The Tamil Separatist War in Sri Lanka

Channa Wickremesekera

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317293859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

The complex and long-drawn war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended with the defeat of the Tigers in 2009. This book provides a military history of the conflict in tracing its evolution from a battle between a ragtag guerrilla force and a mainly ceremonial army to one between an organized guerrilla force with semi-conventional capability and a state military apparatus that had morphed into a large and potent force with modern armour, aircraft and naval vessels. Using a wide range of sources this book offers an incisive analysis of the progress and conclusion of one of the longest and most destructive wars in modern South Asia.

Comprehensive and accessible, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asia, especially Sri Lanka, military history, politics, defence and strategic studies, as well as the general reader.

1 From assassins to guerrillas

The birth of the Tamil rebellion

DOI: 10.4324/9781315646053-2

The Tamils are not the Chechens of South Asia. There is no long tradition of a fierce sense of independence tenaciously defended. Nor are they like the Kurds, a minority maintaining its identity in the face of centuries of conquest, displacement and discrimination. Tamils in Sri Lanka are a minority fighting majority domination which is of relatively recent origin. The reasons for this lie in the Tamils’ unique experience as people in Sri Lanka.

Today Tamils are the dominant ethnic group in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka. They share the Eastern Province with the Sinhalese and the Muslims, the former being the majority community in the island. The Tamil influx into the Eastern Province is of more recent origin, but the heartland of Tamil rebellion, the northern Jaffna Peninsula, has been home to them for centuries.

On a map, the Jaffna Peninsula appears like a patchwork of small landmasses at the northern tip of Sri Lanka, separated by fingers of water. The three main segments in this collage are Vadamarachchi, Thenmarachchi and Valikamam. Of these, Valikamam is the most populous, with the capital of the Northern Province, Jaffna, and its suburbs occupying its south-western corner. The waters that surround the landmasses are branches of the Jaffna lagoon, which spread inland, fanning into a landscape of mudflats and mangroves. The land is almost completely flat with no mountains, rivers or lakes to break its general evenness and contiguity except the swampy lagoon. The peninsula itself is connected to the mainland at its south-eastern end by a slender strip of land. To the west of this isthmus, at Elephant Pass, the main highway from the south crosses the shallow sea, linking the peninsula with the mainland. Between the peninsula and the mainland lies the Jaffna – or Kilali – lagoon, an expanse of shallow water with a maximum depth of about three metres. A string of eight islands to the immediate west of the peninsula completes the geography of the northern end of the island.

The mainland immediately below the peninsula is sparsely populated and relatively flat, but unlike the peninsula it is irrigated by a number of rivers and dotted with numerous man-made irrigation tanks, some of vast proportions. On the east, the coast is broken by several inlets, while on the west the coast caves in to form the Gulf of Mannar. The islet of Mannar off the north-west coast of the island forms part of a chain of reefs, the remnants of a land bridge that connected Sri Lanka with the neighbouring subcontinent millions of years ago.

The predominance of the Tamils in this part of the island dates back centuries. It is a story of migration, conquest and survival.

A little history

When Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) gained independence from Britain in 1948, the Jaffna Peninsula and the adjacent mainland had long established itself as a predominantly Tamil region. Tamils had begun migrating from the neighbouring South India centuries ago, arriving as traders and adventurers. Tamil domination of the region, however, began with invasions. From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, the armies of the Chola and Pandyan kings of South India overran the North, pushing the Sinhalese kingdoms southwards, leading to the emergence of a Tamil kingdom in the North. By the fourteenth century, it extended over the greater part of the northern plains on the mainland, swallowing much of what was once the kingdom of Anuradhapura. With the entrenchment of Tamil rule in the North, the eastern seaboard also became gradually populated by Tamil communities, Sinhala settlements in the East retreating to the interior, under the shadow of the central highlands.¹ From the north, Jaffna cast covetous eyes on the southern kingdoms, struggling to recover from the loss of their seats of power to the North. Invasions of the south ended in failure, but the kingdom of Jaffna remained strong, looming as a potential predator to the North. Then in 1449, a new ambitious king from the kingdom of Kotte, in the south, Parakramabahu VI (1415–67), made a bid for the overlordship of the entire island, sending an army to conquer Jaffna. The North fell to the conquering army, and for the first time in two centuries, a ruler of a Sinhala kingdom claimed overlordship over the North. But it was short-lived. Upon the death of Parakramabahu VI, Jaffna reverted to its former independence while the Sinhala polity fractured into several kingdoms and chieftaincies.

