Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam Research Articles

Diaspora and Conflict: The Case of Tamils in Germany

While most research on the Tamil diaspora and the conflict in Sri Lanka studies the Tamil diaspora in the United Kingdom and Canada, this article focuses on the role of organized Tamils in Germany. Based on an extensive three years of qualitative field study in Germany and Sri Lanka, and using the theoretical framework of Bercovitch's (2007) conflict cycle, I analyzed the engagement of the Tamil diaspora in Sri Lanka in three phases of the conflict: conflict emergence before the war (until 1983), conflict escalation and the war (1983–2009), and post-conflict reconstruction after the war (from 2009). In each of these phases, they took different positions toward the conflict. Before the war, German Tamil organizations were reluctant to get involved in the conflict. During the war, some Tamil diaspora organizations in Germany were involved in the war to a minor degree by their active membership and political participation in larger umbrella organizations initiated by the Tamil militant organization called Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The larger part of the diaspora focused on self-initiated and independent social development projects in Sri Lanka. After the LTTE lost the war, the second generation of Tamils took over leadership positions in the diaspora in Germany and focused on new social and health projects in Sri Lanka.

Protection gaps: child soldier rehabilitation and militarized governance in Sri Lanka

Abstract Child soldier disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) practice has a strong normative commitment to protect children from harm and violence. However, there exist policy and research knowledge gaps in comprehending the translation of such norms in meeting the social and protective needs of children. In Sri Lanka from 2009, 594 former child soldiers from the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE) underwent a national rehabilitation programme. National engagement with international child protection norms could not materialize from a militarized governance framework implemented at the end of the civil war. This article provides a primary source of data based on 45 semi-structured interviews with former boy and girl child soldiers from the LTTE. The Sri Lankan case-study demonstrates that the DDR programme resulted in the re-calibration of social and political control over child and adult participants. Former child soldiers' social and protective needs therefore remain complex and unresolved because of state generated structural violence related to poverty and militarization. The article advances a framework to account for a generational power dynamic of adult-child relations, and the politics of institutionalized protection to account for children's formal rehabilitation and return experiences.

Disrupting the “Tamil diaspora-terrorism” paradigm: the political mobilisation of younger generation Tamils in the London diaspora

ABSTRACT Following three decades of armed conflict, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009. The victory was framed as a successful counterterrorism operation, yet, the GoSL’s military campaign in the Tamil-populated Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka, faces credible allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. As the armed conflict reached its apex, the Tamil diaspora mobilised politically across the globe and the participation of younger generation Tamils (YGTs), namely, those who were born outside their parents’ country of origin, or had settled outside of their ancestral homeland as children, caught the attention of scholars and analysts. Within this small pool of literature, the pervasive and problematic counterterrorism-inspired concept of “radicalisation” surfaced. This article contributes to critical debates on terrorism by analysing the cursory application of a radicalisation framework to the political mobilisation and perspectives of YGTs. Based on critical ethnographic research on YGT activism in the London diaspora, this article provides an alternative to criminalising and marginalising approaches by utilising an emotion-based conceptual framework, derived from social movement studies, to unearth and understand the complex mechanisms, contexts, and processes surrounding their political mobilisation.

Forging alliances: examining civil-military partnerships and their impact on war-time casualty care in Sri Lanka

Over the course of the 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government forces, LTTE’s ‘military’ capacity and strategy evolved from guerrilla-type ambushes using landmines to semi-conventional warfare with light arms and eventually to heavy artillery and improvised explosive devices. This evolution required both military and civil surgeons to enhance their knowledge and skills in managing high-energy war wounds to handle the large number of casualties admitted to health institutions. The Sri Lanka Medical Corps (SLMC) had been meticulously organized into echelons of care with graded capacity and capability to medivac battle injured personnel from point of injury to definitive care facilities. All injured personnel eventually found their way to Colombo Army Hospital and Ragama Rehabilitation Hospital for comprehensive rehabilitation. The civil war in Sri Lanka presented a significant influx of war-related injuries, demanding the creation of a comprehensive system seamlessly integrating both military and civilian elements. With a decade of peace, accompanied by shifts in injury epidemiology, the evolving landscape has mandated the exploration of innovative strategies to sustain and enhance the surgical skill-base for both military and civilian casualty care.

