The Reinvention of Suicide Bombing by
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
On the evening of May 21, 1991, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was campaigning on behalf of the Congress Party in the town of Sriperumbudour, near the city of Madras (since renamed Chennai), the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. An enthusiastic crowd had gathered to hear him speak in the shadow of a statue of his mother, Indira Gandhi, who while serving as prime minister had been assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 in a revenge shooting. Rajiv Gandhi was mobbed by his supporters, many of whom hoped to honor him by placing a garland of flowers around his neck. One woman in particular struggled forward and was temporarily restrained by a police officer. Gandhi asked the officer to relax, and she allowed the young woman to approach Gandhi, ostensibly to garland him. The woman dropped the garland, however, and bent down to retrieve it. At this point she was close enough to touch Gandhi’s feet. She then triggered the explosive belt she was wearing around her waist. The blast killed Gandhi and his assassin as well as nine police officers and seven civilians. In the months after the assassination, there was some confusion about who had been responsible for it, but today the attack is credited to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a guerrilla organization that until its defeat in spring 2009 was the most violent and uncompromising advocate of a separate state for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka.1
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination represented a watershed in the history of suicide bombing for several reasons. First, Gandhi was the most significant political figure to be killed by a suicide bomber since Alexander II’s death 110 years prior. He was a former prime minister, son of a prime minister, and grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. He was also the head of India’s Congress Party, at the time of his death the most prominent party in the country. Second, the professionalism involved in the attack’s execution was extraordinary, equaling the sophistication, if not the overall power, of the Beirut blasts of the early 1980s. Investigations revealed that Gandhi’s murderer, a young woman known as Dhanu, had been part of a team of five members that had planned and trained elaborately to carry out the attack. The team had included another woman who served as a backup bomber in case Dhanu proved to be unreliable. The dedication of the members of the organization was also stunning. In the months following the attack, nine LTTE members committed suicide rather than submit to incarceration by Indian authorities in connection with the investigation. Third, one member of the team sent to kill Gandhi was a photographer tasked with documenting the attack for propaganda purposes.2 He was killed by the blast and his camera was damaged, but the film proved salvageable. The photos provide chilling images of the last few seconds of Rajiv Gandhi’s life.
During the 1990s the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam came to be known as the masters of suicide bombing.3 The LTTE made use of the truck bomb associated with the Middle East, pioneered the use of the suicide belt for more precise missions (such as assassinations), and made extensive use of boat-borne suicide bombers as “smart torpedoes” in its war against the Sri Lankan navy.4 There is, however, considerable disagreement regarding the number of LTTE suicide bombings. The LTTE and its Black Tigers, the division from which the suicide bombers were drawn, wished to portray themselves as a military force and usually did not claim their attacks against civilian targets. They therefore denied responsibility for many of the operations attributed to them by Sri Lankan authorities.5 In addition, the willingness of LTTE members to commit suicide to evade capture muddies the picture somewhat. In most instances, LTTE members killed themselves by swallowing cyanide, but there were some exceptions. For example, in March 2000 Sri Lankan forces surrounded four LTTE members after a failed guerrilla attack on a government motorcade. Rather than submit to capture, the four attackers committed suicide by blowing themselves up.6 In a sense, it was a suicide bombing, but classifying it as a suicide operation, like the one that killed Rajiv Gandhi, would be inappropriate given that neither the bombers nor the organization planned for the attack to be a suicide bombing.
Although it is problematic to assess the exact number of suicide attacks carried out by the LTTE, the figure is undoubtedly high. Ami Pedahzur had identified 86 successful suicide attacks through 2004. The Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s database, recorded an additional 23 LTTE suicide attacks between 2005 and the defeat of the organization in 2009, for a total of 109 between 1987 and 2009.7
One of the most striking characteristics of the LTTE’s use of suicide attackers is how constant it remained during the course of the nearly two decades that it utilized them. While suicide bombing in the rest of the world became subject to increasingly decentralized control, LTTE suicide bombing remained under the strict control of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the group’s leader. Prabhakaran’s role in directing LTTE suicide bombing demonstrates that in technological systems, users matter. They play the obvious role of selecting and developing specific technological solutions in lieu of others, of course, but they also transform specific technologies through how they choose to use them. The realm of use has historically driven change and evolution in technology so that even technologies that have common origins and material components will demonstrate significant differences when employed by different cultures.8
Prabhakaran chose to develop and then use suicide attackers for his own reasons, some of which were consistent with suicide bombing in other contexts, the tactical effectiveness of suicide bombers, for example, accounting for some similarities. His agenda, however, was significantly different from that of Hizballah leaders and the Russian revolutionaries in that he endeavored to create a cult of personality and charismatic leadership to dominate the Tamil political scene. Suicide bombing proved to be effective for furthering this agenda as well.
