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India & the Struggle for Tamil Eelam

LTTE: Need for a Balanced Assessment

Arjun Katoch
Economic and Political Weekly - 2 November 1991

"It is not the purpose of this article to defend or glorify the LTTE. But one man's terrorist, they say is another's freedom fighter. Currently, despite the fuss over the Sri Lankan army and LTTE fighting together in 1989 to eliminate the TNA, the LTTE are no doubt the Indian and the Sri Lankan governments' terrorists, but with equal certainty they are, and always have been, the Sri Lankan Tamil's freedom fighters.

To conclude with the basic rationale behind the LTTE's continued presence against heavy odds - and to repeat a point made earlier - the whole struggle is for land. The logic behind the LTTE's popularity in the Tamil speaking part of Sri Lanka is that they are trying to protect what they consider to be their homeland from incursions by settlers from the south, under the protection of the Sri Lankan army. This fact must be understood for a balanced assessment of their durability and influence in the Sri Lanka imbroglio."

As long as the issue of control over land in the north east provinces of Sri Lanka remains unresolved, the LTTE will continue to have the support of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi brought the LTTE into focus of the Indian public's attention as never before. Terrorism in any form and politically motivated killings need, of course, to be strongly condemned and our media have been rightly doing so. In the process the image of the LTTE that has got imprinted on the public mind is that of a cruel and ruthless organisation which has not only brought untold misery to the Tamil population of Sri Lanka hut created law and order problems in our own state of Tamil Nadu as well.

There is also general amazement as to how the LTTE could stock on Indian soil such large caches of arms, explosives, radio sets, petrol, etc, as were found by the SIT on information provided by Shanmugam, and are still being discovered by the Tamil Nadu police during their current crackdown on the LTTE. Shanmugam's 'escape' and 'suicide' and the subsequent suicides of Sivarasan, Suba and other LTTE cadres when cornered, have only added further to the mystique of a sinister LTTE.

Public perception of the LTTE in India has shown several sharp shifts as events in the northern portion of the subcontinent unfolded. The pre-1987 perception was that of sympathy for this underdog Tamil outfit bravely fighting the Sri Lankan army and keeping it at bay. The post-Accord 1987 period saw the LTTE portrayed as lungi clad upstarts who bit the hand that fed them, who dared defy the might of the Indian state and who would soon be taught a lesson by the Indian army.

By 1990, 4,000 IPKF casualties later and after many dubious claims by the IPKF Commander Lt. Gen. Kalkat, the LTTE came to be regarded with a mixture of grudging admiration and condescension: as an organisation that had fought well but was critically weakened and confined to the jungles of Vavuniya, and which would soon be mopped up by the Sri Lankan army.

The Sri Lankan army, as professionals, should have known better but for the decimation of the JVP under its belt and Ranjan Wijeratne to back them. In the event it soon lost Jaffna Fort, Mankulam Camp and more men in six or seven months than the IPKF had in three years. The fierce battles at Elephant Pass and in the Mullaitivu jungles around the 14 Base (so called because 14 is the radio call signal of Prabhakaran on the LTTE radio net) have now brought home to the Sri Lankan army that the best they can hope for is a bloody stalemate in the north-east of the island.

Our media, fed this time on Sri Lankan rather than Indian defence ministry press releases, started blaming the LTTE for the latest round of fighting and for the suffering.

Consequently, the public perception of the LTTE again started turning negative. The killing of Wijeratne, the blowing up of the JOC HQ of the Sri Lankan army and the assassination of Lankan army and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi transformed the LTTE image completely into that of a body of rabid terrorists who ruthlessly murdered innocent civilians and eminent politicians. Not many people sat back to think that in all these years of stories of LTTE atrocities the views aired in our media has been based largely on hearsay; that few Indians other than officers and men of the IPKF infantry battalion have had occasion to interact with the LTTE over and length of time and were in a position to assess as to why this organisation had not only survived under extremely adverse circumstances but continued to nourish.

During the period the IPKF was in Sri Lanka, two worlds existed in the by lanes of Jaffna and the jungles of Vavuniya and Batticaloa. One was the safe antiseptic world of headquarters, maps, staff officers, and helicopters flying above the jungle canopy, which rarely had any contact with a militant. The other was the hot, humid, tension-filled world of infantry in close combat, below the jungle canopy and in the bylanes. Here no quarter was asked for or given; death, injury and privation were constant companions, and the antagonists got to know each other's strengths and weaknesses well.

It is a cruel irony that the Indian public's perception of the LTTE's popular support and capabilities should have been based on press handouts and conducted tours for journalists organised by IPKF HQ which was physically and mentally distanced from reality and whose views were shaped more by what they thought South Block wanted to hear than by facts as they existed on the ground.

This deception was exposed at least once when the BBC announced in September 1988 that the camp claimed to have been destroyed by IPKF was a fake and the weapons supposedly captured there had actually been flown in from Madras. This revelation, incidentally. was the result of a slip by an inebriated Special forces colonel captivated by the charms of a comely Indian reporter. As was to be expected the Indian army top brass were very upset and ordered an inquiry into the incident. But amour in Vavuniya was hard to prove, and the colonel, is now a Brigadier.

The actual ground realities were too well known to the brave, uncomplaining, dirty, tired infantry soldier who was solely responsible for what success the IPKF had and who was in regular contact with the LTTE as well as the local population. Having had the privilege of commanding a battalion of pars commandos through the battle of Jaffna, the clearing of Batticaloa, the retaking of Vavuniya Mankulam, Mullaitivu and the initial attempts to clear the Alampil jungles (then and current HQs of the LTTE), this writer feels that perhaps a more realistic view of the LTTE as he saw it would help in a better understanding of the organisation.

