Prepaid SIM cards, single satellite signals for communication devices Avail secure communication Defeat government communication intercepts
Discursive writing, Slidex chart for coding communications Avail secure communication Defeat government counterintelligence
1 Brian Jackson, Breaching the Fortress Wall: Understanding Terrorist Efforts to Overcome Defensive Technologies, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2007, p.80.
Table 3.2
Major LTTE Assassinations NameTitleDate
General Ranjan Wileratne Minister of Defense March 1991
Denzil Kobbekaduwa Army general August 1992
Wijaya Wimlaratna Army general August 1992
Lakshman Wijeratna Army general August 1992
Clancy Fernando Navy commander November 1992
Lalith Athulathmudali Former national security minister April 1993
The most important of the seven commands is the military wing, which was structured very close to the organization of a conventional professional army. Within the military wing were the Sea Tigers (navy), Black Tigers (suicide commando unit), and an elite intelligence outfit.69 A rudimentary air capability existed for a short time as well. Beneath the military wing was the political wing, led by Tamil Chelvam and Anton Balasingham. The Sea Tigers were divided into two separate wings, one for amphibious operations and another for merchant marine type duties. This branch of the Tigers maintained an extensive organizational structure, including a substantial female naval unit. The Sea Tigers had their own naval intelligence cell and the group also worked closely with the Black Tigers. The Black Tigers were suicide commandos selected from the most elite LTTE recruits. This wing of the organization was “fully integrated” into the LTTE’s land and sea operations.
Sanctuary, Safe Haven, and Operational Space
Sanctuary proved indispensable to the Tigers for four principal reasons. First, the Tamil diaspora provided the LTTE with virtually a global sanctuary. Second, the physical sanctuary maintained in Sri Lanka’s Northeast, particularly Jaffna, allowed the insurgents to train without fear of COIN force infiltration. For years, a sympathetic Tamil population and government in Tamil Nadu, India (located a mere 28 kilometers across the Palk Strait and home to 60 million ethnic Tamils) acquiesced to the LTTE’s need for a physical foreign safe haven. The Tamil Nadu sanctuary was facilitated by the relationship between Prabhakaran and P.Nedumaran, a senior politician in India. Tamil Nadu demonstrates that for sanctuary to be valuable, it need not be geographically contiguous. Third, sanctuary became a de facto headquarters for the LTTE and a place where the group established a system of governance to rival that of the Sri Lankan state. It also prolonged the duration of the conflict because it allowed insurgents to evade arrest and offered the Tigers a secure area to rest, recuperate, replenish, and rearm.
For those insurgents who needed a hiatus from fighting in Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu was an ideal destination, especially for fighters whose absence from the conflict would only be temporary. As early as the 1970s, Tamil militants, including Prabakaran, evaded arrest for crimes by fleeing to Tamil Nadu.70 The LTTE purchased safe houses and communication centers in Tamil Nadu where militants on the lam and attempting to evade capture could hide, without removing themselves too acutely from the battlefield. Besides safe houses, the insurgents used factories to manufacture uniforms and weapons.71 There were even hospitals run by the insurgents that were used to treat wounded fighters. As they solidified control over the northern and eastern Tamil-dominated provinces of Sri Lanka, the LTTE used these areas to build an extensive network of bases and defensive fortifications.72 The group’s unofficial headquarters was located in the town of Kilinochchi in Northern Province, located approximately 100 km southeast of Jaffna. By establishing a de facto shadow government in the north and east of the country, the LTTE gained legitimacy at the expense of the Sri Lankan state.