The largest ethnic group on the island of Sri Lanka is the Sinhalese, who constituted approximately 74 percent of the population, estimated at 5.5 million, in 2006. The Sinhalese have their own language and tend to be Buddhist. The next largest group, the Tamils, who tend to be Hindu, comprises approximately 16 percent of the population. The Tamils fall into two categories. The larger of the two, Sri Lankan Tamils, 10 percent of all Sri Lankans, live primarily along the eastern and northern shores of the island. Their connection to the island dates back thousands of years. Members of the other group, the plantation Tamils (6 percent of the population), are more recent arrivals, having immigrated from India in the last two centuries to serve as agricultural laborers on plantations in the elevated middle sections of the island. The other major ethnic group, Muslims, makes up approximately 10 percent of the population.9
The Portuguese first colonized Sri Lanka, followed by the Dutch, and then the British. It became an independent state only in 1948. Early in the twentieth century, British colonial policy favored the Tamil minority, who held a disproportionate share of government positions. Upon independence, the Sinhalese sought to redress the situation, but what ensued was a systematic policy of reverse discrimination that eventually left large numbers of Tamils disenfranchised and disadvantaged.10 In 1956 the Sinhalese-majority government passed an act decreeing Sinhalese to be the only recognized language on the island. After protest and dissent, the act was amended, in 1958, and Tamil was allowed to be used in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka; elsewhere, however, Sinhalese remained the official language. Language thus became a means of discrimination, resulting in the systematic loss of government jobs by Tamils. A quota system instituted at the university level limited Tamil enrollment. This led to increasing unemployment among Tamils through the 1970s.11
On May 22, 1972, the Sri Lankan government introduced a new constitution, which established Buddhism as the state religion and Sinhalese as the only recognized state language. The country’s name was changed from Ceylon, which had been its name since independence, to Sri Lanka, which is Sinhalese for “resplendent island.” The constitution had relatively weak provisions for the protection of minority rights, and Tamils worried that the centrality of Buddhism in the constitution would encourage and reinforce the discrimination they were already experiencing. The constitution immediately provoked an organized Tamil reaction, with four Tamil political groups forming the Tamil United Front (TUF), a coalition that observed May 22 as a day of mourning. In autumn the TUF called for a campaign of political action against the government. On October 3 the leader of the TUF resigned from the national assembly to protest the treatment of Sri Lanka’s Tamils under the constitution. In May 1973 the TUF officially decided to push for an independent Tamil state, to be known as Tamil Eelam.
Tamil youth, who watched their employment and educational opportunities dwindle, became increasingly frustrated with the inability of Tamil politicians to convince the government to address their community’s issues.12 As the decade wore on, they became more radical and created underground groups that became increasingly violent. Numerous armed gangs claiming to be politically motivated formed, but most of them quickly dissolved. Only five such organizations proved to be effective and durable enough to last for more than a couple of years.
The first paramilitary organization to emerge was the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO) in 1974. The following year it was followed by the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS). One of the members of the Tamil United Front of 1972 had been a student organization called the Tamil Students League. In 1973–74 this organization became more radical and began calling itself the Tamil New Tigers. Its founder was arrested in 1975, after which the organization fell under the sway of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, who in 1976 changed the name of the organization to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 1979 the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE and sometimes PLOT) formed when an LTTE leader split with Prabhakaran.13 The fifth group, the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRL), made its debut in 1980.
Of the five groups, the Tamil New Tigers/LTTE were the most militant and least ideological. From the start, the Tamil New Tigers distinguished themselves through their use of assassination; indeed, Prabhakaran rose to prominence within the group when he murdered the mayor of the city of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah, a Tamil, in July 1975. Tamil extremists viewed Duraiappah as a traitor because he did not support the secessionist movement. The following March, Prabhakaran led a successful bank robbery to raise funds for the group. In May 1976 he formally announced the existence of the LTTE, writing the group’s constitution and designing its tiger logo. The LTTE set up a self-supporting training camp in the jungles of the north and by mid-1976 was established well enough that its members began attacking the Jaffna police network. In the first half of 1977, they killed four police officers, one of whom was a detective investigating the murder of Mayor Duraiappah.14
The following August deadly anti-Tamil riots broke out in the Jaffna peninsula in the north and quickly spread; hundreds of Tamils were killed or displaced. In many cases, the police and military contributed to the violence instead of acting as impartial supporters of law and order. The government, unconstrained by any effective opposition, became increasingly authoritarian, and in 1979, in response to the violence of Tamil separatists, such as the LTTE, passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The act, which was applied retroactively to offenses committed prior to 1979, permitted the army and police to hold prisoners incommunicado and without charge for up to eighteen months. Since there was no registry of detainees, and arrests were not subject to judicial review, the act stripped citizens of constitutional rights and weakened prohibitions against arbitrary killings and arrests. Authorities promptly abused the powers allotted by the act, conducting widespread arrests and detentions of Tamil civilians.15 In summer 1981 violence intensified. That June, a policeman was killed in a conflict with the LTTE, and in response, civilians in complicity with the local police went on a rampage in Jaffna, looting and destroying Tamil property.16
On the night of July 23–24, 1983, LTTE leaders dramatically escalated the scale of their violent activities by ambushing a Sri Lankan military convoy and killing thirteen soldiers.17 Newspaper headlines and other coverage of the soldiers’ funeral enraged many Sinhalese, who then launched what can only be described as a pogrom against their Tamil neighbors, killing approximately 2,000 Tamils in late July and early August. The character of the violence was particularly brutal; many of the Tamils were beaten or hacked to death, while others were burned alive in their homes or shops. More far-reaching was the refugee problem that followed the assault. More than 175,000 Tamils were displaced by the violence. In the city of Colombo alone, about 100,000 Tamils were driven from their homes. On July 25 thirty-five Tamil political detainees at Welikade prison were murdered by fellow prisoners with the complicity of prison guards.18
The violence against the Tamils suggested a high degree of government complicity. Seemingly disorganized mobs possessed information about the location of Tamil-owned factories, businesses, and shops. Furthermore, during the first days of the violence, the government and military made little effort to intervene, showed no sympathy for the victims of the violence, and afterward made no effort to compensate Tamil civilians for their losses or bring the perpetrators to justice. Lacking democratic options for changing the situation, Tamils began to analyze the conflict in racial and existential terms. Thus summer 1983 can rightly be considered the point at which Sri Lanka descended into civil war, a period which the LTTE referred to as Eelam War I.
