Bombshell
Page 17
Darshika’s father was killed in the center of Jaffna, at the junction close to the bus station. According to Darshika’s mother, he had not been a man of influence, was not politically involved, and never discussed politics at home. He was a minor official at the post office who just minded his own business. One morning after he had left for work the Sri Lankan air force began bombing and strafing the town. A bomb fell near the bus station and Darshika’s father was one of twenty-six people who were killed. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Darshika was devastated by the loss. According to her mother, she ceased to have any feelings whatsoever. She became numb. Darshika made up her mind then to join the Tigers and aspire for a place in the suicide squad. Darshika’s account agreed with her mother’s. Since the enemy took her father, she said, she had witnessed murder with her own eyes. She said that the government routinely killed civilians in the Tamil areas. They even attacked areas that would be considered sanctuaries elsewhere. People ran to the churches for safety, even people who were not Christians, assuming that the government would never violate the sanctity of the house of God. But they bombed the churches too. Even when it was well known that villagers were taking shelter in the churches, the churches became a target of choice. The blood flowed freely in the churches, Dharshika said.56
Darshika remembered being harassed by the Sri Lankan military when she was very young. The army would turn up suddenly in their vehicles when the children went off to school. The girls were singled out for special attention, and not the kind that made them feel safe. They were afraid. Even the ten-year-old girls were scared of what the soldiers might do to them. Darshika and the others felt defenseless.57 Her mother said that the military regularly targeted women. When they mounted house-to-house searches, the soldiers would touch them unnecessarily. Even when the women tried to hide, the soldiers would find them. In the end, Darshika could not go to school or church. She felt like a prisoner in her own home.58
While Darshika was prompted by the loss of her father to join the organization, this was not necessarily what made her stay or what made her willing to kill others.59 She also had a political motivation of her own. Darshika explained that she and her friends were fighting for their homeland: “A country where people can freely live. That is why our leader is carrying on this struggle, and we are proud to be part of it. Outsiders have not seen our true face. That is why they call us terrorists. To be a terrorist we fight for true justice.”60
Darshika did not seek to kill the man who had killed her father—which would be a normal vengeful response. Rather, she joined an organization that sought to bring down the corrupt and evil government that was responsible for Tamil oppression.
As a fully committed member of the Black Tigers, Darshika was thoroughly imbued with the notions of death and sacrifice that were part and parcel of the organization. Darshika said that neither she nor the other girls cared about death. That’s just how it was. As Black Tigers, they would be told how and when they would die.61 In a perverse way, the women saw this as a form of empowerment. Their certainty gave them a kind of inner strength. Darshika’s fatalism was reinforced by her intense loyalty to the LTTE’s cause and specifically to Prabhakaran. She was raised a Catholic and initially aspired to join a religious order and devote herself to God, but after her father’s death, her passion and devotion switched to the “cult of Prabhakaran.” Her faith may come as a surprise to those who saw the conflict as one between Hindus and Buddhists; many Tamil Tigers were Christian and the organization reflected the ethnic and religious demographics of the Tamil population as a whole. Most Tigers were Hindu, but the LTTE’s ideology was secular and nationalist. Yet the worship of Prabhakaran matched the religious dedication of any jihadi to Islam.
Time magazine’s Alex Perry understood this dynamic. For him, there was no doubt that that the Tigers genuinely loved Prabhakaran and never questioned anything he did or said. His name was so revered and inspired such awe that Tigers would not actually use it. Instead they referred to him as “the Leader.” In every Tiger’s home, Prabhakaran’s picture sat on a desk where you might expect family photographs. Daya Somasundaram, a Jaffna psychiatrist, alleged that the faithful made pilgrimages to Prabhakaran’s former home in Valveddithurai to fill little boxes of soil “like a holy ritual, as though they [were] collecting water from the Ganges.” For many of Somasundaram’s patients, Prabhakaran was higher than their own god.62
Perry’s depiction is spot-on. In every Tamil home I visited there was a large portrait of Prabhakaran, garlanded, surrounded by incense, and set in a place of honor. Having one’s photo taken with the Leader was a great source of pride. Darshika and her friend Puhalchudar venerated Prabhakaran like a deity. Before he was slain, S.P. Tamilselvan, the second-in-command of the LTTE, told me, “They love him and adore him as mother, father, brother or god.” The organization encouraged and fostered Prabhakaran’s cult-like status through imagery, poetry, and songs. Prabhakaran was like a sun. Nobody could even think of eclipsing him.63
PUHALCHUDAR
For best friends Darshika and Puhalchudar, membership in the movement was a huge honor. The girls embraced every challenge together and looked forward to the day when they would be called upon to conduct their final mission. Darshika said that they went often to the cemetery to remember and celebrate fallen LTTE war heroes. They left garlands and burned incense at the grave sites. They did not fear death for themselves.
