Prabakharan himself, as I have said, was a Christian, as were other key members of the Tamil Tigers. Religion was less of a factor in this tragedy than ethnicity; the Tigers, it should never be forgotten, oppressed as many Hindus as they did Buddhists.
The civil war began in earnest on July 23, 1983, when Prabakharan orchestrated and personally led an attack on a Sri Lankan army patrol near Jaffna University that included a land mine explosion and automatic weapon fire. Thirteen of the fifteen Sinhalese soldiers taking part in the patrol were killed. A week of rioting followed in the capital, Colombo, and other Sinhalese regions, in which ethnic Tamils who had lived amicably with their Sinhalese neighbors for decades saw their homes and businesses burned and suffered beatings, gang rapes, and murder, including being burned alive. As would happen in Gujarat in 2002, official involvement was alleged after voting rolls had been used to target Tamil families.
Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi attempted to play the role of peacemaker, even as the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian security bureaucracy—the spy service known as RAW—established training camps for militant Tamil youths to fight the Sinhalese. In the late 1980s the Indian military was dispatched to Sri Lanka as peacekeepers but ended up fighting the Tamil Tigers, the very group it originally had helped train. The Indians ultimately withdrew from the island in utter failure. In 1991 a female Tiger suicide bomber assassinated Indira Gandhi’s son Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
For more than a quarter century since 1983, during a civil war that killed more than seventy thousand people, Sri Lanka occupied a pathetic position in the news: an ongoing tragedy of immense humanitarian proportions that, nevertheless, could be forever relegated to the inside pages. In the United States, especially, it seemed that the worse the war got, the less anyone knew about it, or cared even, for at the time few thought about the island as strategic.
Throughout the course of the war Prabakharan turned the Tamil Tigers into a quasi-cult terrorist group in which he was venerated as a demigod. “To comprehend LTTE,” writes the late American scholar Michael Radu, “imagine Jim Jones’ Temple cult of Guyana in possession of a ‘navy’ and ‘air force,’ as well as (at its height) some 20,000 fanatical and armed zombie followers.”14 Indeed, Prabakharan’s Tigers comprised the world’s first guerrilla insurgency with its own air force (Czech-made Zlin Z 143s) and, more important, its navy (explosive-packed fishing trawlers and a small submarine force). He imposed a blood tax on the population under his control in the north and east, with each family having to provide a son to the Tigers. There was a wing of the organization, the Black Tigers, dedicated to murder and assassinations. Until the early 1990s the Tigers led the world in suicide bombing, a tactic that, to a large extent, they had pioneered. The Tigers used many tens of thousands of civilians as human shields and children as porters on the battlefield.15 The very history of the Tamil Tigers shows that perverse violence, the embedding of warriors amid large numbers of civilians, and the rampant use of suicide bombing are not crimes specific to Muslims or to the Arab-Persian world.
The Tigers also symbolized another deeply troubling phenomena: the idea of a seemingly permanent insurgency and the consequent power of statelessness. In the early twenty-first century, mass communications and weapons technology have conspired to embolden groups that have no formal representation at the United Nations, few institutions, and, in many cases, little or no secure territory. Precisely because they do not have to govern, these groups are spared the need for compromise and can subsist on moral abstractions and absolutes.16 The near permanence and lethality of such groups as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Tamil Tigers have stemmed directly from their lack of official responsibilities of sovereignty. Just as battling al-Qaeda somewhat dehumanized the United States government—to judge from the revelations about torture—battling the Tamil Tigers did worse to the Sri Lankan authorities, whose institutions of democratic governance are far weaker than those of America.
