An Encounter With the Tamil Tigers

I walked by the White House yesterday, and before it was a shouting crowd of ethnic Tamils, pleading with President Barack Obama to intercede to get the Sri Lankan government to stop its assault on the north of the country and the Tamil Tigers. But Obama could do nothing, and nor should he have -- the Tigers long ago morphed from a defender of the Tamil people into the senseless killing machine of a self-interested terrorist named Velupillai Prabakharan. It also was a vain effort -- the protest coincided with the final crushing of Tigers, and the death of Prabakharan. (The L.A. Times' Mark Magnier has a good profile of him today.)



My own interest in the Tigers goes back to 1991. I was among many South Asia-based foreign correspondents who had turned their gaze from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, the pristine island nation at the southern tip of India. The government was facing a deadly challenge from the Tigers, who were getting excellent media coverage as protectors of a marginalized minority, the Tamils. But when correspondents went down for a look, they didn't always return glad-eyed. One colleague described arriving in the capital of Colombo, driving out to the city, turning back around, and flying straight back to Delhi. The place simply gave one the spooks.

My specific entry point into things Tamil occurred in May 1991, and the suicide assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Newsweek sent me out to Madras in the hours after the killing. At the site of the attack, I came upon a man digging gingerly, like a surgeon, in the dirt. He was P. Chandrasekharan, a senior investigator, and in his hand were dozens of tiny pellets smaller than BBs -- part of the bomb belt worn by the killer, who had approached Gandhi at a ceremony in a manner of respect before blowing herself up. Chandrasekharan and the other Indian investigators were masterful. Though Gandhi, his killer and 14 others were torn apart by the bomb, the investigators were actually able to find (alert: next part not for delicate sensibilities) the killer's face -- not her head, mind you, but her face -- amid the carnage, identify her and track her origins (end alert). She was Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a rank-and-file member of the Tigers.

It was the Tigers' signature. Just a few months earlier, they leveled several buildings in downtown Colombo, killing 19 people, in order to detonate a car bomb that also assassinated Sri Lankan Defense Minister Ranjan Wijeratne. The year before, the Tigers shot down 147 Muslims as they prayed in the town of Kattankudy. Of course the Tigers' biggest prize next to Gandhi was yet to come -- two years later, they would assassinate President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

In the coming months, I went down to Colombo myself. There, I set about making contacts among local journalists in an effort to make the trip north to the Tamil capital of Jaffna. After a week or so, I had a proper contact, a driver (whose name escapes me), and we left.

We reached Jaffna easily enough after a long passage first across government lines, then into Tiger territory. But that evening there was a knock on my hotel door: A young man entered, and said my driver was under arrest.

Arrest?

Yes, said the gentleman, who identified himself as an officer of the Tigers. The driver was a spy.

What I hadn't known was that the Tigers had evicted the entire Muslim population from the north over the previous two years. The driver was Muslim; he had neglected to say anything.

My only recourse at the moment was to insist that, as a courtesy to a foreign guest and a journalist, the driver be confined to the hotel and not taken away anywhere. That was agreed.

When I went to the driver's room, he had only one thing to say: "I don't want to die." I assured him everything would be fine. Foreign journalists didn't ordinarily speak with Prabakharan himself -- I knew no one who had -- but I said I would talk to the local Tiger leadership.

Meanwhile, I drove myself around town for the next four or five days in his car. All seemed quiet and orderly. Apart from the fact that my driver was under arrest, life in Jaffna was as the media presented it -- the Tigers seemed to be embraced by the population as much-needed protection against the Sinhalese government.

One day, though, as I strolled downtown, a man whispered as he shuffled past, something along the lines of Don't believe everything you see or hear. Then he vanished.

I began asking around quietly about life among the Tigers, and learned that in fact a lot of the people in Jaffna were terrified. They had to watch what they said and did in order not to be accused of treachery by the Tigers; the penalty of crossing the line could be death. Contrary to the propaganda, they definitely were not in charge of their own lives nor their future.

That's the first story I wrote for Newsweek when I got back -- about life under the Tigers. Then I started digging in to how the Tigers financed themselves, which I discovered involved arms smuggling on their own ship to southeast Asia; heroin smuggling to Europe; and "donations" from Tamil immigrants abroad. Abroad, a lot of Tamils worked in banks. Tamil immigrants in Canada, Britain and elsewhere would be visited by fellow immigrants living in town; they would be told that they were expected to tithe a specific sum every month for the Tigers. How did the visitors know how much? Why, the Tamils working in the bank had checked how much salary they were depositing. I filed that story next for Newsweek.

Back to my driver: The Tigers decided out of compassion to let him go. They bundled him, blindfolded, into a van back south. I followed in his car. At the boundary of Tamil and government-controlled territory, they let him out and told him never to return.