In the early years of the Tamil insurgency, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi lacked the political clout to convince Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M. G. Ramachandran, to close down the LTTE training camps that operated free from scrutiny. Ramachandran possessed no great affinity for the insurgents, but he needed to be seen as sympathetic toward a group that could claim widespread popular support in the community and had already been embraced by Ramachandran’s political rival, Muthuvel Karunanidhi.73 Blowback from Indira Gandhi’s tacit support of the movement would come full circle over a decade later, when a Black Tiger attack killed her son Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister. In 1995, feeling pressure, the LTTE established a permanent base in Twante, an island located off of the coast of Myanmar.74 The Sri Lankan government pressured Myanmar’s military junta to dismantle the Tigers’ base, so in January 1996 the LTTE vacated Twante and developed a base on an island located off of Phuket, Thailand.
Training
By mid-1987, approximately 20,000 Tamil militants had been trained in India, which included camps in Tamil Nadu, as well as specialized training which occurred in New Delhi, Bombay, and Vishakhapatnam.75 In addition to these locations the Tigers received training in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka and established camps in Salem and Madurai.76 For the majority of the conflict, the most promising insurgents were sent for training outside of Sri Lanka’s borders, while the rest were trained in camps located in the forested areas of the north.77
The average training cycle for an LTTE recruit lasted approximately four months. Those insurgents who displayed skill or advanced military acumen were handpicked to attend specialized training courses to prepare for task-specific roles in the group’s intelligence, communication, explosives, or naval components.78 In 1994, the LTTE implemented a training school designed specifically for “officers,” which included a rigorous curriculum that incorporated lessons learned from previous battles against the COIN forces. In the realm of intelligence, the LTTE trained specialized members for each phase of the intelligence cycle, including a cadre of insurgents whose only job was the collection and analysis of long-term intelligence on both potential and real targets.79
Tamil Nadu was critical to the LTTE’s longevity and the group even managed to train and operate there while fighting the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s, primarily due to a combination of popular support among the locals, government apathy, and “cynical bureaucratic ploys of the intelligence agencies.”80 The LTTE’s tentacles extended deep into Tamil Nadu. They constructed a dense network in the Thanjavur district between Nagapattinam and Adiramapattinam, Vedaranyam, and Point Calimere. The local administration was co-opted or subverted, among them police and politicians. Fishermen, farmers, and smugglers served as the manpower for an ever-growing sanctuary.
A highly sympathetic population was a contributing factor to the LTTE’s ability to achieve so much success in using Tamil Nadu and other Indian areas as sanctuary, although the Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka proper was unmatched in value. The Tigers so thoroughly controlled the Northeast of the country at various points throughout the conflict that they were able to build mock ups of the actual venues they planned to attack. These real-life models were constructed by the map and models department within the group.81 Some of the more devastating attacks ever conducted by the group—international airport, World Trade Center, Central Bank—resulted from this type of training.82
Organizational Capabilities
Since the ultimate prize for insurgents is control of the state, constructing a shadow government is a necessary prerequisite. The LTTE’s sanctuary afforded the Tigers with the opportunity to build a parallel system of government in the areas under their control. In many parts of the north and east, this included courts of law, municipal administration, a police force, a customs service, a tax and legislation code, a banking system, and a television and radio network.83 During long stretches of the conflict, traveling from government-controlled areas to Tiger redoubts required passing through well-guarded border control posts that include identification checks, goods inspection, and the coll
ection of customs fees.84
LTTE political liaisons met with Tamil Nadu politicians in Chennai, the capital, but eleven other districts served as part of an extensive military infrastructure, each connected by a high-tech wireless network. The districts were the center of the LTTE’s war supplies and are listed in no specific order with the military specialty in parentheses: Dharmapuri (procurement of explosives), Coimbatore (arms and ammunition manufacturing), Salem (explosives manufacturing), Periya (Erode) (military clothing manufacturing), Vedaraniym (coastal area from where supplies were dispatched), Madurai (transit area), Thanjavur (communications center), Nagapattinam (landing area for supplies from ships), Rameswaram (refugee reception and recruitment), Tiruchirapalli (treatment of wounded insurgents), and Tuticorin (trade in gold, silver, narcotics, and other goods).85
Leadership
Velupillai Prabhakaran was born in the northern coastal town of Valvettithurai on the Jaffna Peninsula in 1954 and grew up amidst poverty, violence, and oppression, during a time when Sri Lankan Tamils struggled for equal status with the Sinhalese. He was born into the Karaiyar caste, a relatively low-ranking rung of Sri Lankan society. The most common profession for men from Prabhakaran’s village was to become a maritime smuggler. From the little that is known about the LTTE’s reclusive leader, he was married to Mathivathani Erambu and had two children, a daughter Dwaraka and a son Charles Anthony, named after one of the Tigers’ most famous fighters, Charles Lucas Anthony, who was killed in the early 1980s. Physically, he was short and portly, which sometimes masked the steely determination hidden beneath an otherwise unassuming veneer of calm and quiet focus.