The Jaffna kingdom retained its autonomy from the southern Sinhalese rulers until the early seventeenth century, now a mere shadow of its greatness in the fourteenth century, but still surviving as an independent kingdom. This was put to an end by the advent of European colonial powers. The Portuguese had begun establishing themselves in the coastal regions of Sri Lanka in the sixteenth century, and after several attempts, they finally brought Jaffna under their control in 1618. The peninsula now became part of the Portuguese Indian Empire with a separate administration based in Mannar. From the Portuguese, Jaffna passed over to the Dutch, who succeeded them in 1658. Jaffna became a British possession in 1796 when the British took over Dutch-administered territory in the island.

While Jaffna lost its independence and passed from one European master to another, the Sinhalese fought a long but losing battle against European encroachment. The seat of Sinhala power had shifted to Kandy in the central hills in the late sixteenth century, where, among the rugged Kandyan hills, the Sinhalese fought off repeated attempts by the Portuguese and the Dutch to bring it to heel. The British finally succeeded where the Portuguese and the Dutch had failed, conquering Kandy in 1815 and becoming the first power to rule the entire island in nearly four centuries.

Thus, from the thirteenth century the ethno-political geography of the island was dominated by two distinct regions: the Tamil region in the north and the Sinhala region in the south. They also developed into distinct cultural regions – the Tamil region based on the Tamil language and Hindu religion and the Sinhala region based on Sinhala language and Buddhism. They were also more or less politically independent of each other. The integration of the Tamil North into the maritime dominions of the Portuguese and the Dutch ended the independence of the Tamils but still kept them separate from the rule of the Sinhalese in the south, whose main seat of power had now shifted to Kandy in the central hills. The eastern coast at this time seems to have accepted Kandyan overlordship. But the separation of the North was firmly established. Even in the East, the Tamil language and culture predominated with the majority of the population being either ethnic Tamil or Tamil-speaking Muslims. The British conquest of the whole island in 1796 did not bring an end to this. Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures maintained their dominance in their respective heartlands regardless of British hegemony over the island. Indeed, the British were making a tacit acknowledgement of this reality when they divided the whole island into five administrative provinces demarcating the Tamil-dominated North and the East as the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

However, this does not mean that Tamils and Sinhalese were separated from each other as peoples. Far from it. Tamil-speaking communities were part and parcel of the society outside the North and the East with considerable numbers of them engaged in trade and commercial activities in and around ports. Sinhala kings and members of the royal families frequently intermarried with South Indian princely families. The last dynasty of Kandyan kings was of South Indian descent, and their rule led to the emergence of a strong Tamil presence in the town of Kandy.² The British had also inducted a large number of labourers from South India into their tea and coffee plantations in the central highlands, and they formed a substantial Tamil population among the Sinhalese in former Kandyan territories. During British rule, many Tamils and Sinhalese from the upper strata of society came to enjoy the advantages of an English education and they interacted freely with each other. There were also thriving Tamil business communities in many parts of the island. These Tamils, however, lived among the Sinhalese with the tacit acceptance of the primacy of the Sinhalese as the majority community and Buddhism as the dominant religion. For the members of the elite, ethnicity hardly mattered. They were largely deracinated, having more in common with each other than their ethnic communities. But it was different with Tamils in the North. There they enjoyed the position of cultural dominance in a region outside the influence of the Sinhalese. Under British rule, even the dominance of the Sinhala culture in areas outside the North and the East did not feel overbearing without any corresponding political clout. Sinhala language and culture predominated, but it was the British who ruled, a fact driven home by the use of English as the language of administration.