In conversation, they were almost cavalier about the inevitability of their deaths. In describing a possible suicide attack, they waxed poetic about what would happen to their remains. They knew that when they blew themselves up they would likely be reduced to hundreds of pieces scattered all around, a piece here, a body part there. There would be nothing left for either their families or the authorities to identify. But if the battle was won, the organization would build a tomb at the site to honor them; if not, the LTTE would build a small memorial elsewhere, or the girls would be commemorated by a picture during the Heroes’ Day celebrations every November.64
The LTTE International Secretariat issued a glossy booklet, the Sooriya Puthalvargal Memorial Souvenir, every few years with the photos and details of the fallen martyrs. The booklets were distributed at events around the Tamil diaspora and listed the Tigers’ noms de guerre and their stats (including how many of the enemy they had killed). The 2003 edition of the Sooriya Puthalvargal Memorial Souvenir contained ninety-six pages in which the most “daring military maneuvers in contemporary warfare” performed by 240 Black Tigers were described. Some were shown smiling, some were stern-looking, and some even appeared aloof. For average Tamils, the fighters on the pages of the Sooriya Puthalvargal were superheroes of the highest order. Tamils regarded them as part of their extended family.65
Darshika and Puhalchudar were consumed by thoughts of battle against their enemy. Whenever they closed their eyes, they said, they dreamed of battles. In their dreams, they shot at the enemy but their bullets had no effect. Darshika explained it this way:
In our dreams, the bullets never come. The soldiers don’t die. The more we shoot, the more they keep coming. In reality, when we have no bullets left, we can’t do anything … we have our cyanide capsules. If we bite it in our sleep, we won’t wake up. Once you put the cyanide capsule in your mouth and bite it, the glass breaks and cuts your tongue. The poison seeps into your blood. This way, even if the girls are injured, and they cannot bite down onto the capsule, they can still break it and pour it directly into their wounds. The poison in the glass cylinder mixes with your blood, that’s it.66
Puhalchudar was thirteen years old when her family was permanently displaced. The army had kicked them out of their house in Jaffna and they lost everything. They wandered around for weeks, staying with family or distant relatives to escape the violence. Puhalchudar had to quit school and stop studying. She remembered how upset she was not to be able to go to school. During the day it was too dangerous for the g
irls to leave the house. During the evenings there was heavy fighting all around them. The family lived in a simple shelter built by her parents adjacent to a big army base. Her parents would sit outside all night, watching and waiting to see whether this was the night they would have to pack up the kids and make a run for it. When the twenty-millimeter shells started falling in front of their house, they decided that the war was too close for comfort. They, along with thousands of other refugees, fled for their lives.
