Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam Research Articles

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.

Spatiotemporal Variation in Armed Group Recruitment Among Former Members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam1

Drawing from life history accounts of 30 former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), this study analyses spatiotemporal variation in recruitment patterns. It demonstrates how shifts in the compositions of territorial control result in and intersect with changes in the recruitment strategies employed by the LTTE and the levels and forms of indiscriminate violence that respondents were exposed to. The results generate three space and time‐specific recruitment trajectories that my interviewees followed to join the LTTE: political resentment, personal victimization, and military socialization. Paying attention to spatiotemporal shifts in recruitment patterns is imperative to better capture the differing recruitment logics operating at different stages of an armed conflict, as well as to improve scholarly understanding of why and how armed groups change their recruitment tactics.

Degrees of peace: universities and embodied experiences of conflict in post-war Sri Lanka

This paper examines the impacts of conflicts on universities and considers the corresponding implications for their ability to contribute to post-war recovery. Pushing against the methodological individualism associated with notions of human capital loss, I concentrate on the interaction between conflict and the social constitution of universities. I argue that the ways in which universities as social groups embody experiences of conflict can powerfully influence how they operate and how they interact with post-war peacebuilding and development. To operationalise the framing of universities as social groups, I introduce the concept of a university substrate as a means of thinking through the evolving constitution of universities. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews with university actors in Jaffna and elsewhere in Sri Lanka, I explore the case of the University of Jaffna and how it has been shaped by conflict. I outline the moulding of its social constitution by waves of departure during the conflict and by the environment created by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the main non-state actor in the war. This case study illustrates how the substrate lens can capture dynamics that are missed by human capital approaches and can help better explain the legacies of conflict for universities.

Politics of Language and Education: An evaluation of Tamil Separatism in the Sri Lankan civil war

Sri Lanka, at present, is haunted by memories and experiences of the protracted ethnic conflict which lasted for nearly three decades due extremities of extrajudicial and rampant killings, suicide bombing, and human rights violation. The war was mainly fought between the Liberation of Tamil Tiger (LTTE) and Sinhalese dominated state government. At the primary level, the conflict is viewed as the manifestation of ancient ethnic rivalry between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority. However, the causes of this conflict are far more complex than ethnic differences among the communities and stem largely from the pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence history of the country. Albeit many circumstances and situations have contributed to Tamil separatism and consequent insurgency but this paper is centred on the role of language politics and education in the conflict. The politicization of the issue of official language during the various phases of the war turned out to be the most powerful manifestation of the Sinhala –Tamil conflict, since language is a crucial factor in the maintenance and preservation of the cultural and ethnic identity, here the language became the exclusive marker of the ethnographic boundary between them. The language issue later manifested in the form of discrimination against Tamils in education. The indiscriminate practices after 1972, especially standardization policy and quota system for admission into universities based on language and pro-sinhala policies in the government sector paved the way for Tamil demand for a separate traditional homeland for Tamils. Hence this paper will analyse language politics and policies -Sinhala only act, and policies standardization and quota to understand the Tamil separatism during Sri Lankan civil war

Some Critical Notes on Sri Lankan Muslim Religious Identity Formation, Conservatism, and Violent Extremism

A new wave of attacks by Sinhala-Buddhist extremist elements against the Muslim community in Sri Lanka started following the brutal end of the ethnic civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhala-Buddhist-dominated Sri Lanka security forces in 2009. Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in 2019 by some Muslims polarized Sri Lanka and contributed to the compromise of the country’s security. Sri Lankan Muslims often claim they are a peaceful community and thus have no serious interests in violent mobilization. But the evidence would basically contradict Muslims’ claim of a peace-loving community. The Easter Sunday terrorist attacks did not take place in any vacuum. This paper will situate some key developments in the violent mobilization of Sri Lanka during the war against the LTTE. The primary goal of such an attempt is to read the growing religious conservative and violent trends among Muslims between 1977 and 2009. In understanding the growing religious conservative trends, an understanding is attempted to situate a later propensity for violence within the community that would manifest itself with the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. Interviews were conducted with members of the Islamic Dawah organizations and Muslim youth who were formerly associated with violent groups in the Eastern Province to understand the ground reality. The period of 1977–2009 is important as the rise of religious conservatist influences in Sri Lanka mirrors the global transnational influences of Iran and Middle East Petro Dollars, especially Saudi Arabia. The article draws mainly on secondary sources. But to gain a better understanding of the ground reality, we spoke to a few Eastern Muslims between July 2016 and September 2021 at regular intervals.

