Liberation Tigers Of Tamil Eelam Research Articles

S29-01 The Queensland Response to the Current Flood Disaster: Provision of Timely Universal and Targeted Interventions to Children and Families

Managing the blood system in disasters is one of the main challenges for any blood transfusion service exposed to natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, biological threats such as pandemic influenza as well as manmade disruptions and terrorism. Sri Lanka had to face contrasting types of situations. The most unexpected and dreadful one was the 2004 December 26 tsunami catastrophe which cost >30,000 human lives, leaving more than 23,000 injured. Health services were over-burdened with influx of dead bodies and injured people, most due to drowning. Injuries varied from small lacerations to deeper wounds, broken arms, legs, ribs, damaged organs and head injuries. The National Blood Transfusion Service, had to coordinate its blood supply effectively and to manage large number of blood donors during the first few days following tsunami.In contrast to the acute destruction of tsunami, Sri Lanka also faced a “chronic disaster” of 3 decades due to the separatist war waged by the Tamil Tigers, until it was completely terminated in 2009. There were large scale terrorist attacks using suicide bombers, land mines and claymore mines resulting in frequent influxes of dead bodies and injured patients to hospitals.The experiences of Sri Lanka blood system in the face of two contrasting types of disastrous situations are presented.

China and the United Nations: The Stakeholder Spectrum

In December 2009, representatives of 192 nations—not to mention thousands of journalists, activists, and business executives—assembled in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Un...

The Displaced Northern Muslims of Sri Lanka: Special Problems and the Future

It has been widely established as fact that ethno-political conflict and civil war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka have generated immense sufferings among the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic groups at the level of the masses. However, very little has been discussed about the plights of the Muslims of the North and East, particularly the former who became victims of the Sri Lanka’s long running ethnic conflict. In October 1990, the entire Muslim population of Jaffna, Vavumiya, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Kilinochchi districts in the northern region were evicted from their homes at gun point and turned into Internally Displaced Persons overnight by the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). Muslims of the North claim that they have some basic and important problems to be solved. This study attempts to identify some of the special problems of the expelled Northern Muslims who are languishing in the state supported refugee camps in Puttalam district. A questionnaire on the special problems of the Northern Muslims was circulated to the North Eastern youth, students, unemployed Muslims, and farmers. The population of the target group was selected randomly. More than 250 questionnaires were issued. Ninety percent of them responded to the questionnaire. Interviews were also conducted over the phone with an educated section of the Northern Muslims. Finally, solutions are suggested to the protracted ethno-political conflict based on power-sharing and easing the special problems of the Northern Muslims.

Conventionally Defeated but Not Eradicated: Asian Arms Networks and the Potential for the Return of Tamil Militancy in Sri Lanka

This article analyzes the previous and current dynamics of the arms trafficking network of the former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Asia and its relevance for the post-conflict situation in Sri Lanka. It also analyzes some of the leading western theories on civil war and determines their relevance in this specific theater. Further analysis is provided regarding the state of the Tamil diaspora as well as the remainder of the LTTE's financial network. This article argues that the governments in Asia that house key sources of weaponry and other supplies for violent nonstate actors do not seem either willing or able to take any kind of meaningful action against these illicit markets aside from making occasional high-profile arrests. Further, key former LTTE financiers continue to reside in several western countries and many remain willing to underwrite arms smuggling operations in Asia, provided that there are effective managers. Given these realities combined with a nascent government-in-exile that continues to espouse the LTTE's raison d'être, the insurgency in Sri Lanka could reignite quicker and more intensely than most think if current political and demographic trends are not reversed and force levels of the Sri Lankan military cannot be sustained. However, any new Tamil militant groups would likely look quite different from their LTTE predecessors.

