Terrorism: The Tamil Tigers (LTTE)

The fundamental conflict in Sri Lanka is between two different language groups, Sinhala and Tamil . Neighboring India became very involved for reasons related to proximity and language.

The map above is of the extent of the Dravidian languages. Dravidian is one of smaller language families. There are no countries with a government that speaks a Dravidian language, but the governments of several south Indian states do.

The Sinhala-speaking people, or Sinhalese, comprise about three quarters of the island's population. Most are Buddhists, while most Tamil are Hindu.1 2 The term "Tamil" has not had a single meaning over time. Before the end of the 19th century, a person was Tamil only if they spoke Tamil and were a land-owning farmer (the Vellalar caste). With the passage of time the term has become synonymous with the people who speak Tamil.3 The British period, which only ended in 1948, saw the British attempting to disempower the Buddhist majority, which generally benefited the Tamil.4 By the end of the British period, the Tamil were firmly entrenched in most elite, government positions although they were distinctinly in the minority by population.5 Language was an early problem in independent Sri Lanka, with mostly English-speaking locals having government experience and jobs, but English is an alien language, the Sinhala in a new majority position, and the Tamil dropping from positions of power.

The animosity between the Tamils and Sinhalese was a political game, a figure of speech, an argument devised by lawyers to score off each other in parliament. It was not meant to be played out in the streets, and when it was, they were severely shocked[.] 6

Post-colonial conflict erupted after the 1956 Sinhala-Only Act and again in 1958.7 The beginnings of violence were directly related to the use of language. The early Tamil political alliance, the TULF, had language and land (for Tamils) at the top of their agenda (their efforts came to naught.)

The Tamil Tigers, claiming to represent the 13%8 native Dravidian speaking Tamil population, also is in conflict with the Islamic Moors from India, even though they speak Tamil.

The Tigers propose a map of Eelam which includes, very specifically, all the people with a linguistic connection to the Tamil language except the Indian Tamil-speakers brought by the British.9 The government of India got involved quickly when violence erupted in the mid-1980s. India generally supported Tamil groups which wanted autonomy, but did not support those who wanted to secede. India had its own secessionist concerns at home.

Tamil leader Kittu claims that the LTTE, in the early 1980s, was armed and trained in India.10 We can only imagine this was in the state of Tamil Nadu, and not by the federal Indian government.

India's support of the LTTE ended when Rajiv Gandhi took over after his mother was assassinated by Sikh separtists. Talk soon began. The Indians supplied a large force known as the IPKF , originally designed to disarm the LTTE, but later fighting it. The IPKF was a problem with Sinhala nationalist groups and the Buddhist orders. Not withdrawing on time and one apparent result was the election of a new Sri Lankan President, who put more pressure on India to leave. At this point the Colombo government was also fighting a Sinhala nationalist organization, JVP.11 The end of IPKF presence restarted the Civil War. With Norwegian involvement, a CFA was reached in 2002.12 The ceasefire was basically ignored as of 2006, and as of today, neither side seems to be interested in negotiating, while neither side wants to be the first to officially rebuke the CFA.

Why were the LTTE, among all the others, succesful?

At one level, it could be argued that the LTTE has beaten all other groups in its claim to represent Eelam and the Tamil because it has, militarily, beaten all other groups. The LTTE has been involved in violent clashes, and alleged ambushes, with the leadership of other groups, and the LTTE generally emerges victorious.

At another level, perhaps the LTTE were simply far better at propaganda.

Perhaps the stories surrounging LTTE leader Pirapaharan, and the stories of a cult of personality, make it easier to it easier to connect with the LTTE, one either likes or hates Pirapaharan.

Is it a class issue?

No, the LTTE crosses class lines and the Sinhala "enemy" are also multi-classed.

Is it a caste issue?

No. Although the LTTE has a regional base near the town of Valvattiturai, and fisherfolk are Karaiyar class, and many Karaiyar are in the leadership of LTTE, the powerbase of the LTTE is in the North, while concentrations of Karaiyar can be found in the East and West, instead.13

How about religion?

The LTTE are multi-confessional, although tend to be anti-Buddhist.14 The LTTE always was a group united by language, fighting for the language group. Most of the other groups had a specific social program.

[W]hat is common sense today: that languages and nations are not necessarily connected, that the relation between them is contingent. 15

Max Mu:ller, in his Science of language (1899), traces early European knowledge of Sanskrit prior to Wilkins and Jones, mostly through Catholic missionaires. Success has a thousand fathers, as they say, and virtually every nation of Europe has some claim to the formulation of the Indo-European idea. George van Driem, in a recent publication (2001: 1039-1051), makes an argument for Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1612-1653) of Leiden as the first recognizing the existence of the family of languages now called Indo-European, comprising Persian, Greek, Germanic and others, which he derived from a proto-language he called Scythian. Von Driem further argues that Boxhorn's friend Claudius Salmasius added Sanskrit to Boxhorn's Indo-Scythian family on the basis of Indian words recorded in the fragments of Ctesias's lost work, the Indica because of their resemblance to modern Persian words. He further argues that Jones picked up on these findings through the work of William Wotton. It is clear from the evidence given that these ideas of genetic connection of languages were already in play, and that the ancient Indian languages were being connected with those of Persia and Europe by these Dutch scholars. Plainly, the Indo-European idea was a product of a long evolution involving many, rather than the discovery of a lone genius. Von Driem sees the Biblical story of the descent of Noah and the dispersal of nations as having contributed to "obscuring the overall picture" of the genetic connections among languages for European scholars leading up to the Renaissance. But it is my view that the development of the Indo-European idea presupposed the genealogy of Nations in the Bible and applicate it to languages, in other words, the idea of a family of langauges and of genetic connections among them was not naturally given and had to be fashioned from the idea of a genealogical tree of nations. 16

The legacy of the Dravidian proof most evident today is the Dravidian political movement in Tamil Nadu, which began with the Justice Party of the 1920s and continued with the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) Party and its offshoots. The very word "Dravidian" is strongly associated with that political formation. Assuredly, there is a lineal connection between the Dravidian proof and the Dravidian political movement, but the nature of the connection is not self-evident, and it is not simple. The political movement came about nearly seventy years after Caldwell's comparative grammar of the Dravidian languages (1856) and a full century after the Dravidian proof (1816). To derive it from the Dravidian proof directly would be to evacuate the large time interval and the may historical developments that mediated between them. The Dravidian movement, moreover, was largely succesful in only one part of the Dravidian language region, Tamil Nadu, and in its origins was associated with the attempt to overcome brahmin hegemony in government. 17

Footnotes1.

These claims and counterclaims [about the origins of the populations of Sri Lanka] aside, there is little doubt that contemporary Sri Lankans are of mixed ethnic background. From Sri Lanka's ruling elite to its lowliest classes, miscegenation, conversion, and acculturation appear to have been common over the centuries. As a result, contemporary "Sinhalese and Tamil labels are porous sieves through which diverse groups and categories of Indian peoples, intermixed with non-Indians... , have pass through."18

and, yet, still they fight.back