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Kamal Kishore/Reuters — Corbis,Tamil man sweeping at a mass cemetery of Tamil Tigers.
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By AATISH TASEER
FOUR years ago this week, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam announced that their struggle for an independent homeland in northern Sri Lanka had “reached its bitter end.” The group had been fighting on behalf of the Tamil people for more than a quarter-century, and its defeat was absolute.
Today, great sections of Tamil country are still a scene of devastation. The houses are either destroyed or brand-new; the land is uncultivated and overgrown; there are forests of decapitated Palmyra palms, damaged by heavy shelling. And then there are the relics of war — graveyards of L.T.T.E. vehicles rotting in the open air; the remains of a ship, its superstructure blown to pieces and in whose rusting starboard a gaping hole gives on to blue sea.
When I first arrived there last March, I saw the loss in primarily
military terms. But the feeling of defeat among the Tamils of Sri Lanka
goes far deeper than the material defeat of the rebels. It is a moral
and psychological defeat.
In that forested country of red earth and lagoons, it is possible to
visit the bunker of the leader of the Tigers, a torture chamber of a
place that sinks three levels into the ground. There, in the fetid air,
infused with the smell of urine and bat excrement, one senses the full
futility and wretchedness of what the rebel movement became in the end.
For the truth is that the Tamil defeat has less to do with the
vanquishing of the L.T.T.E. by the Sri Lankan Army and much more to do
with the self-wounding (“suicidal” would not be too strong a word)
character of the movement itself. The Tigers were for so long the
custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs
was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai
Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide
bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an
expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to
self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a
man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination
for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no
offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation
were seen as betrayal.
One evening, soon after I arrived in Jaffna, the capital of the northern
province, I had dinner at the house of a woman whose sister had been
part of a circle of academics who had published a book in 1990 called
“The Broken Palmyra.” The book was, by no means, a simple polemic
against the Tigers; it was an academic work that, in trying to be
evenhanded, had taken account of both government and L.T.T.E.
atrocities. But this was too treasonous for Mr. Prabhakaran, and my
host’s sister was killed even before the book went to print.
The room that night was filled with people whose lives the tyranny of
the L.T.T.E. had left forever scarred. There was the Muslim woman who,
along with all the other Muslim families of Jaffna, had, one morning in
1990, been summoned to a school compound and given two hours to leave
the city of her birth. They were told to leave behind their valuables
and the deeds to their houses. When they asked why they were being
expelled, they were told that they were lucky not to be killed. Then
they were loaded into lorries and escorted to the border of the
district. (Like most, this woman returned only after the end of the war
in 2009.)
A middle-aged woman, working as a maid in the house, had more recent
traumas. Her son had gone to work with his uncle, a carpenter, in the
northern district of Kilinochchi, which would become the scene of an
infamous battle. When war came, it was Mr. Prabhakaran’s express
strategy to retreat with an enormous civilian population — 300,000
people, some say — and to use them as a human shield against the
advancing army. It was his intention to let so many Tamils die that the
international community (read, the West) would be forced to intervene,
and the Tamils would be granted their homeland.
But here he made a grave mistake: he either overestimated his own
importance; or else, the West’s sense of decency. For the West, occupied
with problems more pressing, let as many Tamils die as had to die for
the war to be won.
This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just
that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement
they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed
able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them
than to anyone else.
When I asked what became of the woman’s son, she replied that he had not
come home. “He’s dead,” my hostess clarified, “but she doesn’t like to
hear that.”
THE north of Sri Lanka today is a spectacle of Sinhalese triumphalism. A
victorious army is rebuilding new roads, grabbing land for itself
(6,000 acres, rumor has it), and displaying the spoils of war before
tourists from the south.
Even when the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa acts
magnanimously toward the Tamil people, by building new infrastructure
projects, for instance, the Tamils seem to feel that their defeat is
being rubbed in their faces. And they are not wrong. It is simply one of
those intractable situations where nothing will feel right. For the
loss the Tamils feel is really the loss of a story. They are now a
people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of
war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the
nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare.
“We lost something,” a Tamil artist in Jaffna, T. Shanaathanan, told me,
“but we do not know what. The war is over, but there is a kind of
psychological warfare now. Before, people looked at us with suspicion,
with the feeling that you’re Tamil, you might be a terrorist. But now
they look at us as if we’re nothing.”
