‘Tamil Tigers’ extinct in

Sri Lanka, but not abroad

Berlin: Daud Haider, well-known Bengali poet and our gracious host, was keen to treat us to a home-cooked meal which would include, apart from prawn curry, karela fry, which I presumed would be done Bangladeshi style, and daal with drumsticks.

On the way back to his apartment, tired and hungry after tramping around the city the whole day, we stopped by at a store owned by a Sri Lankan Tamil family. It had a narrow doorway and seemed more like a corridor that had been converted into a shop packed with shelves laden with generic desi groceries, spices and an enormous variety of dried fish. “Imported from Jaffna,” the young man at the counter told me, the hint of pride in his voice unmistakable. So was everything else at his store, barring the fresh green vegetables, which were possibly grown in a Berlin backyard, and the Basmati rice from Pakistan.

Daud did his shopping while I looked around, checking the stuff on display. That’s when I chanced upon a stack of flyers printed on glossy paper that had been kept in full view, obviously for the benefit of the store’s Tamil patrons. The flyers showed a solemn (though slain) chief of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in his trademark fatigues with a pistol in a hip holster against a black backdrop. The text, in Tamil, called upon all who “thirst for a Tamil homeland” to gather at Dortmund for a meeting to pay homage to their “national hero”. The significance of November 27, when the meeting is scheduled, was lost on me. If any reader has a clue, I would be grateful to be enlightened. Shopping done, we left the store with a copy of the flyer and Daud’s bagful of vegetables, including half-a-dozen very pale skinnedkarelas which could have done with some sunshine.

Over the next few days I asked around and found that two years after Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed, along with his lieutenants and cadre, and the LTTE obliterated by the Sri Lankan Army, the ruthless man who terrorised Sinhalese and brutalised Tamils alike is very much alive in the imagination of Germany’s — as well as Europe’s — Tamil diaspora. In life, Prabhakaran tested the loyalty of his ‘Tigers’, many of whom were in their early teens, by asking them to turn themselves into human bombs. Any ‘Tamil Tiger’ taken alive by security forces was under instruction to swallow a cyanide pill; nobody is known to have violated that order. Over the quarter century that he led a horrific campaign of terror for a Tamil Eelam, Prabhakaran set standards for terrorists around the world. The final battle against the LTTE was no doubt vicious and exacted terrible collateral damage, but in the end the evil that Prabhakaran and his organisation had come to symbolise were destroyed root and branch. On May 18, 2009, Prabhakaran was killed while trying to escape the military blockade of Mullaitivu. He met a violent end, as did the entire top leadership of the LTTE.

Not many tears were shed for him in Jaffna or elsewhere in Sri Lanka. If the Sinhalese were triumphant, the Tamil felt relieved. A dark era of death and destruction had come to an end. Sri Lanka had become the first and till now the only country to have won a decisive victory against terrorism. Such was the scale of its defeat that the LTTE became history in Sri Lanka. But in Europe, the LTTE survives, having morphed into various front organisations with seemingly misleading names. There’s a reason for this, apart from the emotional appeal of long-distance ‘nationalism’ to which diasporas tend to be vulnerable. Many of the Jaffna Tamils who had made their way to Europe and sought political asylum there, insisting they would suffer persecution and worse if forced to return home, a claim bolstered by the lurid propaganda of human rights groups like Amnesty International, became fund-raisers for the LTTE. They ran extortion rackets, forcing fellow Tamil immigrants to part with their meagre and miserable wages, indulged in human trafficking, bringing in young Tamil girls who were pushed into prostitution, and traded in proscribed drugs. The profits of their criminal enterprises were channelled into buying arms and ammunition for the LTTE that were routed back to Jaffna. After the US listed the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, the EU had no other option but to follow suit. But despite the EU ban on the LTTE, which came in May 2006, the activities of its front organisations remained uncurbed and unrestrained. The Tamil Coordination Committee alone was able to ‘raise’ three million euros between July 2007 and April 2009.

The recent trial of five Tamils, including Selliah, the ‘global book-keeper’ of the the LTTE, charged with mobilising funds through illegal means and trying to resurrect the LTTE, in a Dutch court fetched startling revelations. Prosecutor Ward Ferdinandusse told the court that “although the Tigers have been defeated in Sri Lanka, here in Europe they are very much alive”. The EU’s police coordination organisation, Europol, in its ‘Terrorism Situation and Trend Report’ for 2011 said ‘Tamil Tigers’ in Europe continue with their extortion and “are actively involved in drugs and human trafficking, the facilitation of illegal immigration, credit card skimming, money laundering, and fraud for the purpose of funding terrorist (support) operations”. Tragically, the Dutch court, while sentencing the five men to prison terms ranging from two to six years, refused to accept the prosecution’s case that the LTTE was and remains a terrorist organisation. This despite the EU’s official listing of the LTTE as a terrorist outfit. Stunningly, the court ruled that the LTTE’s war in which at least 100,000 lives have been lost, was a “non-international armed conflict” and hence could not be classified as terrorism but as ‘war crimes’ (by the state). The defence has seized upon the ruling to press its case for removing the LTTE from the EU’s list of terrorist organisations. It is more than likely that the European Court of Justice, where a petition for this purpose is pending, will pander to this self-defeating view.

The tolerance that is shown by Europe’s ‘liberal’ Governments and courts towards those who front for terrorist organisations, be it the LTTE or the LeT, the Taliban or Al Qaeda, only serves to underscore Europe’s duplicity. While mouthing clichés on the need to fight terrorism, it allows bogus concern for human rights to ride roughshod over genuine concerns in countries (like India and Sri Lanka) which have to deal with terrorists. Ironically, Europe stands to lose the most because of this duplicitous approach. Germany allows the LTTE flag to be displayed at football matches and LTTE propaganda material to be freely distributed. The district court in The Hague may have held five Tamils guilty of extortion and other crimes to raise funds for the LTTE’s revival, but that does not account for what 800,000 immigrant Jaffna Tamils are up to across the continent.

India cannot afford to take a casual view of this reality. Maoists have sympathisers among the Indian diaspora in Europe and human rights groups with considerable influence over European Governments jump to the defence of the Red Marauders every time they are brought to justice. Recall the extraordinary interest shown by the EU in securing the release of Binayak Sen on bail. New Delhi must forge a common front with Colombo. If it doesn’t, Beijing will do so. China’s gain will be India’s loss, though not for the first time.

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