The End Days of the Fourth Eelam War: Sri Lanka's Denialist Challenge to the Laws of War

AbstractDuring the final months of Sri Lanka's 2006–2009 civil war, Sri Lankan armed forces engaged in a disproportionate and indiscriminate shelling campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which culminated in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Conventional wisdom suggests that Sri Lanka undermined international humanitarian law (IHL). Significantly, however, the Sri Lankan government did not directly challenge such law or attempt to justify its departure from it. Rather, it invented a new set of facts about its conduct to sidestep its legal obligations. Though indirect, this challenge was no less significant than had Sri Lanka explicitly rejected those obligations. Drawing on Clark et al.'s concept of denialism, this article details the nature of Sri Lanka's challenge to the standing of IHL. At the core of its denialist move, Sri Lanka maintained that while the LTTE was using civilians as human shields, government forces were adhering to a zero civilian casualty approach. With this claim, Sri Lanka absolved itself of any responsibility for the toll inflicted on civilians and sealed its conduct off from the ambit of IHL. This case illustrates how actors can considerably undermine the law using strategies of contestation far more subtle than direct confrontation.

Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka

Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka Sonal Khullar (bio) i was excited to be taking the express train Yal Devi, named after the goddess of Jaffna, to attend ”but political by persuasion,” a workshop on contemporary art in Sri Lanka organized by Mariah Lookman in Colombo in 2018 (Figure 1).1 It was my first time on the train. My companion on that journey, the artist Jasmine Nilani Joseph, was also keen on going south by train from Yalpannam, as Jaffna is known in Tamil. She spoke of Yal Devi, the train and goddess, as a friend and protector. I had come to know Joseph, a graduate of the fine arts program at the University of Jaffna, on trips to Sri Lanka between 2013 and 2018 while researching a book on contemporary art from South Asia.2 The rail journey between Jaffna and Colombo, cities in the North and South of the country and associated with its Tamil-minority and Sinhalese-majority communities respectively, had been impossible for much of the twenty-six-year-long civil war that began in 1983 and concluded in 2009, which is to say, for most of Joseph’s life. [End Page 502] Joseph was born in 1990, the same year Sri Lanka Railways suspended train service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai in the Northern Province. Service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai resumed in October 2014 and January 2015, respectively. As Sharika Thiranagama has argued, the Yal Devi, or ”Queen of the North,” train was legendary for transporting goods and passengers in twentieth-century Sri Lanka and symbolized better relations between Tamil and Sinhalese communities.3 For many Tamils, the train signified ”normality,” ”magical days” of a prewar period, and ”the dream of ordinary movement, as opposed to wartime forced displacements” and travel ”to a destination that you yourself had chosen.”4 north and south On that day in 2018, the six-hour ride between Jaffna City and Colombo Fort stations was bumpy, even bruising, as train tracks had been bombed in 1985 and set ablaze in 1990 by the ltte (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) during the war and were still not fully repaired. Our journey yielded sights and stops laden with meaning. We passed Kilinochchi, erstwhile administrative base of the ltte, and Anuradhapura, capital of an ancient Sinhalese kingdom. Joseph pointed out Vavuniya, where her family had lived in a refugee camp between 1995 and 1998 (Figure 2). Peacocks danced in the arid bush, with their blue and green plumes shining against golden earth. In response to state-sponsored discrimination against Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, the ltte led a political and military campaign against the Sri Lankan government demanding Tamil Eelam, an independent Tamil homeland.5 The Jaffna Peninsula in the Northern Province was [End Page 503] the imaginative locus for Eelam, although Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, which includes Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, is scattered across the country with significant communities in the east, north, and southwest. The civil war officially ended in May 2009 with the ltte’s defeat by Sri Lankan military forces, a large-scale refugee crisis, and human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government and ltte.6 More than a decade later, the process of resettlement, reconstruction, and reconciliation is incomplete. The postwar period has witnessed a continuation of war by other means and generated new conflicts, encapsulated by the rise of Bodu Bala Sena, a Buddhist nationalist group, and the Easter bombings in April 2019.7 Effects of war are perceptible in the North, South, and journeys between them. During the war, the 250-mile journey by road between Colombo and Jaffna could take as long as three days because of checkpoints and curfews, the artist T. Shanaathanan recalled at a conference in Colombo in 2013. (My bus journey on the A9 highway took about six hours in 2018 with stops. Thiranagama recalls a thirteen-hour journey [End Page 504] on that road in 2010.8) On those journeys, Shanaathanan was stopped and questioned about his drawings by security forces who believed them to be maps that could be used as weapons against the state.9 Maps were coveted...