In late 2008 the Sri Lankan army’s most professionally trained elements, numbering some 50,000, began a methodical offensive in the north and west of the country, after defections had liberated the east from Tiger control. From an area of seven thousand square miles, the Tiger-held territory fell to some thirty square miles, surrounded on land and sea by the Sri Lankan military. Between the two armies were as many as 200,000 Tamil civilians that, by some accounts, the Tigers were using as human shields. The Tigers thus carried to an exponential extreme the technique of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Hamas to hide amid noncombatants. The Sinhalese government forces did not flinch at this moral predicament, however. With mortars and multi-barreled rocket launchers they shelled and then starved civilians even as they mopped up further territory. Of the 70,000 people killed in the war since 1983, 10 percent, mainly civilians, were reportedly killed in the last few months of fighting in 2009.17 Moreover, the government’s gradual victory over the Tamil Tigers, among the post-World War II era’s most ruthless and bloodthirsty organizations, while a good in and of itself, would lead only to a more severe coarsening of politics in Colombo. Not only did Tamil civilians (themselves opposed to the Tigers) have their rights violently abused by the government, but even independent-minded Sinhalese, journalists especially, were hunted down and killed as well.
“Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty,” wrote journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga in a self-penned obituary that anticipated his own assassination in early 2009.18 Sources told me that he had been killed by having iron rods with sharp points driven through his skull. “If Lasantha, with all of his connections, could be killed in broad daylight, then they could do this to anybody,” one local journalist told me. This journalist had stories about reporters being beaten black and blue; the atmosphere in Colombo was one of extreme self-censorship—“the worst and most insidious kind.” Another journalist told me: “Lasantha’s fate really scarred us. People like me decided it was more important to stay alive than to report the news.” Few journalists I met were willing to cross the line and publicly attack the government. The Americans had struggled with how to deal with an independent world media while conducting a counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Sri Lankan government knew no such frustrations in its path to victory.
Sri Lanka, when I visited it toward the start of the southwest monsoon in the spring of 2009, was a place on the brink of a great victory against the semi-conventional elements of the fascist Tamil Tigers who were down to their last square mile or two of territory in the Mullaitivu district of the northeast, with a few tens of thousands of civilians packed inside as hostages. But Sri Lanka was also a place in the grip of fear. The media, usually the watchdogs of free societies, had been psychologically separated from the public by the government, whose own human rights abuses were now increasingly tolerated by the population as long as victory on the battlefield was imminent. The civilizational divide between Buddhist and Hindu on this island, at the meeting point of the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, had never been sharper, even as it was not originally a religious dispute.
“Since the Rajapaksas assumed power in 2005, abductions and disappearances have gone through the roof,” a foreign expert told me. He was referring to the three Sinhalese brothers who ruled the country during my 2009 visit: the elected president, Mahinda Rajapaksa; the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa; and the president’s most trusted advisor, Basil Rajapaksa. Together they marked a decisive break from previous Sri Lankan governments. Whereas the governments of the Senanayake and Bandaranaike family dynasties hailed from the Colombo-centric elite, the Rajapaksas were more representative of the rural, somewhat xenophobic, semi-illiterate, and collectivist part of the Sinhalese Buddhist population. There were both rumors and credible reports from foreign embassies of deep connections to the underworld, and to narcotics and human trafficking. The brothers’ consolidation of power represented the democratic equivalent of a colonels’ coup.
Whereas in 2003
, aside from the war itself, there had been relatively few human rights problems, by 2009 there were roughly a thousand extra-judicial killings and disappearances annually. These murders and abductions, mainly of young Tamils, but also of journalists, lawyers, and other members of the Colombo elite, were being conducted by shadowy underworld groups controlled by military intelligence, which, in turn, reported to the top leaders of government.
Then there were the more celebrated cases such as the sixteen ethnic Tamil and one Muslim aid workers employed by a French nongovernmental organization, who in 2006 were each shot through the back of the head execution style near the port of Trincomalee in the east. And at a plethora of military and police roadblocks throughout downtown Colombo and the country, young Tamils were being abducted and dispatched to overcrowded internment camps. Because of the unsophisticated backgrounds of members of the regime, the amoral aid from China, and the government’s illicit activities combined with the very brutality of its military and security operations, diplomats and human rights workers feared that the pressure of the war had, finally, turned it into the same category of regime as those in Burma and Zimbabwe, with disappearances reminiscent of the Argentina of the 1970s and early 1980s, just as the government was about to achieve an epochal victory. The Rajapaksa brothers, with the full backing of the Sinhalese clergy and population, now constituted something out of the Sinhalese past: a royal and ethnically rooted dynasty, superficially like the Buddhist kingdoms of Kandy of old, dedicated to ethno-national survival, unaccountable to the cabinet and parliament. Democracy had yielded up a family business. Colorful banners were everywhere, even as war heroes in the great struggle against the Tamil Tigers were proclaimed and celebrated.