This changed with independence in 1948. Now, with independent Sri Lanka having to elect governments by majority vote, Tamils for the first time faced the real possibility of being ruled by a government dominated by the Sinhalese. This should not have caused much anxiety had the deracinated elite who took over from the British hat stuck to their cosmopolitan ways in conducting the politics of post-independent Sri Lanka – or Ceylon as it was known then. But the leaders of new Ceylon found the lure of political power too hard to resist. And the reality of coming to power through majority votes in a land of different ethnic groups that still thought largely in pre-industrial terms of caste, ethnicity and religion made communal politics very attractive. Island wide, there were simply more Sinhalese than Tamils and more Buddhists than Hindus, Christians and Muslims. And in the North and the East, the Tamils outnumbered other communities.

Therefore, instead of focusing on building a national identity that every ethnic group in the island could lay a claim to, the leaders of independent Ceylon resorted to using communal sentiment to ride to power. It was easy and cheap, in more ways than one. So when SWRD Bandaranayake had the opportunity to tilt at national political power by pandering to the wishes of the Buddhist clergy, he grabbed it by both hands, promising to make Sinhalese the official language. His party came to power with a powerful mandate in the 1956 elections, and the new prime minister went about delivering on his promise. It was a ridiculous policy that forced Tamils to learn Sinhalese in order to get jobs in the government. Predictably, the Tamils who were the majority in the North and the East voiced their opposition to the decision, seeing it, quite understandably, as an attempt to marginalise them in the new nation. Their resentment was only exacerbated by the failure to negotiate a settlement with the government. Attempts by Sri Lankan governments to redress Tamil grievances through a measure of power sharing in 1958 and 1965 were stymied by the increasingly powerful lobby of Sinhala nationalists led by Buddhist monks.³ This made many Tamils feel that the Sri Lankan government had little interest in going against the strident voices of the Sinhala nationalists.

Their protests had initially been peaceful, the usual demonstrations and sit-ins. They tried it in 1958 and 1961, the latter an exceptionally successful satyagraha which attracted widespread support from the Tamils in Jaffna and Batticaloa in the Eastern Province. The Sri Lankan government’s response, however, was stern. The protesters were treated like contemptible upstarts. And to remind them of their place the military was called in, and the satyagrahis were handled with harshness, sometimes even with brutality.⁴ The resistance gradually petered out. The sit-ins had galvanised the people in the North into action but achieved little more than ensuring that the government remained firm in its stance.

By the early 1970s, the increasing ineffectualness of the tactics of the old guard of Tamil political leadership was beginning to frustrate the youth. The old leaders were too steeped in traditional methods of persuasion. Sit-ins and petitions did not work with a government that seemed too closely bound to the majority community. They needed something more imaginative – and powerful.

The rise of Tamil militancy

That alternative was provided by growing militancy, led by a number of militant youth organisations that had sprouted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam or LTTE, which was to gain notoriety later as a ruthless and powerful Tamil guerrilla group, was one of them. It began its life as the Tamil New Tigers (TNT) formed by Velupillai Prabhakaran, a youth from Velvetithurai in Vadamarachchi in Jaffna. The TNT and another group under a youth called Nadarajah Thangathurai were the two leading militant groups at the time. Both were committed to armed struggle as a means of fighting Sinhalese hegemony.

Under pressure from these groups, the main Tamil political party, the Tamil United Front (TUF), changed its name ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 From assassins to guerrillas: the birth of the Tamil rebellion
• 2 Learning to fight: the Sri Lankan military
• 3 The first showdown: ‘Operation Liberation’
• 4 The IPKF interlude and the Tigers’ return
• 5 The army on the offensive
• 6 The rise of the Sea Tigers and the battle for Kilali
• 7 A new regime, a new war
• 8 The problem of the Wanni
• 9 The East in ferment
• 10 The rise and fall of the Unceasing Waves
• 11 The peace that failed and the reconquest of the East
• 12 The rolling up of the Wanni
• 13 The last retreat of the Tamil Tigers
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index