In August 1983 the government passed the Sixth Amendment to the constitution, requiring parliamentarians to swear allegiance to Sri Lanka and to condemn any form of separatism. This led the TUF to boycott parliament and therefore closed off political reconciliation, contributing to the appeal of the radicals.19 In Tamil regions, men between the ages of fifteen and thirty were subject to mass arrests, which often resulted not only in torture but in large-scale disappearances, as extrajudicial killings on the part of the authorities became commonplace. The LTTE and other militant groups then began to massacre Sinhalese civilians as retribution. Attributing specific atrocities to any one of the many militant Tamil groups is problematic, but the LTTE was likely responsible for civilian massacres in November 1984 and May 1985 in which 70 and 150 persons died, respectively.20
In 1985 Prabhakaran reluctantly joined with leaders of other Tamil resistance groups and participated in talks with the Sri Lankan government in Thinpu, Bhutan.21 The talks quickly broke down, and in the aftermath the LTTE pursued its own version of Eelam more brutally than ever, targeting political and military rivals in the Tamil community and at the same time escalating its attacks against the Sri Lankan state. On April 17, 1987, LTTE militants stopped three buses, singled out Sinhalese riders, and murdered all 127 of them. Four days later, they detonated a massive bomb in Colombo that killed 113 people.22 By this point, the LTTE was considered the most dangerous group in the Tamil insurgency.
The LTTE’s growth came at the expense of its rivals, in a literal sense. It was initially a minor player in the very crowded field of Tamil militancy. The LTTE had begun Eelam War I as one of dozens of militant groups. Rohan Gunaratna counted thirty-six of them in the early 1980s. The LTTE’s small size, some twenty-five to fifty members, combined with the youth of its leadership (Prabhakaran had not even turned thirty when Eelam War I began) led security officials to refer to the group condescendingly as “the boys.”23 Prabhakaran recognized that to make his personal vision of Tamil Eelam a reality, the LTTE had to compete not only with the Sri Lankan state but also with other Tamil militants. In late 1985 Prabhakaran decided to eliminate LTTE’s major Tamil rivals. This approach allowed the LTTE to expand its geographical base and to distinguish itself through sheer brutality and determination.
In April 1986 the LTTE attacked the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization, killing hundreds of its members, including its leader, Sri Sabaratnam. In December it killed more than one hundred members of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front. In September 1987 a third wave of LTTE bloodshed eliminated more than seventy members of rival groups, including PLOT. The strategy, which one author refers to as predatory rationalization, did indeed simplify the Tamil political scene, leaving the LTTE as the most dominant organization.24 It was a rational strategy insofar as it secured the political marketplace for the LTTE, but it also had a devastating impact on the Tamil community by weakening its independence movement as a whole.
Tamil groups were not the only to suffer at the hands of the LTTE. As early as 1983 the LTTE was using violence against the Tamil community more generally to intimidate moderates and prevent them from pursuing less radical means of resistance. It executed such “traitors” and then displayed their bodies publicly, often with signs declaring that this was the punishment awaiting all traitors. As the LTTE gained control of territory in the north in the later 1980s, it infiltrated every layer of local governance and carried out the type of routine political killings characteristic of the most brutal police states.25 When a group of academics from Jaffna University published a critique of the LTTE, one of them, Rajani Thirinigama, was assassinated; the others fled to Colombo.26 By 2000 Tamils in LTTE-controlled areas were sufficiently intimidated that the organization no longer needed to use violence to impose its will. As one respondent to an academic study explained, “People know what the LTTE is capable of. Violence is not necessary.”27
The willingness of the LTTE to use such violence against members of its own ethnic community demonstrates an extraordinary degree of ruthlessness and discipline, characteristics that can be traced to Vellupillai Prabhakaran. Born in 1954, Prabhakaran was the son of a tax official. He was extremely young when he entered the militant movement, and left his family to flee a police crackdown in 1972, at the age of eighteen. From that point until his death in 2009, Prabhakaran lived essentially on the run. He had no formal military or academic training. Most of his knowledge—from Tamil history and culture to practical issues of weapon use and leadership—he taught himself.28
Prabhakaran credited his success to self-discipline. He suffered innumerable hardships along with his followers and always adhered to a strict moral and ethical code within the context of the movement. He did not smoke or drink, and he prohibited his followers from indulging in them as well, going so far as to write moral guidelines into the organization’s 1976 constitution. Prabhakaran’s moral strictness struck even some of his most ardent supporters as being excessive.29 There was, however, a purpose to this thoroughgoing effort to control the behavior of his followers.
The LTTE had been a small outfit in its infancy, so the need to overtake other militants and to deal with the threat of police informers meant that any factionalism or dissent within the group would pose significant long-term risks. Prabhakaran therefore eliminated potential dissent by placing himself at the heart of the group and at the center of the Tamil national movement. He required members to pledge allegiance to him personally and subjected them to the harshest of disciplinary measures. LTTE members who committed serious transgressions of the group’s rules were executed. This combination of fear and respect drove the group’s core toward an unwavering commitment to Prabhakaran.