Three Attempts at Peace in Sri Lanka: A Critical Muslim Perspective

This paper examines three instances of attempted rapprochement between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government in 1987, 2002 and 2005, and the inadequate response to the security and economic concerns of the Muslim minority community. The state's indifference to Muslim concerns has been due to the fact that minorities continue to be considered less than worthy citizens, and the conflict has been understood to concern only the state and the LTTE. Muslims' chosen methods of engagement in politics, and recent community choices regarding self-representation, through the ‘piety movement’, for instance, have also contributed to their exclusion. This paper argues that Muslims will need to find new ways of engagement with different levels of Sri Lankan civil and political society if they are to have their concerns addressed under the new political regime and changing social conditions within the country.

Schizophrenic soothers

How can the international community influence belligerents in internal armed conflict to move towards peace? Research on influence strategies in international relations commonly stresses the importance of a combined ‘carrot-and-sticks’ approach, yet little is known about how this mixed strategy is best applied in the context of internal armed conflict. The article addresses this question by developing a theoretical framework exploring the conditions under which the mixed approach is successful in influencing conflict actors and by focusing specifically on non-state actors. It is argued that the effectiveness of the contrast strategy in dealing with non-state actors depends on the balance between the ‘good cop’ approach and the ‘bad cop’ approach, the perceptions of the targets and contextual adoption of the sequencing of strategies. We apply this framework to the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2008, when the international community’s initial success later turned into a failed attempt to influence the LTTE in the direction of respect for human rights, in ending the violation of the ceasefire and in preventing a return to the battlefield.

Women’s Involvement in Terrorism

Women have had a long history of participating in terrorist activity. This history extends from the earliest modern terrorist group, from the nineteenth century Russian People’s Will to the current wave of suicide bombings carried out by the Chechen Black Widows and the Tamil Tiger’s Birds of Paradise. This article traces the history of female involvement in modern terrorism and then goes on to make a number of generalizations about this experience. Among other things, the writers point out that women have played strong leadership roles in left-wing, revolutionary bands, while these roles have been far fewer with right-wing and racist aggregations. Women have tended to be late-comers to contemporary, religiously-inspired terrorism: Muslim religious authorities first had to endorse their participation.

Corruption and conflict: connections and consequences in war-torn Sri Lanka

In the transition from war to peace, one key challenge is to ensure that those who gained something from the war can be convinced to support the peace. At the same time, however, it is crucial to avoid reproducing corrupt practices and inequalities that fuelled the conflict. The problem of corruption during post-war peace-building has gained considerable attention recently, academically as well as in policy-making circles. This exploratory case study of Sri Lanka traces and problematises the complex linkages between corruption and conflict at the shift from war to peace, building on field research in Sri Lanka before and after the end of the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. The article illustrates how global resource flows and politics have enabled conflict-fuelling corruption in Sri Lanka, and how local experiences of corruption feed into the popular grievances which have both caused and kept the conflict going. The end of the war has not presented a break with the corruption-conflict links of the wartime—and these connections will have implications for reconstruction and reconciliation in the country.

(A171) Daily Crude Mortality Rate (DCMR) as an Indicator to Measure the Success of Provision of Services to Internally Displaced Population (IDP) in Sri Lanka

BackgroundSri Lanka's 28 year protracted civil conflict between the government forces and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the North of country saw dramatic end by May 2009 when the military forces succeeded in crushing the LTTE. Around 300,000 people were displaced due to the conflict and they were settled in welfare villages established in the North.DiscussionThe Government of Sri Lanka working in partnership with all other actors mounted a major humanitarian response to address the needs of the war displaced population. The Ministry of Health took a leading role in coordinating the health care programs for the Internally Displaced Population(IDP).ObservationsHigher morbidity and mortality observed during early phase of settlement of IDPs was due to the results of two scenarios, one being the conflict situation and its direct consequences that have caused injuries, disabilities and mental trauma among the population. The second being the result of the collapse of the health system in conflict affected areas, long period of displacement of people and the disruption of social structures that have led to the indirect consequences of increase of infectious diseases and worsening of chronic diseases. Ministry of Health used Daily Crude Mortality Rate (DCMR) to measure the success of the response. According to the Sphere Project guidelines that developed a set of minimum standards in a disaster situation, the DCMR should be 0.25 per 10 000 population for South East Asia. The emergency threshold level is 0.5 per 10 000 per day for this region.ConclusionsOf the number of people reaching the IDP welfare villages in early stages of emergency phase in May, DCMR averaged to 0.7. The figure settled to less than 0.5 per 10000 in June 2009. Thereafter daily DCMR remained less than 0.5 indicating success of the provision of care for IDPS.