Reimagining Victors' peace in Sri Lanka: Exploring an alternative approach

AbstractThe three‐decade‐long Sri Lankan civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers) came to an end following a major GoSL offensive in May 2009, which resulted in GoSL claiming a “victor's peace.” The war caused the death of around 80,000 to 100,000 people and internally and externally displaced hundreds of thousands. During the three decades, five attempts at formal peace processes were initiated, all of which ended unsuccessfully. This paper identifies the root causes of the Sri Lankan civil war using the social cubism analysis by Byrne and Carter (Peace and Conflict Studies, 1996, 3, 5). It then examines two of the five formal negotiations, namely the Indo‐Lanka Agreement of 1987 and the Wickramasinghe‐LTTE agreement in 2002. Finally, it explores an alternative approach to building peace in Sri Lanka using the multimodal approach by Byrne and Keashly (International Peacekeeping, 2000, 3, 97) utilizing the nested paradigm, and the time dimension of peacebuilding by Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (1997).

A UNHRC Resolution of Questionable Legality on Sri Lanka and its Importance as a Catalyst for Future UN Reform

From 2012-2019, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a series of resolutions on Sri Lanka calling for accountability for war crimes and other crimes purportedly committed during the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This paper challenges the traditional narrative regarding the resolutions – ie that it was a well-intentioned effort by the sponsoring nations, the United States (US) and its allies, to foster peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. Instead, this paper argues that in pursuing the resolutions, the UNHRC has violated the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations (UN Charter) as well as the UNHRC’s founding documents. The author contends that, through these resolutions, the US and its allies have developed a series of innovative tactics to enable them to intervene in the internal affairs of weak nations by using the UNHRC as a conduit. It is in the interest of the friends of the United Nations (UN) and, in general, all persons who value the rule of law in international affairs to know about what has happened so that they can advocate for the relevant reforms in order to prevent the UN from losing its credibility any further.

Understanding Non-Participation in Armed Groups during the Sri Lankan Civil War

Abstract This article addresses the question of why individuals do not join armed groups during civil wars. Based on conflict history interviews with non-combatants and former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), it singles out the most relevant mechanisms that inform respondents’ non-participation choices: lack of opportunity, embeddedness in disapproving networks, resource activation, resilience, and determination. These mechanisms operate at different levels of analysis and therefore highlight the fundamental importance and interplay of (changing) political contexts, (adjusting) quotidian systems of social ties and individual dispositions in shaping non-participation dynamics and in generating spatio-temporal variation in non-involvement patterns. By analyzing non-participation in armed groups, the article contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the multiple choices and roles individuals take and adopt (beyond engaging in militancy) and elucidates the complex relationship between endogenous conflict dynamics and pre-war structures and dispositions underlying micro-mobilization processes.

The Integration of Liberal Democracy in Sri Lanka

The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority Sinhalese population and the minority Tamil population has grown to become a complex and pressing matter within the country. The election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as president in 2005 furthered these tensions as his administration passed legislation suppressing the Tamils, ultimately leading to the development of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an extremist organization representing the Tamils who support independence from the country. Rajapaksa’s pro-Sinhala Buddhist government greatly appealed to the Sinhalese population, but his administration’s lack of action towards domestic and foreign issues resulted in the election of Maithripala Sirisena, a liberal democratic leader who significantly improved the status of Sri Lanka. Nonetheless, with the prevalence of Buddhist nationalism and the recent election of Rajapaksa’s brother, the economic, political, and social environment within the country has again begun to decline. Thus, given Sirisena’s positive contribution to the country’s affairs, this paper attempts to view the impacts of his government on the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, foreign relations, and the possible future repercussions of integrating liberal democracy within the government in order to propose a feasible solution to and assess the likelihood of stabilizing the ongoing ethnic conflict.