The most dramatic and visible symbol of dedication was introduced to the group in 1984 in the form of a small glass vial of potassium cyanide, which LTTE cadres received when they formally joined the group and swore allegiance to Prabhakaran. The use of cyanide was inspired by Sivakumaran, one of the heroes of Prabhakaran’s youth. Sivakumaran, a member of the Tamil Student Federation, had swallowed cyanide rather than submit to arrest in the early 1970s.30 There seems to be no earlier evidence of such a form of self-sacrifice in Tamil lore and history. The acceptance of the cyanide vial on the part of a prospective LTTE member quickly became a mark of distinction because it proclaimed the recruit’s willingness to die rather than betray the organization or its leader. The first cyanide “martyr” acknowledged by the LTTE took his own life in May 1984.31
From its introduction, the distribution of cyanide to new LTTE members served several practical purposes. The pledge to commit suicide rather than submit to torture and interrogation by Sri Lankan authorities helped to decrease the likelihood that members might compromise the organization; it therefore contributed to group security over the long run. As a physical reminder of death, the presence of the vial of cyanide suspended around the neck helped recruits overcome their fear of death, thus contributing to their bravery in battle. By July 1988 a Sri Lankan newspaper reported that two hundred Tamils had already achieved “martyrdom” by taking cyanide.32
Much of the population of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located eighteen miles across the Palk Strait from Sri Lanka, is ethnically similar to the Sri Lankan Tamils, and so Tamil Nadu became a source of regular support and encouragement for the Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka. The size of Tamil Nadu’s population also made it a vital pillar of support for India’s Congress Party, and in the early 1980s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began to support the Tamil independence movement covertly. After the anti-Tamil violence in 1983, this support became more overt, with hundreds of Tamil guerrillas from various groups training in India every year.33
As internecine violence weakened the Tamil secessionist movement in 1987, the Sri Lankan armed forces launched Operation Liberation, a campaign to reassert governmental control in Tamil lands. Despite a number of deficiencies, the Sri Lankan army was clearly superior to the poorly coordinated forces of the rebels; it encountered little resistance during the operation, which lasted from May 26 to June 10. Rajiv Gandhi, who had succeeded his mother as Indian prime minister, reacted angrily toward what he described as brutality in the suppression of the Tamil independence movement. On June 4, before the end of Operation Liberation, the Indian air force dropped supplies to the Tamils in a violation of Sri Lankan sovereignty and airspace.34 Shortly afterward India sent ships loaded with humanitarian supplies to relieve the Tamil population.
The initiation of Indian intervention ended Operation Liberation. By the end of July, Gandhi’s government had produced an accord to reconcile the warring factions and had assumed responsibility for enforcing it, a position that would appease Indian supporters of the Tamil movement and also give India a measure of control over the Sri Lankan Tamils. The Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) became responsible, among other things, for disarming Tamil militant groups, especially the LTTE, which had always been far more independent of India than the others. Large numbers of Tamil civilians were favorably disposed toward the IPKF, hoping that it would put an end to the conflict. On the other hand, many Sinhalese were appalled by India’s military intervention in their internal affairs.35
Prabhakaran, unwilling to concede political power over the Tamil community to anyone, viewed the occupation warily from the beginning. He made an initial show of supporting the occupation and handing over arms, even going so far as to claim that the LTTE could resort to nonviolent tactics if necessary; it soon became clear, however, that the LTTE was withholding the bulk of its arsenal.36 Indian leaders were wary of the LTTE and pressured it more aggressively than they did any of the other Tamil groups, going so far as to fly Prabhakaran and several other LTTE leaders to India to try to persuade them to accept the accord. After returning to Sri Lanka in early August, Prabhakaran denounced the agreement. In protest, the LTTE’s Amirthalingam Thileepan began a fast unto death, refusing food and water beginning in mid-September. He died on September 26, 1987, making him the first Tamil martyr in the struggle against India.37
The following month, seventeen LTTE members captured by India were scheduled for deportation and questioning. Prabhakaran apparently had cyanide smuggled in to the prisoners, and all seventeen attempted to commit suicide. Twelve died immediately, three others succumbed soon thereafter, and two survived because of medical intervention.38 This mass suicide triggered full-scale warfare between the LTTE and the IPKF, which held advantages in equipment and numbers of troops but was utterly unprepared to fight the kind of guerrilla war at which the LTTE was beginning to excel.
The ongoing conflict between the LTTE and the IPKF took the lives of more than a thousand Indian soldiers and was thus deeply unpopular in India. At the same time, it fueled Sinhalese anger toward the occupation and the curtailment of Sri Lankan sovereignty that it represented. The leaders who had negotiated the accord, Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president J. R. Jayewaredene, had both left office by 1989. Their successors were not politically invested in the accord, and the new Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, demanded the evacuation of the IPKF. In 1989 the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government negotiated a cease-fire, removing justification for the Indian presence. In 1989 the IPKF began a phased withdrawal that was completed in early 1990.39
The LTTE’s first suicide attack occurred in July 1987. During the course of Operation Liberation, Sri Lankan forces had taken control of a school building near the town of Nelliady, in Tamil territory, and had made it into a temporary military base. On July 5 the Tigers launched a mission to retake it. The building was heavily reinforced and protected by barbed-wire barriers, making the operation a challenge. One Tiger, twenty-one-year-old Vallipurum Vasanthan—a local man more commonly remembered by the name Captain Miller (sometimes spelled Millar)—volunteered for the mission, agreeing to drive a vehicular bomb into the heart of the defenses.40 Miller’s comrades packed a truck with explosives and then attached the young man to the controls of the vehicle, tying his hands to the steering wheel and one of his feet to the accelerator. They used sticks to wedge his body into the driver’s seat so that he could not move even if he wanted to or even if killed. According to one account, Prabhakaran was present during the preparation and gave the signal for the attack to proceed. Other LTTE members then started the truck and moved away.
Miller was quite possibly dead shortly after the truck cleared the first set of barricades and the defenders opened fire; it did not, however, matter. The truck continued forward, rammed the main building, and exploded. Miller’s companions quickly followed up his attack with a conventional military assault, and the outpost was taken. Casualty figures vary, but twenty to forty Sri Lankan defenders were killed, and at least twenty more were injured in the blast and ensuing attack.41 LTTE members videotaped the incident for recruitment and propaganda purposes.