Violence at the Margins: Street Gangs, Globalized Conflict and Sri Lankan Tamil Battlefields in London, Toronto and Paris

This article explores the global dimensions of violent conflict and the parallels and links between violence in the diaspora and the homeland. It does so by discussing Tamil street gangs in London, Toronto and Paris. The Tamil diaspora played a key role in the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which raged between 1983 and 2009. In spite of being a marginal phenomenon in the Tamil diaspora, Tamil street gangs became part of a wider culture of fear within the Tamil community and possibly reinforced the LTTE’s dominance over and fundraising in the diaspora. Although some of the rivalling gangs have been cast as pro- and anti-LTTE, gang violence cannot be interpreted as a direct continuation of conflict from Sri Lanka but has to be understood in relation to marginalization and identification in the city of residence. In everyday life in the diaspora, ‘the gang’ has been a way for some young Tamil men to strive for respect, riches and heroism, employing a mixture of references to gang culture and the LTTE and building on both ethnic and geographical identifications. The larger Tamil community, on its part, has been eager to dissociate itself from the street gangs as they threaten the image of the Tamils as law-abiding and well-adjusted migrants.

Sri Lanka: From Turmoil to Dynasty

While successive post-independence governments' ethnocentric policies undermined liberal democracy and led to Sri Lanka's civil war, the extraconstitutional and extrajudicial strategies President Mahinda Rajapaksa adopted to defeat the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the tactics he has since pursued to perpetuate his tenure as president, and the malpractices he and his supporters have perpetrated in order to create a Rajapaksa family dynasty have ushered in a soft authoritarian dispensation that could very well lead to a hard authoritarian milieu.

Book Review: Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka & the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers

Book Review: Gordon Weiss, <i>The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka &amp; the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers</i>

State Violence in Sri Lanka: The International Community and the Myth of ‘Normalisation’

This essay examines the foundational role of state violence in the context of the recently concluded military conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Sri Lanka's conflict, I argue, enables a broader global discourse concerning state violence. I proceed to analyse the operation of state violence in terms of a crucial instrument of counterinsurgency, in which the collective punishment of Tamil civilians presented a Faustian bargain between physical security and political rights. Situated in this context, I demonstrate how the discourse of human rights, in the absence of a jurisprudence of group rights, was itself conducive of state violence. In the course of my analysis, I bring into focus how the discourse of liberation too, created its own legitimising myths. Individual human rights were placed subordinate to the LTTE's privileging of ‘armed struggle’ as the chosen mechanism of liberating the ‘group.’ Both the divergent political narratives of the state and the LTTE, and the use of violence to prosecute it, had a contagious relationship with each other. The use of violence by each party served to confirm the legitimising myths of the other, contributing to the conflict's escalation. Counter claims of genocide and counter-terrorism paradoxically blunted the real questions which were: what kind of violence did the Sri Lankan state commit against Tamil civilians, on what scale and with what intentions? In the latter part of my essay, I examine the wide-ranging implications generated by such questions.

Women in the LTTE: Birds of Freedom or Cogs in the Wheel?