Within the LTTE, Prabhakaran remained a Tamil nationalist first and foremost. Similar to other well-known insurgent commanders, he was known to live a monastic lifestyle and mostly eschewed material comforts. Gordon Weiss characterizes Prabhakaran, and similar insurgent leaders, by describing them in the following manner: “unlike ordinary mortals, they turn their backs on the ordinary relationships, quotidian fears and communal safety nets that nurture and restrain others.”86
Two interesting aspects of Prabhakaran’s leadership were the cult of personality that formed around the leader and his constant paranoia throughout his tenure as LTTE leader. Most accounts of Prabhakaran make reference to his status as a hero who was afforded a godlike worship by LTTE cadres and elements of the Tamil population. Followers swore an oath of loyalty to Prabhakaran himself, and referred to him strictly as “Leader,” because his actual name was known to inspire so much awe.87 In speeches, his language was both inspirational and visionary, and often evoked the nationalistic pride held by many of his followers. As related by Post, a Jaffna psychiatrist described the impact of Prabhakaran’s leadership, noting that many LTTE members “regard Prabhakaran as higher than their own god,” and many would make pilgrimages to his former home as something akin to a spiritual ritual.88 Pictures of Prabhakaran adorned homes and businesses throughout rebel-held areas, yet “According to scores of accounts from defectors and others who escaped Tiger tyranny, many of his [Prabhakaran] own lieutenants were murdered; Tamils who criticized him, even mildly or in jest, were banished to dungeons, starved, and hauled out periodically for battering by their guards.”89
Ideology
The Tamil Tigers are often classified as an ethno-nationalist terrorist group.90 Translated loosely, this means the LTTE was comprised of ethnic Tamils and sought freedom for a clearly defined national territory (Eelam). Still, because the Tigers’ core group was initially comprised of students living abroad, there was also the requisite Marxist influence of stereotypical “coffee house revolutionaries.”91 Among Tamil insurgent groups, the Tamil Tigers were not unique in their taste for left wing politics. Both the PLOTE and the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization were Marxist groups, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) were Maoists.92
Insurgent political thought, however nascent, requires a modicum of organization. So when violence broke out in 1983, the ideologically-inclined Tamil groups were best placed to protect Tamil neighborhoods. With this protection came a platform, which the various groups used to spread their ideologies. After the 1983 riots, non-Marxist groups were engulfed by the Marxist groups through both persuasion and coercion.93 Though at first the LTTE adopted Marxism as an ideology of convenience, the intensity of the group’s radical leftist beliefs grew more fervent over time.94 Balasingham, the LTTE’s aforementioned theoretician, explained the LTTE’s ideology as follows: “our total strategy integrates both the national struggle and class struggle, interlinks both nationalism and socialism into a revolutionary project aimed at liberating our people both from national oppression and from the exploitation of man by man.”95
The LTTE fought for a united Tamil Eelam homeland in Northeast Sri Lanka. Like the PIRA, independence was considered the ultimate goal and objective of the organization. Some members figured that if Marxism could shepherd the process toward this end, then so be it. Most foot soldiers fought for justice and the opportunity to redress grievances, while the leadership spoke of leaving behind the chains imposed by the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism.96
Under the leadership of R. N. Dixit, the Indian High Commission in Colombo devoted significant resources to determine which groups were “really Marxist” and which groups were frauds. But Dixit failed to understand the motivation of the insurgents, Marxist or otherwise. That the insurgents considered themselves Marxist, used Marxist models in their strategic analysis and decision-making, tactically employed classic Marxist clandestine techniques and couched their language in Marxist phraseology was most important.97
Human Resources and Recruitment