Miller posthumously received a promotion to the rank of captain and is remembered as one of the most respected and revered martyrs in LTTE lore. His face became the insignia for the Black Tigers, a new LTTE division from whose ranks the suicide bombers of the 1990s and 2000s would be drawn. In addition, July 5 became a holiday, Black Tigers Day, celebrated every year to commemorate Miller’s sacrifice. On the fifteenth anniversary of the attack, the LTTE unveiled a statue of Captain Miller, flashing a victory sign with his right hand, near the site of the crumbling, but still standing, school building.42
Shortly after the Indian withdrawal, the rapprochement between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE ended, with the LTTE resuming attacks against Sri Lankan forces in June 1990. This marked the beginning of what the LTTE called Eelam War II. The early stages of this renewed conflict were reminiscent of previous LTTE campaigns, with ambushes and assassinations of Sri Lankan and rival Tamil figures prominent among the operations.
The group began its systematic use of suicide bombers almost immediately upon launching Eelam War II, with an attack on a naval vessel on July 10. Some doubt remains as to whether the mission was a deliberate suicide attack. In November 1990 the LTTE used a suicide truck bomber to spearhead an assault on a Sri Lankan military facility. By the end of the year, the Black Tigers had been recognized as a new and dangerous force. Six months later, LTTE suicide bombers would assassinate Rajiv Gandhi.
In 1992 the LTTE used an individual suicide bomber to assassinate Vice Adm. Clancy Fernando of the Sri Lankan navy.43 In May 1993 the LTTE dispatched a suicide bomber to carry out another bold mission—President Premadasa’s murder, which would put the group in the exclusive company of the People’s Will as being the only two organizations to have assassinated a sitting head of government in a suicide attack. The mission demonstrated the LTTE’s patience and the dedication of its individual members. It took approximately two years for the assigned bomber to infiltrate the president’s circle, which he accomplished by befriending a Tamil member of his personal staff. Despite the would-be bomber’s two years of relative autonomy, he showed no hesitation when called upon to take his own life. Twenty-three other people died in the attack.44
Suicide bombers came to be a regular component of Eelam War II and the next phases of the conflict, Eelam War III and Eelam War IV. Suicide attackers were often used for individual assassinations, such as those discussed above, but they were also deployed in conjunction with conventional military operations. Although the LTTE did not claim mass-casualty suicide attacks against civilians, these too became a regular part of the fighting. After a brief cease-fire in 1995, the Sri Lankan army went on the offensive, capturing the city of Jaffna by the end of the year. On January 31, 1996, the LTTE responded with its most destructive suicide attack to date, when an LTTE member drove a truck packed with explosives into the central bank building in Colombo, killing ninety people and injuring more than a thousand.45 On December 18, 1999, an LTTE suicide attacker attempted to assassinate Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga as she campaigned for reelection. Kumaratunga survived, but was severely injured and permanently lost sight in one eye; twenty-one people died in the attack.46 In a stunning assault on October 15, 2006, an LTTE suicide bomber drove a truck bomb into a convoy of Sri Lankan military buses, killing himself along with 103 military personnel and injuring another 150. Thirteen buses were damaged or destroyed, and the body of the driver was found 160 feet away from the scene of the explosion.47 The attack ended another cease-fire, in effect since 2004, and ushered in the final phase of the conflict, which ended with the LTTE’s defeat in 2009.
The LTTE also used suicide attackers in its ongoing campaign against Tamil rivals. On May 29, 1999, one of its suicide attackers killed the leader of a rival Tamil group cooperating with the Sri Lankan military.48 On July 29 an LTTE operative assassinated Neelan Tiruchelvam, a moderate Tamil politician and vice president of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). The bomber, on foot, approached within a few feet of Tiruchelvam’s car, which was stopped in heavy traffic in Colombo, and detonated himself. Tiruchelvam’s driver and the security officer in the car with him survived the attack.49
The exact date at which the Black Tigers came into being as an organized unit is unclear. Since Captain Miller’s face became the insignia for the group, and he is considered to be the first Black Tiger, his death was obviously a foundational event. Observers had begun to write about the Black Tigers by 1988–89, but it was not until the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, that Prabhakaran discussed the group publicly.50
The size of the Black Tigers was a closely guarded secret, but it is clear that membership was a mark of distinction. Within the LTTE, cadres competed with one another for the honor of membership in the elite unit, and their training was intense.51 The extensive preparation of the Black Tigers stands in marked contrast to the workings of many other organizations that utilize suicide attackers; typically, they see their prospective bombers as being expendable and therefore invest minimal resources in their training.
The LTTE also made extensive use of female suicide attackers, sometimes called the Black Tigresses and sometimes the Freedom Birds, beginning in the early 1990s. The initial women’s unit was formed in the 1980s. Women had become a significant percentage of the overall strength of the LTTE long before they were used for suicide missions. While there is debate over the percentage of women within the LTTE at large, and specifically within the elite corps, the number was undoubtedly significant. Female attackers contributed to the capabilities of the LTTE as well as to its overall legitimacy by suggesting that the group was more open to gender equality than was Tamil society writ large.52
The reliability demonstrated by Black Tigers was the product of an extensive program of training and indoctrination that led to active competition among members for positions of prestige within the organization. By all accounts, life for LTTE cadres was intense and harsh. They endured great physical hardship, with few if any material comforts to offset the severity of their training. In such an environment, honor and prestige were among the few desirable commodities. Within the LTTE this mindset became so powerful that Black Tigers confessed that they feared failing Prabhakaran and dishonoring themselves more than they feared dying. To cement their commitment to their missions, prospective bombers met with Prabhakaran and posed for a photo with him shortly before departing.53 This element of ritual was comparable to the production of videotaped testimonials by Lebanese suicide attackers and can be thought of as a form of public contract obligating the individual to follow through with the attack.