Except that what the Rajapaksas had wrought was a perversion of the old Buddhist Kandyan kingdom, which, rather than purely Buddhist, was really syncretic. Beleaguered by Portuguese, Dutch, and British attempts to conquer it, Kandy, defended by its mountainous forests in the center of the island, held on as independent until 1815, when finally taken by the British. The ruling dynasty, the Nayakkars, were South Indian and Hindu in origin, even as they patronized Theravada Buddhism, while seeking Hindu brides for their Buddhist male heirs. By ending this dynasty and thus breaking the link between Buddhism and Hinduism, the British helped set the stage for the ethnic polarization of politics in the postcolonial era. The truth was that Theravada Buddhism, so concentrated on ethics and the release from worldly existence, was too austere for the Ceylonese peasantry, and thus required the Hindu pantheon to provide it with the necessary color and magic. A few miles from Kandy, deep in the forest amid shimmering fields of tea, I saw statues of the Buddha and of Hindu gods under the same roofs, together in their dusky magnificence: in dark stone vestibules at the medieval temples of Gadaladeniya, Lankatilaka, and Embeka.
At the temple of Embeka, I lifted aside a Hindu tapestry to behold the Buddha, which the tapestry had been guarding. At Lankatilaka, I saw the Buddha surrounded on all four sides by devales (prayer complexes) devoted to the deities Upulvan, Saman, Vibhishana, and Skanda—of mixed Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian origin. At the Buddhist shrine of Gadaladeniya, I saw stone carvings based on the style of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The torrential rain of the southwest monsoon invigorated the spiritual and artistic pageant, shrieking and clapping against the leaves as sheets of mist moved across the bosky realm. This was the real legacy of Sri Lanka, I thought, to which primarily the Tamil Tigers, and secondarily the Rajapaksas, had done violence.
One diplomat told me that the West should simply ostracize the Rajapaksa regime and not worry about it becoming a linchpin of Chinese great-power strategy. As he saw it, the hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese money invested in the U.S. economy was more central to American interests than one more Chinese-built port in the Indian Ocean which, in any case, was of greater concern to the Indian and Japanese navies than to America’s. Furthermore, Sri Lanka’s Burma-trending regime was simply too corrupt and too incompetent in other spheres to last, despite its battlefield successes.
For their part, the Rajapaksas were dismissive toward the West and the United States, and replete with vindicated righteousness. After all, let us consider the following history:
In 2006, at a time when the new Rajapaksa government withdrew from a meaningless ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers (both sides were still shooting at each other), the Tigers controlled one third of Sri Lanka. The United States had been, up until then, increasing its support for the government as part of a post-9/11 strategy whereby the Tamil Tigers were considered a terrorist organization in a similar category as al-Qaeda. But Mahinda Rajapaksa had been elected to finally win the war, and in 2006 he had a stroke of luck: the Tiger-held east of the country folded up because of the defection of a key ally of Prabakharan—Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, known by the nom de guerre Colonel Karuna Amman. Now was the time to push for final victory. Yet, finishing the war meant officially breaking the ceasefire, which, together with Colombo’s increasing human rights violations under Rajapaksa, ended American military assistance. Thus, there were no more deliveries of spare parts for Sri Lanka’s fire-fighting radar, or for its Huey helicopters and C-130s. The Sri Lankan navy had been especially pleased with its maritime domain awareness radar, but the Americans soon dropped all service and parts for it. The navy had relied on its 30mm Bushmaster cannons from the U.S. as a standoff capability against Tiger suicide craft, but the salt water was hard on the equipment and, again, no more parts were forthcoming. The Sri Lankans felt that the Americans were slamming the door in their face just as they were dealing efficiently with a nihilistic insurgency. “Right at their moment of glory they’re getting their ankles bit by the ‘international community,’ ” was how one diplomat in Colombo described it.
