http://austms.blogspot.com.au/
01 March 2021
LTTE LEADER
LACKED INTUITION TO PROTECT HIS GROUP?
By being within a group that recognizes itself as a Sovereign group, and by being true to them, one is able to read them at depth and identify with their needs as if it were ours. The first of such units known to us is the family. Families that have firm relationships are recognized as being more civilised than those that are enjoy early freedom. If that freedom is based on one’s truth and there is separation pain – natural structure develops to support the new branch. If the parent group that the new broke off from is not owed by the new branch and v.v. both would have exponential powers of Independence. A parent unit could owe the new branch when it has received from the younger unit / member more than it has spent on the younger unit / member. The measurable units are money and status.
Likewise,
in any community structure. The Sri Lankan Tamil community is struggling to
maintain this balance of Sovereignty in the post-war period for similar reasons
as to why the Sinhalese community is also facing difficulties at global level. The
parent here is the law abiding multicultural Tamil Community. The branch is de
facto governance group of armed rebels. Majority Tamils known to me would
hesitate to accept De Facto marriages. Yet most of them seem to accept it in community
governance.
The
Tamil Diaspora leader with whom I had conflict recently, asked:
[Why
you don’t talk about the cremation issue. ]
I
did but he probably had not seen it. Interestingly, Universal power of truth
brought to my attention the following published in the paper by ‘ Building
cemeteries, constructing identities. Funerary practices and nationalist
discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka’ by Cristiana Natali :
Before 1991 we burnt
[the fighters] according to Hindu rites. If the parents asked for the ashes, we
gave them. But Christians and Muslims didn’t take ashes. We had this problem.
There were Christian soldiers, and the parents didn’t want to burn them. A
meeting of the leaders was organized and they decided to study what did for
their soldiers other countries like America and England. They saw that
they used to bury their soldiers. Then they decided to proceed in the same way ]
Personal
interview on 7 December 2002, of Mr. Pon Tyagam, in charge of Maaveerar’s office .
The
reason for the change was stated to be taken from America and England
who have Christian majority. Cristiana Natali continues on to present the
following:
[It
is not surprising that the LTTE chose to adopt funerary practices utilized by
Western armies. In fact, Tigers do not like the epithet of “terrorist” and
claim the status of liberation fighters. That is why they never miss an
opportunity to emphasize that they are a regular army: for instance, they point
out that they wear uniforms. From this perspective, an acceptance of Western
military funerary customs might be considered a logic consequence of such a
claim.
Conversely,
what is really surprising is to ascertain that the official explanation for the
transition from cremation to burial is never mentioned by civilians or
fighters. Indeed, if questioned on this issue, both tend to refer to other
explanations for the change. In the course of my fieldwork, I interviewed LTTE
fighters, Tamil civilians living in both LTTE- and government-controlled
territories, and eventually Tamils living in Italy. The persons interviewed
gave me different interpretations for the transition, but nobody referred to
the official one. This official explanation is probably neither significant nor
acceptable to Tamil civilians, particularly for the relatives of the dead. In fact,
when a daughter or a son, a sister or a brother are given burial as opposed to
the customary ritual cremation, it is likely that relatives would not be
satisfied with an explanation that justified this practice on the basis of
conformity with Western military tradition. Indeed, it is more than likely that
they would seek other more meaningful explanations.
Thanks
to the exception represented by the interment of ascetics, Tamil civilians have
the opportunity to place the burial practice within the mainstream of Hindu
tradition. In order to provide an understanding of the symbolic analogy between
ascetics’ interment and the Maaveerar’s burial we have to dwell upon the
self-representation of the LTTE fighters. The combatants are portrayed as men
and women who are not involved in the “bad habits” of ordinary people: they do
not drink, do not smoke and do not have forbidden sexual intercourses.
Abstaining from alcohol and cigarettes is significant particularly for male
fighters, because in Tamil culture women are not supposed to drink or smoke.
With regard to female fighters the most important peculiarity is therefore
their purity:
The
LTTE ideal of the armed guerrilla woman puts forward an image of purity and
virginity […]. The women are described as pure, virtuous. Their chastity, their
unity of purpose and their sacrifice of social life supposedly give them
strength. The armed virginal woman cadre ensures that this notion of purity,
based on denial, is a part of the social construction of what it means to be a
woman according to the world view of the LTTE (Coomaraswamy quoted in
Schrijvers 1999: 316).
Michael
Roberts suggests that the ascetic mould of the LTTE fighters implies “the
influence of Hindu tradition of tapas (strength via abstinence) as well as
Maoist strains of revolutionary self- discipline” (1996: 256). The ascetic
attitude of fighters is also a subject of LTTE-filmography. In this regard
Peter Schalk, explaining the plot of a film on the Black Tigers – the suicidal
commandos –, points out:
The hero of the film is described as a tavan, “ascetic”, not by
the word, but by his behaviour. Although he is of marriageable age, there is no
sign of a girlfriend […]. Living in the group of Black Tigers, he seems to be
dedicated to the holy aim [to free Tamil Eelam] only (1997: 160).]
Whatever the reason,
the above is a deviation from the Hindu cultural practice of Cremation. As per
my interpretation – Cremation confirmed immediate detachment from the form. The
combatants I met were not ascetical in their nature. Nor are their current
followers.
I find this ‘branching
off’ to be of negative value due to
young ones not settling their dues to the parental structure and abandoning the
family structure before settling their dues as mentioned above. I feel also
that this would have weakened the intuitive connection that the law abiding
Tamils had with the official structures including within the Sri Lankan
government.
The Sydney Morning Herald article ‘World's Tamils can only watch as Sri Lanka edges
closer to war’ was published on 12
January 2008 – more than a year before the Mullivaikal attack which ended in
May 2009. As per that presentation:
[Schalk's research on the 17,000 Tiger "martyrs"
should also caution Western politicians who try to lump them with al-Qaeda as
suicidal terrorists. Although the Tamils are mostly Hindu (against the
majority Buddhists backing the Government) their struggle has no religious
character. They are buried, not cremated. They are not promised any glorious
afterlife.
Dr Kohona said
it was popular outrage at Tiger ceasefire violations that had forced the
Government's hand. But he also made it clear
that Colombo thought the Tigers were now beatable, and dismissed fears Sri
Lanka was heading for an all-out war with massive civilian casualties.
"The LTTE
doesn't have the capability to launch an all-out confrontation any more. It's
seriously lacking in cadres, and we also believe its levels of ammunition are
very low since the sinking of the four supply ships," he said. In his last
annual "Great Heroes' Day" address on November 27, the Tigers'
supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, himself seemed to strike an unintended note of
desperation when he railed at the international community for moves to isolate
his movement.
Colombo hopes that a "moderate" Tamil majority
outside the Tiger zone of control in the north-east will accept a proposal for
devolution within a unitary state that a constitutional review committee will
publish in coming weeks.
But this
raises the question why Mr Rajapaksa could not wait these few weeks to publish
his proposals for a political solution and assess the reaction. Instead he has
chosen the path of military conquest, one on which many of his predecessors
have been bloodied before.]
As an Australian Tamil said when I returned to Sydney
after being with those in the camps, as a guerrilla force they ought to have
gone into hiding. But once they think they are an official force – they lose
the courage of ‘freedom’ that a guerrilla force enjoys.
I am therefore unmoved by acts of Martyrdom undertaken
not only in London by Mrs Ambigai Selvakumar who paid her respects to LTTE nor the fast undertaken by
the group headed by Mr Velan in Northern Sri Lanka.
I would focus on sharing my sense of Independence with
needy Tamils in Sri Lanka’s multicultural areas.
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