One reason that suicide attackers were introduced effectively into the Tamil struggle was the reality that the LTTE faced significant disadvantages in confronting the Sri Lankan army. Although the disparity in arms was not as great as the disparity between Israeli forces and the Shiites in 1980s Lebanon, the Sri Lankan army in the 1990s possessed significant advantages over the LTTE in terms of armor and airpower. Most important, the behavior of the Sri Lankan forces allowed the Tamil minority to perceive the conflict in existential rather than political terms. Even Tamil opponents of the LTTE described the violence of the 1980s in terms of genocide and holocaust.54 It was therefore relatively easy for Prabhakaran to frame the conflict in these terms, claiming in his 1995 Great Heroes’ Day speech, “This war is not, as the government claims, against the LTTE. This war is against the Tamil people, against the Tamil Nation. The objective of this war is to destroy the Tamil Nation. This racist war of Sinhala chauvinism has a long history.”55 While exaggerated, the actual policy of the Sri Lankan government provided sufficient credibility to Prabhakaran’s rhetoric that it resonated with much of the Tamil population. The extremity of the situation thus legitimized the extremity of the LTTE’s response.
The veneration of Captain Miller and his Black Tiger successors within the LTTE was but one facet of a much larger, systematic effort on the part of Prabhakaran to intensify group discipline and dedication to prepare the group for the pursuit of Tamil Eelam following the withdrawal of the IPKF. Central to this transformation was Prabhakaran’s success in fashioning the LTTE and the idea of Tamil Eelam as a secular faith.56 As Peter Schalk notes, the LTTE became “a political movement with religious aspirations,” sacralized by the blood sacrifice of its members. Prabhakaran took the willingness of his followers to die, even to kill themselves, and turned it into social capital that held the organization together. The LTTE created holidays and rituals within the subculture of the organization based on the veneration of martyrs. This work was the responsibility of the Office of Great Heroes in Jaffna, a division established exclusively for the manufacture of symbolism and ritual.57
The LTTE calendar was divided into five intervals punctuated by holidays created to commemorate the LTTE dead. The primary LTTE holiday, Great Heroes’ Day, was established on November 27, 1989, in memory of the movement’s first official martyr, a young fighter named Lt. Shankar. Over the years this celebration became longer and more elaborate, until by the end of the 1990s it had become a week-long festival of events culminating at 6 p.m. on the evening of November 27 with LTTE family members gathering around cemeteries and war memorials while ceremonial bells toll throughout LTTE-controlled territory.58 July 5, the date of Miller’s attack, became another holiday, and the deaths of LTTE hunger strikers were commemorated as well.
In English language translations of Prabhakaran’s speeches and other LTTE official propaganda, the term “martyr” was consistently used when referencing LTTE dead. Native English speakers sympathetic to the movement also preferred this word. According to Schalk’s analysis, the word “tiyakam,” which the LTTE chose for its suicide attackers, is more subtle, reflecting the characteristics of classical martyrdom as well as the practical implications of tactical martyrdom.59 “Tiyakam” means abandonment of life, in this case, the voluntary abandonment of life. Those who make this sacrifice are referred to as “tiyaki.” LTTE culture emphasized that the tiyaki die representational deaths for the people of Tamil Eelam, but there is another dimension to tiyakam. Schalk argues that it is a specific kind of death—the abandonment of life in the act of taking life, that is, dying while killing.
Even before the end of the Indian occupation, the LTTE occupied much of the Jaffna peninsula. Its control of the territory allowed the LTTE to build the physical infrastructure of martyrdom, immortality, and transcendence in the form of its own cemeteries and shrines. In doing so, the LTTE created a secular form of resurrection by substituting ritualized burial of dead martyrs for the more traditional Hindu custom of cremation. The Office of Great Heroes proclaimed that the bodies of martyrs were not corpses, but seeds to be planted in anticipation of the establishment of Eelam. The LTTE then turned the graves into shrines for its secular martyrs, establishing the dead as having an ongoing presence among the living. LTTE martyrs were thus offered symbolic immortality in the form of ritualized remembrance, but some took this symbolic immortality literally, believing that the cause was the path to immortality. In 1995 the LTTE took the process of burying martyrs away from family members and made it an organizational function, mandating that LTTE dead be interred in the LTTE’s cemeteries and that memorial services be performed by the LTTE irrespective of the families’ wishes. LTTE ritual thus supplanted tradition and custom in the treatment and remembrance of the dead.60
Prabhakaran drew attention to the transcendence of the LTTE’s dead during his Great Heroes’ Day speeches. In 1993 he declared, “From the tombs of the dead martyrs who lie in rest in the womb of our soil rises the cry for freedom. This cry for freedom is the articulation of the will and determination of more than 6000 martyrs which underlie the motive force behind our struggle.” In 1997, when he condemned the destruction of LTTE cemeteries after the reconquest of Jaffna city by Sri Lankan forces, Prabhakaran charged, “The enemy forces committed the unpardonable crime of desecration, disrupting the spiritual tranquility of our martyrs. Their war cemeteries underwent wanton destruction, their tomb-stones up-rooted and flattened and their memorials erased without a trace. I call this act of desecration of the graves of martyrs whom the Tamils venerate as their national heroes as wicked, immoral, and uncivilized. . . . This is a grave act of terrorism which has left an indelible stain in the soul of the Tamil nation.”61
Prabhakaran took pains to emphasize that the LTTE was not a religion, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the different religious traditions represented through its membership and also to serve as a contrast to the Buddhist chauvinism of the Sri Lankan forces.62 He was careful to portray the LTTE in the terms of the moderate socialism typical of revolutionary movements in the 1970s, arguing that Tamil Eelam would be a politically neutral state that would provide social justice for all. The vaguely leftist, secular ideology of the LTTE convinced some analysts that the LTTE’s use of suicide bombers was different from their use by religious groups, like Hizballah.63 The underlying assumption in this case is that the secular and the sacred are somehow mutually incompatible with one another.