Puhalchudar and her brother got separated from the rest of the family when they found themselves on one side of a rickety bridge, their parents on the opposite. As a result of nearly constant shelling by the Sri Lankan military, the bridge had huge holes in it. The two children could not safely get across. For a time, they just stood facing the approach to the bridge while the shelling and gunfire moved closer and closer. Finally some Tigers defending the bridge offered to help the two children reach the other side. Puhalchudar was too young to understand much about the war, but she believes that they survived only because the guerrillas came to their rescue. She owed the Tigers her life. As soon as her brother was safe in her mother’s arms, Puhalchudar left the family to become a Black Tiger.67
The women of the LTTE formed very intense friendships. Darshika and Puhalchudar had spent every day together for the seven years before their interview. They exercised together, practiced martial arts together, ate together, slept in the same room, and confided all of their secrets in one another. “Our friendship means that we share each other’s happiness and sorrow. We help each other whenever help is needed. Of course we are prepared to separate, but as long as we are in the same unit, we do everything for one another.” Puhalchudar said that of everyone, Darshika was closest to her. “Also our Leader [Prabhakaran], who takes care of everything.”68
Their complete and utter devotion to Prabhakaran overrode their personal relationships. The women in the movement had invented a new family, one that was based not on blood or kinship but on a new identity—one of nationalism and camaraderie. Darshika and Puhalchudar prioritize loyalty to the Leader over all else. They discuss what would happen in the event of a betrayal. “Our Leader started the movement for the good of the people,” said Darshika, “but if one person betrays us, we accept losing that person with no regret.” Puhalchudar echoed this sentiment: “Instead of losing many people, it is better to just shoot the one traitor.”69
The young women’s comments dovetail with observations made by some outside observers. For example, New York Times journalist John Burns once likened Prabhakaran’s firm control over the organization to a rule of terror in the city of Jaffna. “According to scores of accounts from defectors and others who have escaped Tiger tyranny, many of his own lieutenants have been murdered; Tamils who have criticized him, even mildly or in jest have been picked up and placed for years in dungeons, half starved, hauled out periodically for a beating by their guards.”70
Asked how they would react if one of them betrayed the cause, Darshika replied, “I would not do anything if someone said Puhalchudar was a traitor, but if it was proved, I would not hesitate to shoot her.” Puhalchudar agreed: “Everything, good or bad, goes right up to the Leader. So if we betray the movement, the Leader will be the final judge. He would probably tell someone else to do it. But if he tells me to shoot Darshika, I’ll shoot her.”71
Even for those women who survived government assassination attempts and hours-long pitched battles, life in the LTTE was difficult. They wore shapeless fatigues. They braided their hair and tucked it tightly under a military cap. Rarely were they able to wear perfume or makeup. The LTTE enforced a strict code of conduct that Darshika and Puhalchudar abided by scrupulously. Prabhakaran set the example that they and other cadres were required to follow. Like the LTTE cadres, Prabhakaran did not drink liquor or smoke tobacco. Even tea, coffee, and carbonated drinks were considered taboo. Sex outside marriage was forbidden and those cadres who violated the code were executed irrespective of seniority or personal loyalty. Gambling and financial dishonesty were also punishable by death. Homosexuality, interestingly, was not a capital offence; however, it was dealt with by public humiliation.72 Prabhakaran initially outlawed marriage, but after he fell in love with Madhivadhani Erambu, an agricultural student kidnapped by his guerrillas, he changed his mind. They married on October 1, 1984, and had two sons and a daughter. He subsequently altered the rules to allow other senior cadres to wed.
Following Prabhakaran’s example, the LTTE decreed that members could marry when women turned thirty-five and men turned forty.73 By the time a woman attained the marrying age, only another LTTE cadre would consider marrying such a battle-hardened female. And when they did get married, off came the trousers: they were expected to wear traditional female garb—colorful saris or the salwar kameez—grow their hair long, and look feminine again. All their efforts and accomplishments within the movement had no effect on the ways in which the women were expected to behave. The former female cadres were just like any other Tamil girl: demure, obedient, and second-class. Their sole function in Tamil society, like generations of women before them, was to give birth to future fighters.
MENAKE
Many young Tamils found the idea of joining the organization glamorous and an expression of dedication to the cause and the Leader. But their attitude hardly reflected the whole story. After April 1995, 60 percent of Tamil casualties in the civil war were under the age of eighteen. This number was driven in part by the LTTE’s policy of forced conscription of child soldiers, and in part by the deliberate targeting of civilians (especially in schools and orphanages) by government forces. The young people in Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the violence and inhabited a world in which brutality and death were the norm. The LTTE kidnapped many young girls, giving them no option other than the life of a child soldier.