REALISTIC VIEW

To begin with, if the LTTE are the ogres that they are made out to be, how is that they have lasted so long? Terror alone can not explain the unending stream of volunteers from amongst the Thamil youth, their dedication to their cause and willingness to die for it. Any one who walked in 1987 was instantly struck by the devastation inflicted on the Tamils by the Sri Lankan army (which should really be called a Sinhala army as it is 98 per cent Sinhalese; the entire army's senior most Tamil officer in 1987 was a Lt. Col. posted on administrative duties in Colombo).

It is not generally understood that the political fight between the Tamils and the Sinhalas is routed primarily in a tussle for land. The Sri Lankan government considered all land as crown or government land and allotted large tracts of Tamil domiciled lands to Sinhala settlers, backed by the army. A deliberate attempt was made to change the ethnic balance so as to break the link between the north and east provinces of Sri Lanka by settling Sinhalas. When the Tamils protested, the Sri Lankan army went about their task of pacifying the Tamils by methods that, if no gloss were to be put on it, could best be described as genocidal. When few in India outside of RAW had heard of it, the LTTE for many long years acted as an effective shield between the depredations - of the Sri Lankan army and the Tamils. When the IPKF came into Jaffna it was rapturously welcomed by the local population who thought it had come to help get the Sri Lankan
army off their backs.

October 10, 1987 the day the IPKF was ordered to commence hostilities against the LTTE placed it in a no-win situation. While the perception of our command structure might have been otherwise popular support was in fact with the LTTE, the proven protectors of the Tamils. And no army can easily destroy an organised force like the LTTE go long as the people whole-heartedly support it. The Sri Lankans have currently relearnt this lesson of military history at great cost at Elephant Pass and Mullaitivu.

Countless villagers told us that we would leave sooner or later and then only the LTTE would save them and their land from the Sinhalas. As long as the issue of control over land in the north-east provinces of Sri Lanka remains unresolved (ironically, this issue wag not even mentioned in the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord), the LTTE will continue to have the support of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

The next question that comes to mind is: why can we not insulate the state of Tamil Nadu from the activities of the LTTE? Our navy during the IPKF operations periodically claimed to, have sealed off north-east Sri Lanka from the sea, The Coast Guard, occasionally, with less conviction, makes that claim now. The fact of the matter is that with the ships the Navy has at present, it is physically impossible to prevent ingress, and it is professional hypocrisy to claim that it can be done. The coastal areas of Tamil Nadu and Jaffna and Mannar are separated by the Palk Straits which are a maze of shallow water and rocks. At their narrowest they are about 40 km apart.

The LTTE uses fibreglass fishing boats with hardly any draught and up to three outboard motors mounded in tandem. These boats have no radar signature worth the name and can do the trip between the two coasts at 60 knots or in 25-30 minutes. The navy has much larger ships, meant for a blue water role, which can not move freely in these waters and can not achieve even half the speeds the LTTE boats can. So the unpalatable truth is that the LTTE always could, and will continue to be able to, move between the coasts with relative impunity and ease, Unless a number of small, fast boats of the type acquired by Sri Lanka from Israel, the state of affairs is unlikely to change.

As for the image of the average LTTE militant being brainwashed killer ready to die at the whims of his leaders, nothing could be farther from the truth. Jaffna is the most literate part of Sri Lanka with almost total literacy. Jaffna University, the prime recruiting ground of the LTTE, is considered a hallowed center of Tamil learning. One of the main reasons why the LTTE are explosive experts is that they are all educated and most of the explosive experts are science graduates. The LTTE militants understand the theory of the use of explosives and their means of detonation. Add to this their native ingenuity and years of practice and you get the 'mines' that so shocked the IPKF. These in fact were not mines at all but basically buried explosives triggered electrically. The Claymore device which was used to kill Rajiv Gandhi was a completely original, simple, and fiendishly clever piece of work.

In the jungles of Vavuniya, the infantrymen and especially the para commandos developed a healthy professional respect for the LTTE fighter, man or woman, The LTTE did not ill-treat their prisoners. In their radio reporting to their superiors (which was often intercepted by us) they were extremely accurate and precise. Sadly, one wishes the same could be said about the reports emanating from IPKF headquarters in Madras. Whereas the generals deluded themselves and the nation into believing that the LTTE had been 'checkmated', the man on the ground knew better. None listened to him. Meanwhile the generals collected their war medals for effective command of their forces under the stress and strain of battle conditions:

It is not the purpose of this article to defend or glorify the LTTE. But one man's terrorist, they say is another's freedom fighter. Currently, despite the fuss over the Sri Lankan army and LTTE fighting together in 1989 to eliminate the TNA, the LTTE are no doubt the Indian and the Sri Lankan governments' terrorists, but with equal certainty they are, and always have been, the Sri Lankan Tamil's freedom fighters.

To conclude with the basic rationale behind the LTTE's continued presence against heavy odds - and to repeat a point made earlier - the whole struggle is for land.

The logic behind the LTTE's popularity in the Tamil speaking part of Sri Lanka is that they are trying to protect what they consider to be their homeland from incursions by settlers from the south, under the Protection of the Sri Lankan army. This fact must be understood for a balanced assessment of their durability and influence in the Sri Lanka imbroglio.

At present it appears that the only politician, Indian or Sri Lankan, who understands this reality is President Premadasa, possibly because he does not belong to the ruling elite class. Unfortunately, however, recent political developments in that country do not make it likely that he will be in a position to have any significant parleys with the LTTE for some time to come.

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