Such an assumption is based on a very narrow understanding of nationalism, faith, and the transcendent. Nationalism emerged first as a religious collective identity that differentiated the national monarchies of England, Spain, and France well before the secular nationalism of the post-Enlightenment era.64 As the nineteenth century passed, more and more states consciously used nationalism as a form of faith tradition to bind their members together irrespective of social class and set them apart from national rivals.65 Dale van Kley has described this phenomenon as a kind of “conservation of the sacred.” By this he meant that as Western Europe entered a more secular era, sacred values did not disappear but instead were transferred to secular belief systems and symbols.66 Revolutionary social movements in the nineteenth century copied this characteristic, with both nationalist and Marxist movements cloaking themselves in the sacred garb of “faith.” James Billington, in his comprehensive analysis of revolutionary faith, observes that the most dedicated revolutionaries tended to emerge in opposition to religiously justified autocracies and became holy warriors in their own right in what he calls “that rarest of all forms of true believer, the militant atheist.”67
The LTTE fit into this tradition of militant atheism emerging in opposition to—and substituting for—traditional religion, just as the Russian revolutionaries had a century earlier.68 Martyrdom for LTTE members thus held many of the same rewards as it did for members of other faith traditions. They could anticipate respect and meaning in this life, remembrance in its aftermath, and some form of immortality. Their rewards were therefore not entirely posthumous. In this respect Prabhakaran’s project of the later 1980s was a success if judged on its own terms. The LTTE succeeded in mixing a level of enchantment with its rational methods, which allowed the group to instrumentalize martyrdom and make it part of an otherwise rational campaign to establish a modern state. As more and more suicide attackers joined Miller in the LTTE’s pantheon of heroes, the phenomenon became self-reinforcing, with suicide bombing as well as cyanide serving to legitimize the cause and reinforce the discipline of the group. What is most extraordinary about the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, after all, is not that one young woman killed herself in order to kill Gandhi, but that nine other people willingly killed themselves to avoid capture after the assassination.
It was several years after Miller’s attack that the LTTE began using suicide bombing systematically. Given the apparent success of the first LTTE human bomb, this puzzled analysts.69 In Dying to Win, Robert Pape explains this pause by arguing that the decision to utilize suicide bombing is a rational choice made by groups whose territory had been occupied by another, religiously different group. Based on this assumption, Pape concludes that the LTTE chose not to utilize suicide attacks against the IPKF because from a Tamil perspective, the Indian occupation was of a different character than that of the ongoing Sri Lankan occupation of Tamil Eelam. Pape asserts that because the Indian army was religiously similar—being largely Hindu—it did not pose the type of existential threat that the Buddhist Sri Lankan forces posed and thus provoked no suicide bombing.70
Pape’s explanation, however, is inconsistent with one of the most significant characteristics of LTTE violence—the extent to which it was also directed against a religiously and ethnically similar community, that is, the Tamil community. This tendency extended to suicide attackers, which the LTTE used against Tamil rivals on at least three occasions, one being the high-profile assassination of Neelan Tiruchelvam. In another attack, on July 7, 2004, a female LTTE suicide attacker attempted to kill a rival Tamil politician. When she was stopped by the authorities, she detonated herself, killing four police officers, but failed to kill her target.71 When the LTTE used a suicide bomber to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu had been at that time a source of support for the Tamil separatist movement. Gandhi’s murder led to such a backlash among LTTE supporters that some analysts theorized that the attack could not have been carried out by the LTTE.72 If one steps back and looks at Rajiv Gandhi from Prabhakaran’s perspective—that is, as a potential rival for the allegiance of the Tamil community—the assassination is entirely logical.
All of these attacks are consistent with the history of the LTTE and its treatment of “traitors” and potential rivals, whether in the form of killing collaborators, the wholesale slaughter of rival leaders and groups, or the murderous enforcement of discipline within the organization itself. There is nothing to suggest that the Sinhalese were singled out for particularly brutal attention in the form of suicide attacks and much evidence to the contrary. As Rohan Gunaratna, an authority on the LTTE, observed, “Internecine warfare for supremacy by the LTTE [was] characteristic of the personality of the LTTE leader. Prabhakaran eliminated his fellow Tamil opponents more ruthlessly than his ethnic enemy.”73
The lack of LTTE suicide missions between June 1987 and June 1990 is not so puzzling if one understands suicide bombing as a technological process that takes time to build and learn to use rather than a behavior or a tactic. The latter implies that suicide bombing is relatively constant over time—one attack is very much like another—which is how Captain Miller’s attack tends to be treated. Miller’s attack, however, was not the same as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The Black Tigers were established after Miller’s death, so it makes no sense to view his mission as the first Black Tiger suicide operation. Instead, given the absence of an institutionalized mechanism for producing suicide bombers, Miller’s attack was largely improvised.
Miller’s mission has much more in common with Ivan Kaliayev’s assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich eighty-two years earlier. Both attacks were contingent and opportunistic, executed with minimal advance planning and preparation. Miller and Kaliayev came from secretive, intensely militant groups with cultures that prized the willingness of individuals to sacrifice their lives for the revolutionary cause, so both went willingly to their deaths. That neither organization deployed additional suicide attackers in the immediate aftermath of their initial successes suggests another similarity: the lack of a dedicated organizational component for preparing and exploiting suicide attacks on a regular basis.