"Don't Be Sorry. We Didn't Do This.": Narrating Diaspora and Problematizing Choice in V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage

This paper discusses how, through a compelling storytelling exercise, V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first novel Love Marriage succeeds in productively articulating a sense of Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic identity. The analysis focuses on the crucial issue of choice, which operates at different levels. Regarding authorship, Ganeshananthan, an American-born second-generation Sri Lankan Tamil, chooses to write a story that has not yet been told, and makes significant choices which necessarily impinge on the textual politics, namely problematizing the genre of her story to visit both history and memory from the area of fiction. Most significantly, the politics of choice are salient at an intradiegetic level, as the novel explores the ethical viability of the choices made by some of the main characters, namely two of the protagonist’s close relatives, who may see the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the only possibility to defend a political stance or, simply, to safeguard the dignity of living. Love Marriage also provides detailed insight of certain dynamics of this diasporic community, mostly articulated around the connections of marriage and family life. Finally, the analysis focuses on the political and emotional choices forced upon diasporic subjects, to conclude that these become more testing when it comes to members of the second generation.

How the Tigers Got Their Stripes: A Case Study of the LTTE’s Rise to Power

Over the course of six months in 1986, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) eliminated their rival militant organizations, despite being significantly outgunned and outmanned by some of these groups. Relying primarily on contemporaneous accounts in Tamil and English, this article traces the process by which the LTTE became the primary avatar of Tamil nationalism, and explores the question of why consolidation unfolded so violently in this case. We argue that the answer lies in the LTTE’s successful portrayal of this violence as order-upholding rather than destructive, and attribute their ability to do this to the fact that much of the population perceived the LTTE as the most legitimate user of violence among the militants.

Eliminating malaria in conflict zones: public health strategies developed in the Sri Lanka Civil War

Despite the 26-year long civil war, Sri Lanka was declared malaria-free by WHO in 2016. This achievement was the result of nearly 30 years of elimination efforts following the last...

COVID-19: The Crossroads for Sinhala–Muslim Relations in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s ethnic civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers, and the government of Sri Lanka comprising the majority of the Sinhalese Buddhist community came to a bloody end in May 2009. Muslims, whose political and civil society elite had largely supported the Sri Lankan state and security forces, welcomed the end of the war and the defeat of the Tamil Tigers given the history of the community with the LTTE. The expectations by the Muslims (and other communities) that peace would return to the country, were quickly dashed as it appeared that a new extremist Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist movement targeting religious minorities especially the Muslims would emerge as the country grappled with post-war reconciliation. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric, hate speech, and incitement to violence against the community has pushed some Muslims to think that they have become the new focus for Sinhala-Buddhist extremists in the wake of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. With suspicions of the complicity of the state apparatus in the anti-Muslim campaign, there are serious concerns around the role and place of minorities (non-Sinhala and non-Buddhist) in the future makeup of the country. While there is no concrete evidence on the state’s support for such an action, it is clear that the reluctance of the state to bring to justice those responsible for hate speech and incitement to violence since 2009 raises some serious questions about impartiality. In addition, with the increase of detentions and scrutiny of the Muslim community’s post-Easter Sunday attacks and the recent treatment of the Muslim community in the response to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, including shutting down of key Muslim towns and the enforcement of forced cremations (which goes against Islamic teachings of dignified burials), there is much to ponder of an anti-Muslim strategy being mainstreamed and institutionalized by the state. This paper will seek to situate the present response to the COVID-19 pandemic by the state and its particular actions affecting the Muslim community amid a wider backdrop of a rise in anti-Muslim hatred and action. In order to understand this, the paper will seek to understand the reasoning behind why Muslims who supported the war against the Tamil Tigers, have now become the enemy for Sinhala-Buddhist extremists. It does this through primary and secondary data gathering including interviews conducted between July 2020 and February 2021. In so doing this paper will explore the development of Muslim political and religious identity by looking at a historical perspective. This paper makes the argument that a holistic approach needs to be developed to avoid a new conflict taking place in Sri Lanka and to avoid violent Islamist extremism taking hold.

