in 1993 in Jaffna, when the Tigers controlled that northern city from 1990-95.

”We have 120 lawyers practising in the courts in our area. They all graduated from our law college,” Eliyathamby Pararajasingham, who heads the LTTE’s judiciary, said in an interview at the law college.

In the past 12 years, courts run by the rebels have handled over 36,000 cases, the bulk of them being disputes over land and money. ”That includes 10,000 criminal cases, like robbery, rapes and murder,” added Pararajasingham.

Even the Achilles heel of the Tigers, its notorious human rights record, has not been ignored in the on-going makeover. Seven months ago, the North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESHR) opened its doors in Kilinochchi.

”This is a further sign that we have grown up as a nation,” Father Mariampillai Karunaratnam, a Catholic priest who heads the NESHR, told IPS. ”The international community is realising this and that is why they want to work with the LTTE.”

Significant in this regard is the rebels’ willingness to learn about human rights as part of this ”politically maturing process,” says Karunaratnam. ”They know as a revolutionary body that there can be excesses and violations.”

Such lessons on human rights – the first of its kind that LTTE military leaders are due to sit through in February – come days after the rebels were heavily criticised by the United Nations for violating children’s rights by conscripting Tamil teenagers to swell the Tigers’ ranks.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan accused the LTTE of recruiting more than 4,700 children, some as young as 11, since 2001. Such recruitment was carried out ”by force, abducting children while on their way to school or during religious festivities,” Annan said in a report, ‘Children and Armed Conflict,’ released this month.

The LTTE, however, appears confident that such criticism from abroad or by the Sri Lankan government will not erode the public support it has received from Tamil civilians in the north and east.

”We are working for the people and we have lot of public support behind us,” Sinnathamby Illamparithi, head of the LTTE’s political office in Jaffna, said in an interview. ”We are not interested in war now. We are building an administration to help the Tamil people.”

POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Tigers Get Ready to Change Their Stripes

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Feb 18 2005 (IPS) - At the radio station that dominates the airwaves in this town under Tamil Tiger rebels’ control, death gets a special place in the morning.
(more…)