Menake did not grow up with the dream of becoming a Black Tiger. She was handed over to the organization against her will by uncaring relatives. Her home was an impoverished fishing village in the northeast of the island. Her father drank heavily and regularly beat his wife. When Menake was three her mother died from one of her father’s assaults. When she was seven, her father raped her repeatedly over the course of a four-day drunken binge. Finally her grandfather rescued her from her father’s abusive care; she never saw the man again. When she was fifteen, her grandparents died and her uncle and aunt took her in. They were reluctant guardians, however, and in 2000 they sacrificed her for the cause. The LTTE had levied a human tax on its constituents: every Tamil family was ordered to donate a family member, male or female, to the organization to be trained for combat.74 So Menake’s uncle and aunt gave her up to the LTTE.75
Menake had cried and begged them not to take her. “I told them I didn’t want to die so young. But a woman officer told me, ‘Sorry, we can’t help you. Your relatives said you came here of your own volition.’”76 The LTTE has been cited by international observers for coercive recruitment by kidnapping, forced mobilization, and extortion. They fended off such attacks by claiming that the government had created so many orphans, and they alone were willing and able to provide for them.
Menake was forced to become a fighter, but she chose to become a would-be martyr. “I had nerve damage to my spine after falling from an LTTE tractor. The doctor said I might become paralyzed when I got older. I thought, why continue to live?” Menake felt that her life was over because she was physically damaged. Her only option was the life of a martyr. “A lot of girls were volunteering to be suicide bombers, so I thought I would, too … I felt I had no other choice. The LTTE calls its suicide missions thatkodai, Tamil for “gift of self.” It made me feel that life still had a purpose.”77 Menake, like other women in the organization, believed that death was sanctified in some way. For her, the main difference between Black Tigers and regular Tamil Tigers was that the regular Tigers didn’t know when they would be killed. Black Tigers knew precisely when they would achieve their ultimate destiny.
Menake’s experience contrasted with that of Darshika and Puhalchudar in significant ways. She lacked the comfort provided by friendship and definitely did not share their total devotion to the cause. Menake recalled that in her first weapons class, her group was handed sticks at first. After they had practiced with the sticks, they graduated to small arms. When they gave her a Kalashnikov, she realized that she might actually have to kill someone.
She had never really thought about whether the Sinhalese people were good or bad. She was, however, subjected to the same indoctrination—a constantly reiterated refrain that the Sri Lankan government is the enemy—that every LTTE member experienced. The terrorist organization told the cadres over and over that the government had perpetrated the worst human rights violations and that they had murdered innocent civilians. In order to take back what was rightfully theirs, the leaders told the girls, they would have to kill enemy soldiers.
Every evening, Menake and the other recruits watched military films, many of them in Chinese, along with some produced specially by the LTTE itself. The films showed the young recruits how to fight, how to use weapons, how to kill. The movies carried a consistent message, that when Tamil girls die in the service of the organization, they become heroes.78 But despite the training, the movies, and the constantly repeated message, for Menake, the prospect of becoming a suicide bomber remained bleak. She was consumed by sadness. She was miserable that she would never have a family of her own. She would never hold a child in her arms and have a normal life. That was her biggest sorrow.79
In September 2006, Menake was given orders to blow up the Sri Lankan prime minister, Ratnasiri Wickremanayake. In spite of her reluctant recruitment to the cause, she enjoyed the notoriety and star treatment she received prior to going on her mission. On the eve of the attack, like all suicide bombers, Menake was given her last meal with an LTTE leader, in her case Pottu Amman, second-in-command and head of intelligence. She was offered the meal of her choice, which included chicken, fried rice, vegetable curry, and vanilla ice cream. “Amman said I would be known as a mahaveera, or great warrior, and venerated in a way I’d never been in life. Only then would I be given a military rank, based on the importance of my target.”80 Menake recalled that Amman was tall and handsome. For her, he seemed like a movie star.81 Also according to standard procedure, a photographer took one last photo of Menake and Pottu Amman, so that after she was dead, it could be decorated with garlands and incense and placed on display at the center of her village.