Leader Nationalism, Ethnic Identity, and Terrorist Violence

Whether or not nationalism fuels terrorist violence by ethnic groups is an important yet underexplored research question. This study offers a theoretical argument, empirical analysis and a case study. When political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers use nationalism to shore up legitimacy, they threaten the existence of disfavored ethnic groups. In turn, those groups are more likely to respond with terrorist attacks. The author tests this argument using a sample of 766 ethnic groups across 163 countries from 1970 to 2009. The multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression results provide evidence that leader nationalism is a significant driver of ethnic terrorism. The detrimental effect of nationalism remains the same after using a generalized method of moments method to account for possible reverse causality. A case study of Sinhalese nationalist leaders versus Tamil Tigers also supports the nationalism and terrorism nexus.

Sole Representatives in War and Peace: The Case of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

ABSTRACT This paper examines the hitherto unexplored subject of nonstate rebels seeking the status of sole representatives. Why do nonstate armed groups seek the status of sole representatives?, What strategies do they employ to achieve the status of sole representatives?, Is the status merely symbolic, or does it fetch tangible benefits? These research questions are explored by treating Sri Lanka’s LTTE as a case study. Primary and secondary data formed the basis of the analysis. The LTTE used three strategies to achieve a hegemonic disposition within the Tamil community. They are: (1) elimination of rival groups, (2) incorporation of some groups, and (3) battlefield efficacy. The rebels used the claim of sole representation to ensure bilateral talks with the government, get the ban on it lifted, and control the proposed interim administrative structure. The strategy worked to a certain extent, but at least partially contributed to its downfall in 2009.

Unequal Civilian Accommodation within Democratic Rule: The Case of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province after the Government–LTTE Conflict

This study analyzes the civil-military relations in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province after the 2009 conflict between the central government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by drawing upon the theories of Alfred Stepan and David Pion-Berlin and Harold Trinkunas. Stepan posited that there were two dimensions that shaped civil-military relationships: military contestation and prerogatives. This study’s analysis of these two dimensions in the case of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province shows that the civil-military relationship in the region takes shape in the unequal civilian accommodation type. This analysis corresponds to Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas’ theory that high levels of crisis coupled with weak civilian control would pave the way for the military to take on extensive domestic roles and intervene in civilian affairs. This research employs a qualitative method through the examination of existing literature and documents.

Role of Military From Counter Insurgency to Peace Building: Paradigm Shift in the Sri Lankan Nation-Stateʼs Security

Historically, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) used to be considered as one of the more stable and secure countries in the South Asian region. In the years after independence it gradually dawned on the government that maintaining national security was a crucial and most challenging contemporary issue faced by the country. At the global level, the role of the Military was understood as being vital for ensuring the safety, security and dignity of the nation-state. And, when national security is threatened on any ground, the military is expected to play a key role in safeguarding it. However, after the military victory was won by defeating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka in 2009 it was expected that a deep sense of peace and tranquility would be restored in the country. Contrary to this expectation, Sri Lankan national security was breached very badly, leadimg to an unstable situation as a result of a series of bomb blasts set off by certain extremist elements on the 21st of April 2019. In this backdrop, it would be a timely exercise to explore and analyze the Sri Lankan nation stateʼs security, peace building initiatives, and the role of the military. Taking this a step further, this study sought to analyze the role played by the military in the post-conflict peace building process as well. The study used qualitative methodology to conduct the investigation. Secondary data sources including books, articles and official reports were utilized to collect information for this study. This research found that in Sri Lanka the military was actively engaged in maintaining national security by using its soft and hard power as appropriate. This Study also found that lack of a coherent National Security Policy in Sri Lanka has been a key problem that needs to be addressed and corrected soon to ensure the safety and security of the country.

Why People Enter and Embrace Violent Groups.

We distinguish two pathways people may follow when they join violent groups: compliance and internalization. Compliance occurs when individuals are coerced to join by powerful influence agents. Internalization occurs when individuals join due to a perceived convergence between the self and the group. We searched for evidence of each of these pathways in field investigations of former members of two renowned terrorist organizations: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (Study 1) and Islamist radical groups (Study 2). Results indicated that ex-fighters joined LTTE for reasons associated with both compliance and internalization but that ex-fighters joined Islamist radical groups primarily for reasons associated with internalization. When compliance occurred, it often took the form of coercion within LTTE but involved charismatic persuasion agents within Islamist groups. This evidence of systematic differences in the reasons why fighters enter violent groups suggests that strategies for preventing radicalization and fostering de-radicalization should be tailored to particular groups.