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a preeminent separatist organization fighting for an independent and sovereign Tamil state in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka. LTTE women’s involvement in the leadership and fighting forces of the group has given rise to fierce debates about whether the visibility of females in the LTTE fighting forces represented the ‘true’ liberation of the Tamil women and whether women would enjoy equal rights in the public during the post-conflict period. Actually, the Tamil Eelam is the overarching goal of the LTTE, and the emancipation of women has always been a secondary issue dependent on the liberation struggle. All the existing literature illustrates that the LTTE has been unsuccessful in creating the gender equality within the movement, and suggests that women have the right to achieve their emancipation and empowerment without linking to interests of the nationalist and ethnic struggles.

Intraethnic Dominance and Control: Violence Against Co-Ethnics in the Early Sri Lankan Civil War

In some ethno-separatist wars, rebel groups direct a large share of violence against members of their own ethnic community. But why do rebels target the co-ethnics they claim to represent in the war against the government? Our aim in this paper is to provide the components for a conceptual framework that we assess using unique disaggregated casualty data on violence committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against co-ethnic Tamils in territories claimed for the Tamil Eelam state in the early phase of the Sri Lankan conflict, 1985–88. We propose that there are two distinct processes of intraethnic violence: violence against co-ethnic civilians and violence against co-ethnic rivals. While the former aims at controlling the population to win the war against the government, the latter aims at establishing leadership dominance over the ethnic minority. We examine the role of ethnic homogeneity in shaping the use of violence directed against the two types of co-ethnic targets in the buildup phase of ethno-separatist war. We conclude that ethnic demographic structures matter for how the rebels treat co-ethnics in the early phase of war before they have established territorial control.

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno-nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy-four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long-standing external threats of ethno-linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro-Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno-nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth-century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti-Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.

A Cultural Analysis of the Ethno-Political Conflict in Sri Lanka

It has been 18 months since the cessation of the armed conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the rebel forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Although the war has finally come to an end, one cannot conclude that the core issue of Tamil minority rights and cultural autonomy has been resolved. Drawing from the theory of multiculturalism, this paper argues that the Sri Lankan state has interpreted and assessed minority group rights and cultural autonomy as a threat to its national security, thereby securitising the debate on Tamil minority rights, which led to a self-fulfilling prophesy. Moreover, it argues that the end of the civil war presents an opportunity for the state to shift its interpretive logic of minority rights from security to justice in order to address the core issue of cultural autonomy in Sri Lanka.

Triumphalism, fear and humiliation: The psychological legacy of Sri Lanka's civil war

The Sri Lankan government's recent victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) presents a unique opportunity to resolve the long-standing ethnic conflict in the country. However, the Tamil population's distrust of the government will not change easily. Furthermore, the Tamil diaspora located in Europe, Australia, and Canada believed that the LTTE was the only force that could protect the Tamil people from annihilation, and the war's end has left them confused and humiliated. Significant psychological hurdles – including group narcissism on the part of the majority Sinhalese, feelings of vulnerability and distrust on the part of Sri Lankan Tamils, and a sense of humiliation on the part of the Tamil diaspora – need to be surmounted in order to reach a successful reconciliation.

Integrating ‘Return’ with ‘Recovery’: Utilising the Return Process in the Transition to Positive Peace: A Case Study of Sri Lanka

Following the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on 18 May 2009, Sri Lanka has recently entered a new era of negative peace. For the huge number of displaced persons, predominately of Tamil origin, who are currently trapped in camps in the North, the beneficial effects of peace remain unseen. This paper explores the links between resolving internal displacement and the transition to a positive peace. Under the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement, both the government and the LTTE failed to integrate return with recovery, undermining the wider peacebuilding process and contributing to further violence. In the context of military victory, the paper argues for an integrated approach to return and recovery, which will foster a new social contract between the government and internally displaced persons, utilising the return process in the transition to positive peace.

From civil war to soft authoritarianism: Sri Lanka in comparative perspective

In May 2009 Sri Lanka's government proclaimed that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which spent 26 years waging a brutal war to create a separate state, had been defeated.1 Amidst the j...