The Influence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative of Economic Crisis in Sri Lanka

<p><span lang="ZH-CN">Sri Lanka, as a country in the South Asian region, is bordered by southeastern India and is in the southern Indian Ocean Sea region. This makes Sri Lanka a country with fast trade and maritime traffic, as well as a seaport. Bilateral connections have existed between Sri Lanka and China since the country's inception, and have been enhanced by financial and other aid supplied to the Sri Lankan government throughout the civil war against the separatist organization Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Negotiations between Sri Lanka and China ended in 2017 with a deal for a Chinese-owned business, China Merchant Port Holdings Company Limited, to acquire almost 85% of Hambantota Port shares for 99 years. Because developed countries clearly have a more dominant role in the process of economic globalization, The research method used is normative law research with a case approach. The results show Sri Lanka's dependence on foreign investment to drive a country's economic growth. Therefore, this study aims to determine the legal arrangements governing the effects of the Belt and Road on the economic crisis in Sri Lanka from the perspective of international law and to determine the positive and negative impacts on the planned project</span><span lang="ZH-CN">.</span></p>

WAR AND WOMEN: AN ANALYSIS OF T D RAMAKRISHNAN’S SUGANDI ALIAS ANDAL DEVANAYAKI

War has so far been an institution led by men. Women are not usually assigned the identity of a warrior in the times of war, even though they make significant contributions. They are viewed as powerless when it comes to their roles during wartime. Their participation in the war is never appreciated and is ignored by comparing their service with those of men. Their ability to fight for their nation, to be part of an organization and to be in a political sphere are largely restricted by the patriarchal society. The traditional role of women in war is as a victim. Sexual assaults have become a war tactic and the victim’s often face stigmatisation and exclusion. The Sri Lankan Civil War between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan state in 1983 brought women to the warfront. The dissertation titled War and Women: Analysing T D Ramakrishnan’s Sugandhi Alias Andal Devanayaki focuses on deconstructing the notion of women as a submissive victim of war to that of a strong warrior using T D Ramakrishnan’s political novel Sugandhi Alias Andal Devanayaki. The article gives the historical background of the novel and examines the involvement of women in the LTTE organization. It also points out how rape and suicide bombing was widely employed by men in power to subside women in the society. The resistivity shown by the women towards the atrocities of war gives a conclusion to the whole argument.

War Against the Tamil Tigers: How Did Sri Lanka Win?

The final Eelam War that was fought during 2006 to 2009, the Sri Lankan State for the first time in the history witnessed the crystallisation of the trends in favour of it against the Tamil tigers or LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as Tamil Tigers). With gradual liberation of north and eastern territory first that where under the clutches of LTTE for long and later dislodging Tigers’ command control, in three years’ timeline the Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF) annihilated the Tigers entirely in May 2009. The victory of the SLAF brought three decade long armed conflict to an end that caused the death of over 100,000 and displacement of millions. While noticing the progress of the security forces and the way things unfolded, the pertinent questions that arise are: How did the Mahinda Rajapaksa government won the war? Was there a game plan with the government since the beginning of Eelam War IV? If so, what was that strategy? If not, how did they go ahead? Although there was no explicit publicly pronounced strategy by the Sri Lankan government for dislodging the Tigers but it appears their evolved game plan was broadly centered around ten points. They were: one, winning local constituency support; two, silence critics; three, build strong military, four, entice Karuna, five, shed conventional military methods; six, shrivel Tigers territories; seven, keep in loop but deter India; eight, diplomatic neutralise West; nine, curb Tigers’s international network; and finally, liquidate Tigers’ top leadership. The paper analyzes these aspects in details in this paper. Keywords: Sri Lanka, LTTE, Tamil Tigers, Eelam, Rajapaksa

How to Capture Birds of Freedom: Picturing Tamil Women at War

Abstract This article examines the uses of images of women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during and after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) to explore the contrasting mobilizations of visual representations of Tamil women cadres, focusing on the cultivation and framing of contradictory nationalist imaginaries by competing ethnic and state actors. In northern Sri Lanka, portraits of gun-bearing women fighters were wielded to signal revolutionary possibilities for the future of the Tamil nation-state as well as to inform the political socialization of its hopeful citizens. Meanwhile, images of Tamil women cadres were cast as gendered and ethnicized threats by the Sri Lankan state in what constituted a calculated form of visual ethno-political othering and weaponization. This article reflects on the ways in which such appropriations exacerbated the political precarity of and the denial of victimhood to Tamil women.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