Embodying the Tamil diaspora: Audiard, Shobasakthi and the transnational languages of Dheepan

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which the dual visions of French director Jacques Audiard and Sri Lankan Tamil writer Shobasakhti, despite a blatant lack of linguistic communication, come to cohabit the spaces and places depicted in Dheepan (2015), a film narrative about immigrant experience. As Audiard delegated decisions about on–set interactions and dialogue to Jesuthasan and the other Tamil cast members, he relegated his own role to a shaping of the sensorial dimensions of a human story– something the film does in strikingly cinematographic terms. In so doing, the pair constructed the contradictory backbone of a text that in many ways evades coherent political comprehension– at once an earnest attempt at depicting a ‘universal’ experience of marginalization (Audiard) and a scathing exposé of the West’s blind spots with regard to the Tamil situation in Sri Lanka (Shobashakthi). Combining one artist’s well–meaning contrivance and another’s quest for recognition, the film begins to emerge as something else entirely – an ideologically confusing, yet viscerally compelling, reflection on violence, its traumas, and its representational limits, filtered through the experience of a former Tamil Tiger. As concrete details about the Sri Lankan conflict and its human costs coagulate in the film’s affective pretensions, we re–conceive their purpose as not just remnants of a failed vanity project, but also an example of the transitive dynamics and inequitable flows of transnational screen culture, and of a globally minded art cinema at its most ideologically imperfect.

Islamic Identity Formation, Madrasas, and Muslims in Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan Muslims form a small (less than 10% of the population) but peaceful community within Sri Lanka’s ethnopolitical landscape. However, the rise of intolerance against the non-mainstream schools of thought, such as Sufism, and violent movements among Muslims as a defensive mechanism during the Sri Lanka government’s war against the Tamil Tigers and after the war in 2009, mainly against Sinhala-Buddhist targets, radically questioned the peaceful nature of Sri Lankan Muslims. This paper attempts to provide some notes on (a) Sri Lanka Muslim elites’ quest for identity formation by intensely resorting to the Islamic faith and values and rejecting the Tamilian identity among Muslims whose mother is mainly Tamil, and (b) the growth of Islamic seminaries among Sri Lankan Muslims or ‘Moors’ as a result of the elites’ construction of Islamic identity for Sri Lankan Muslims. The paper uses both primary and secondary sources to understand the complex ethnoreligious development among Muslims. Apart from a literature review, interviews of former Madrasa students through zoom between October and November 2020 provided inside perspectives about the goals and global views of Madrasas.

The Position of Women in the Military: Ethnic Tamil Female Combatants in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)

This paper discusses various factors behind the ethnic Tamil women who decided to join the terrorist militia group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in the northern and southeastern parts of Sri Lanka. In this discussion it is known that there are three factors that affect the decision of Tamil women ​​to join the LTTE, namely: first, the existence of the Tamil community as an ethnic minority. Second, the occurrence of mass sexual violence and abuse among Tamil women, perpetuated by the Sri Lanka’s majority ethnic group. Finally, the decision of Tamil women to join LTTE is due to the pressure that structurally and culturally appears in communities in conflictual areas. Through these three factors, Tamil women ​​then chose to leave their comfort zone and reconstructed their identity by joining the LTTE terrorist militia group. In this case, the involvement of female LTTE combatants in Sri Lanka is not only an attempt to eradicate negative views regarding femininity through military activities, but also a symbol of successful self-liberalization from the practice of gender oppression in conflict situations

Beyond Liberal Peace in Sri Lanka: Victory, Politics, and State Formation

In 2009, the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ended through a military victory for the government. Features of the post-war peace—including persistent militarization, strengthened nationalism, and communal violence—have commonly been attributed to a failed attempt at liberal peacebuilding followed by an authoritarian backlash. In contrast, this study shows how the post-war peace has been shaped by historical processes of state formation aimed at consolidating the Sri Lankan state. The article takes a long-term approach to analysing peace in Sri Lanka through the lens of state formation. The analysis centres on four key aspects: (1) post-war security, (2) state–minority relations, (3) socio-economic aspects, and (4) electoral politics. We conclude that there are currently few signs of any substantial state reform that would accommodate the continuous demand for social justice and minority rights that has spurred violent conflicts in Sri Lanka.