Both insurgent theorists and social movement scholars highlight the importance of the links between grievances and the provision of popular support. The “Sinhala Only” Act of 1956 was the opening salvo in the area of language, making Sinhalese the sole official language of the country. Affirmative action policies were then instituted in the country’s universities, making it more difficult for Tamils to receive a quality education. At a certain point in the conflict, revenge and the themes of repression and occupation became the overarching concerns of the Tamils. Sinhala nationalism was on the rise and exploded with the anti-Tamil pogroms of July 1983. The “Black July” riots of 1983 resulted in the deaths of between 1,000 and 3,000 Tamils with thousands more wounded and raped. Countless others had their homes and shops burned to the ground.98 In some areas, civilians were pulled from their homes by Sinhala mobs who carried voter registration lists to determine which families were Tamil.99 “Black July” was a watershed event in the conflict and one which caused the Tamil population to throw its support behind those who were willing and able to protect those that remained (hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled abroad, while an additional 100,000 settled in refugee camps) and transformed Tamil militancy into “an engine of popular resentment.”100
By the 1990s, the LTTE relied more on violent and coercive methods to generate and maintain popular support than it had at any point previously in the conflict. The group employed what Jannie Lilja terms territorial entrapment and social entrapment to induce cooperation and attitudinal support from its constituency.101 Social and cultural obligations to support the Tigers were reinforced by a mixture of propaganda speeches and restrictions on the movement of Tamils. The recruitment patterns of fighters into the organization mirrored the evolution of the popular support of the Tamil population. The LTTE’s command and control was vertically structured, with the Central Governing Committee at the top of the organization. The hierarchical structure of the group included a bell-shaped middle stratum of leaders built into the organization to provide the LTTE with a measure of redundancy and defend against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces’ (SLAF) strategy of targeting Prabhakaran with a decapitation strike.102
The LTTE’s entire movement counted approximately 15,000 cadres, to which an additional 3,000 to 4,000 personnel served with the Sea Tigers.103 The organizational
structure was “two-tiered,” geographically structured, and composed of seven regular commands each led by a district commander. Prabhakaran oversaw the seven district commanders and chaired the Central Governing Committee, charged with oversight for the military and political tiers of the organization. Insurgents within the seven commands were members of either a political wing or a combat group and further divided into specialized subdivisions.104 The LTTE operated as a meritocracy—it promoted insurgents and afforded them more responsibility with performance, rather than seniority. Upon promotion, the fighter received increased command responsibilities.105
Media, PR, Propaganda, and Publicity
Among insurgent groups, the LTTE was one of the first groups to realize the importance of a robust public relations and propaganda machine in winning the battle for hearts and minds and operated a transnational network with offices located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia.106 In Toronto, the group operated four 24-hour radio stations, 10 weekly newspapers and Tamil language television programs.107 But of all its overseas bases, none was more integral to success than the LTTE’s British headquarters. The LTTE International Secretariat has operated continuously in London since 1984.108
The bulk of the group’s efforts directed its message to various segments of the Tamil diaspora (those that would contribute money to the group) and politicians and human-rights activists who might be able to influence the situation from a diplomatic or political perspective. The primary messages put forth by the LTTE were the following: Tamils are the innocent victims of a Sinhalese orchestrated campaign of genocide and annihilation; Sri Lankan Tamils (who account for a mere 12.5 percent of the population) have been subjected to severe discrimination and both overwhelming and disproportionate military oppression; and due to the long history of discrimination and oppression, Tamils and Sinhalese can never coexist peacefully in a single state.109
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