Reviewed by: Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan Lopamudra Basu V. V. GANESHANANTHAN Brotherless Night New York. Random House. 2023. 368 pages. THE SRI LANKAN Civil War, which began with demands of the ethnic Tamil minority to form their separate homeland in the early 1980s after waves of state-sanctioned violence initiated by the Sinhala majority, stretched over three decades, leading to horrific civilian casualties and eventual defeat of the militant Tamil Tigers at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. This traumatic history has been the backdrop of recent Sri Lankan novels in English. What makes V. V. Ganeshananthan's Brotherless Night unique is that it presents this traumatic history from the perspective of women and the myriad ways in which their lives are transformed by institutions of ethnic nationalism. Brotherless Night begins with a prologue set in New York in 2009 but then moves back to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka in the early 1980s, where the narrator, Sashi, is preparing for her entrance exams to medical school in a Tamil upper-middle-class family in which she is the only sister to four brothers. Sashi idolizes her eldest brother, Niranjan, finishing medical school, and wants to emulate him in her choice of profession. Her brother Dayalan and his friend, K, are closer to her in age, and together they frequent the Jaffna Public Library as a place for intensive study. This idyllic world of youthful aspirations supported by a loving family is presented from the beginning as precarious. It receives its first shocking jolt when Sashi and her eldest brother move to Colombo to the house of their grandmother. Soon after Niranjan earns his first salary and becomes engaged to a young doctor, this neighborhood falls victim to anti-Tamil riots, and Sashi's grandmother's beautiful house is burned. Sashi and her grandmother become temporary refugees in a camp, but the greater tragedy is when they discover that Niranjan's car has been burned by a violent mob. Sashi returns to Jaffna to her family to face a completely altered family. Her mother is almost on the brink of a mental breakdown after losing Niranjan, and the younger brothers feel an irrepressible rage at the loss of the eldest brother and an absent father. The family tragedy is compounded by the continuing political disenfranchisement of Tamils, the destruction of Tamil homes and property, including the beloved Jaffna library. It is in the midst of these escalating tensions that two of Sashi's brothers and her friend K leave to join the Tigers, adding yet another layer of loss. In spite of these grave difficulties, the novel charts Sashi's growth into political consciousness. She fulfills her departed brother's dream by eventually matriculating in the medical college at Jaffna. While at medical school, she is recruited by K to provide medical assistance at a clinic run by the Tigers. As Sashi gets more intimately acquainted with the operations of the Tigers, she is increasingly disillusioned by their unethical actions, their hunger for power, killing of members of other Tamil militant groups, and ruthless crushing of all dissent. She realizes that her own brother, Dayalan, is complicit in these atrocities. As the war progresses, Sashi is forced to leave her beloved ancestral home on the orders of Tigers. However, her greatest disillusionment with the Tigers occurs when the Tiger leader recruits K to participate in a highly publicized hunger strike to demand the immediate removal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force that had brokered a fragile peace with the Sri Lankan government. After much internal debate, Sashi agrees to accompany K on the stage. As the fast progresses, Sashi expects the demands to be met or the Tiger leader to call off the fast. Neither happens, and K dies a painful death and becomes a Tamil martyr. Sashi is crippled by this loss as well as the loss of Dayalan but gradually recovers under the mentorship of her anatomy professor, Anjali, who is also secretly documenting the atrocities of the conflict. Through her work in the clinic, Sashi bears witness to sexual violence perpetrated by Indian soldiers as well as killings of Tamil civilians by the Tigers...

Rebel Iron Fist

Conventional and tired characterizations of civil wars invoke images of endless chaos and relentless violence perpetuated by armed groups. In reality, civil wars are defned by unique forms of wartime social and political order, and are anything but chaotic.1 This study focuses on ‘rebel governance’ as a specifc rebel-civilian sociopolitical relationship in which rebel groups participate in the administration of civilian afairs. Using disaggregated data on rebel governance in 122 civil wars, I examine the relationship between the character of rebel governance used by rebel groups and the use of violence against civilians. Contrary to existing characterizations of rebel governance, the results of the large-N analysis show rebel governance, particularly the provision of social services, to be positively related to confict violence. Through further qualitative analysis of governance in the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), I point to the necessary role of violence in the administration of rebel governance and rebel group capacity as two preliminary explanations for the observed relationship.

“Life After Death” Remembering the “Tamil Tigers” in North-East Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were defeated militarily by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces in 2009. The LTTE had established its own governance structures for considerable periods of time in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka. This article shows how the LTTE’s governance and leader Prabhakaran are remembered in those areas and how this creates new symbolic and performative realities through commemorations and reclaimed sites of memory. In addition, it demonstrates that the internet and social media function as important emerging sites of memory.