Meanwhile, sensing an opportunity, China began supplying Sri Lanka with more and more arms and ammunition. Chinese fire-fighting radar was bad compared to that of the U.S., but at least parts were available. Military aid from Beijing was soon top to bottom: the assault rifles in evidence at military roadblocks were Chinese T-56 knockoffs of Russian AK-47s. China also had Sri Lanka’s back at the U.N. Security Council whenever the Western powers wanted to condemn it. China was providing slots for Sri Lankan officers at its war and staff colleges. As in Uzbekistan and Nepal, where the curtailment of political freedoms had caused the West to downsize its relationships, the Chinese were seriously upgrading theirs.
Other military and economic aid was coming from Pakistan, Iran, former Soviet states, Libya, and Israel even, which was supplying the Sri Lankan navy with Dvora patrol boats. Buoyed by the non-Western half of the world that was less obsessed with human rights concerns, military progress against the Tamil Tigers accelerated in 2008 as the army stood up new divisions and special operations task forces. Safe in the knowledge of China’s firm backing, the Sri Lankan military moved forward methodically and patiently, not driven by any political timetable, devolving power to its officers in the field. Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan navy sank Tamil Tiger mother ships, or floating warehouses, in the Indian Ocean to the southeast. It was an impressive show, except for the utter lack of a hearts-and-minds element toward ethnic Tamils by an army recruited from the poorest inland villages of the Sinhalese heartland. Indeed, there was little thought of building schools or digging water wells for the Tamils. It was total war with civilians caught in the middle as hostages in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Victory and the deaths of more than a thousand Sinhalese troops in the fighting of 2008 and 2009 put the government in no mood to compromise. Defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa made official visits to China, Russia, and Israel. With a loan from Libya, oil from Iran, and the Chinese building and financing the state-of-the-art seaport at Hambantota, the West simply had less and less leverage.
Partly because of Chinese strategic concerns, Sri Lanka was able to win a war while rejecting the West. And though the defeat of a group like the Tamil Tigers is certainly somet
hing to be welcomed, it was achieved in a manner that demonstrates how the rise of China in Asia and Africa carries with it troubling repercussions for the states and regimes affected. The decline of the West in maritime Asia, while a wholly natural and in some sense benign occurrence in the wider span of history—given the trauma caused since da Gama’s voyage—will not be altogether beneficial. As we have seen, Chinese military aid does not come with lectures about human rights the way the West’s does. China does not interfere in another state’s internal politics and does not tolerate interference in its own. Chinese foreign policy, without being in any way extreme or bellicose, nevertheless represents the bleakest form of realism. It indicates a new bipolarity in the world: between those states that employ human rights as part of their policy calculations and those that do not.
Yet, despite being crucial to Sri Lanka’s destruction of the Tamil Tigers, China cannot be wholly triumphant here for the simple reason that political geography locates Sri Lanka within the shadow of India. Yes, there was the disastrous 1987 intervention of the Indian military, in which India essentially invaded Sri Lanka in order to defend ethnic Tamils and ended up fighting the Tamil Tigers, who would not tolerate any power other than their own. Nevertheless, today India enjoys better relations with Sri Lanka than it does with other large and immediate neighbors such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.* Owing to a 1998 free trade agreement, Sri Lankan trade with India is substantial: India dominates imports to Sri Lanka and is Sri Lanka’s third largest export market.† India’s natural sway over Sri Lanka is so explicit that at the time of independence, Sri Lanka signed a defense pact with Great Britain out of fear of an Indian invasion (as would happen in the cases of Hyderabad and Goa on the Indian mainland). As we have seen, India may be bedeviled by semi-failed states on its borders, but at the same time those states, as irascible as they can be, must make their own geopolitical calculations in reference to India. For example, Pakistan’s support of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan is fully explained by its desire to erect an Islamistan of sorts deep into Central Asia with which to confront India. Thus, Sri Lanka’s new pro-Chinese tilt is, at the end of the day, only relative; for especially as the Indian-Chinese maritime rivalry heats up Sri Lanka will have to maneuver delicately between the two giants in order to achieve a kind of functional nonalignment. Sri Lanka, with its growing and increasingly influential Muslim minority, its political war debt to China, and its proximity to India, is the ultimate register of geopolitical trends in the Indian Ocean region.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 25