Transnational Identity in Anil’s Ghost

Anil Tessera who is portrayed as the central character in the novel seems to be like Michael Ondaatje who is a transnational Sri Lankan and Canadian writer. Like Ondaatje, Anil carries dual citizenship. On the one hand, the novel shows how Anil returns to Sri Lanka i.e. her home country in the middle of the civil war when the government armies fight with Tamil Tigers and insurgent Sinhalese. On the other hand, the novel mainly focuses on Anil’s transnational identity. The novel reflects different reasons for Anil to carry transnational identity: the dissolution of boundaries and crossborder activities, her return to the home country, her connection to the home country, her sense of loss and displacement, and the conflict between national and transnational.

GEOGRAPHY AND INSURGENT STRATEGY IN SRI LANKA AND THE PHILIPPINES

The article analyses the influence of geography on the strategy of insurgent groups in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. It uses the conceptualization of geography created by David Galula to examine the influence of 8 distinct categories of geography on the strategy of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The analysis shows that while the geography of Sri Lanka was a driving force that enabled many of the LTTE successes, it had a divisive effect in the Philippines and heavily contributed to the military failures of the Moro independence movement.

Analysing the Sri Lankan civil war through the lens of conflict resolution theory

The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict can be identified as a landmark event in recent history, reflecting a visible social disunion between the majority and minority ethnic communities. Sri Lanka witnessed a major turnover of events, from circumscribed ethnic clashes to a full-scale civil war. The ripple effects of the Sri Lankan civil war crossed borders and drew global attention. The crisis involved successive governments in power in Colombo and Tamil separatist group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), paving way for the deadliest social unrest in Sri Lankan history. To mediate the conflict and bring adversaries to negotiation, neutral third parties were involved. Norway played a significant role as a third-party mediator who applied various means for mitigating Sri Lanka’s conflict. However, the complicated ethno-centric politics of Sri Lanka and their inconsistent outlook towards the peace process restricted the scope for a successful conflict resolution. This paper highlights both conditions for success and failure of conflict resolution, and the use of third-party intervention as a crucial toolkit.This research also points out the equation between mediators and adversaries, and how their behavioural patterns affect conflict resolution processes. The unpredictable nature of adversary behaviour exposes a variety of challenges that the mediators are often unprepared for. The Sri Lankan peace process uncovered the powerlessness of non-coercive third-party mediation. This study holds potential to drive future researchers closer to exploring means to minimize the impacts of such limitations on forthcoming reconciliations.

State of Emergence

During the Sri Lankan Civil War, an entire generation grew up under a condition of violence. I analyze the violence of the Sri Lankan Civil War as a destabilizing as well as productive force, rather than only as the result of pre-existing social conflicts. I argue that the condition of violence during this war lent itself to new iterations of Tamil ethnic identity, focusing on how it created space for the renegotiation of Tamil womanhood. Inspired by Lee Ann Fuji’s conceptualization of ethnicity as “state-sponsored” and performed according to a “script” during periods of ethnic conflict, I argue that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) created a script for Tamil identity that positioned Tamil women as emblematic of the nation. The LTTE did so by portraying Tamil women as victims in need of protection and by arguing that their liberation from patriarchal traditions represented the liberation of Tamils as a whole. I then examine how the LTTE was both an agent and a product of the condition of violence during this period, thereby facilitating both agency for and oppression of women. Finally, I discuss how Tamil women sought their own agency by at times following scripts for the performance of their identities and at times deviating from those scripts.

R2P and Counter-terrorism: Where Sovereignties Collide

Abstract States play the lead role in implementing the norms of the international system. They interpret norms through the lens of their sovereignty, refining and revising them until they are suitable to local interests and context. The complex nature of sovereignty and its diverse manifestations across states means that norms will be interpreted and implemented in different ways. This article argues that R2P and counter-terrorism are complex norm regimes which are susceptible to modification as they are interpreted through diverse conceptions of state sovereignty. Using the cases of China’s response to the Uyghurs and Sri Lanka’s response to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this article shows that the malleable prescriptive norms of R2P and counter-terrorism can be reinterpreted by states in ways contingent on their sovereignty that deeply impact, and may even violate, the original intent of the norm.