As of 1987–88 many of the mechanisms the LTTE later used to ensure the reliability of its bombers and to capitalize on their attacks were not yet in place. Much of the symbolism and ritual was a work in progress; the shrines and cemeteries had not yet been built, competition for positions of honor within the newly created Black Tigers was just beginning, and the dedicated training programs did not yet exist. Instead, since Prabhakaran already held sway over his members, and a willingness to die certainly existed, the LTTE had the necessary components for carrying out what was essentially a suicide bombing “trial run,” but it lacked the capacity, and perhaps even the motivation, to deploy such attackers regularly. From this perspective, there is no interruption of LTTE suicide bombing to be explained away, but instead the Indian occupation served as a time in which the LTTE, as a consequence of the intensification of its ideology, developed the capability of deploying attackers like Miller more regularly and reliably, and most important, under Prabhakaran’s unquestioned control.
The political environment surrounding Miller’s attack generally does not receive the attention it warrants. Miller’s mission, in July 1987, was not undertaken in the midst of an ongoing campaign against Sri Lanka. Operation Liberation had ended in June with the advent of direct Indian intervention in Sri Lankan affairs. The Indian government imposed a cease-fire, and on June 25 Indian ships docked at Jaffna so that Indian aid could be distributed. Many Tamils hailed the Indians as saviors, an especially galling turn of events for Prabhakaran. Faced with the prospect of the Indian government winning the competition for the allegiance of the Tamil people, Prabhakaran desperately needed some way of changing the political dynamic.
Miller’s attack was meant to make a statement, but in this regard the success of the mission was mixed. It was certainly an effective tactical strike against a military target, but the scope paled in comparison to the LTTE conventional attacks staged the preceding April, in which 127 and 113 people were killed.74 In the years following, the LTTE and its supporters tended to exaggerate the strategic impact of Miller’s attack, ignoring the fact that the Sri Lankan army had already halted its offensive and that Miller’s bombing was an isolated attack during a cease-fire that did nothing to change the behavior of the Indian and Sri Lankan governments.75 Miller’s attack was therefore enough of a success to warrant further exploration as one facet of the LTTE’s increasing power during the Indian occupation and afterward, but perhaps not so successful that the LTTE’s reluctance to follow it up immediately with further attacks should appear puzzling.
The lengthy pause between Miller’s attack and the resumption of suicide bombing by the LTTE therefore suggests a case of independent reinvention of the technology. Prabhakaran was probably influenced by Hizballah’s suicide attacks, but the Lebanese group’s contribution to the development of LTTE suicide bombing did not extend beyond an inspirational role.76 There seems to have been no opportunity for the kind of systematic collaboration and exchange of ideas between the LTTE and Hizballah that typically characterizes the diffusion of innovations and might have allowed the LTTE to develop a mature suicide bombing capability more quickly.77 In the 1970s and early 1980s a small number of Tamil fighters trained in Lebanon in camps run by the Palestine Liberation Organization, and some may even have fought against the Israelis. This direct contact ended with the expulsion of PLO fighters to Tunisia in 1982, and so far there appears to be no evidence that a similar relationship developed with Hizballah in subsequent years.78
The LTTE shared considerable similarities with other groups that deployed suicide attacks and appreciable differences as well. The similarities consisted of the development of a radical, sacred ideology that facilitated the use of, and social acceptance of, self-sacrificial violence to create the possibility of suicide missions. Another similarity was the perception of an existential crisis on the part of the community that created the need for such attacks. The differences between LTTE suicide bombing and other cases are most obvious in the extensive training of the Black Tigers, which in turn was a consequence of the use of suicide bombing by the LTTE leadership. Therefore, analyzing LTTE suicide bombing without attempting to understand how it contributed to Prabhakaran’s quest for unquestioned control will always lead to an incomplete picture.
Since every deployed Black Tiger suicide attacker represented the ultimate dedication to the movement and to Prabhakaran, each one reinforced Prabhakaran’s authority within the LTTE and within the Tamil nationalist movement more generally. From this internal perspective, suicide bombing was an intensification of the trend toward unwavering commitment and discipline within the group that began with the group’s constitution and was reinforced through the cult of cyanide. LTTE suicide bombing was therefore unique in that it reinforced the political power of a single individual, Prabhakaran, rather than a political or religious cause.
There were, however, two sides to this image of perceived power. In 1990 Tamil critics of the LTTE wrote, “The long shadow of the gun has not only been a source of power and glory, but also of fear and terror as well.”79 Projecting an image of unparalleled discipline and ferocity for Tamils, the Sri Lankan state, and the international community was vital for Prabhakaran, because the reputation it produced obscured very real weaknesses and fissures that called into question the LTTE’s sole claim to power. The LTTE did not enjoy the unquestioned support of all the Tamil people, as Prabhakaran liked to believe. It commanded the support of many and intimidated the rest into silence and acquiescence.80
The LTTE fighters, respected internationally, displayed another fissure. The dedicated cadre of thousands of fighters whose loyalty to Prabhakaran was outwardly unquestioned was supplemented considerably by involuntary child soldiers. In the 1990s 40 to 60 percent of LTTE soldiers killed in combat were under age eighteen. The LTTE’s propaganda and the brutish behavior of the Sri Lankan forces explain the motivation of some young Tamils to join the LTTE, but coercion played a significant role as well. For a time, the LTTE mandated that every Tamil family send at least one child to join the organization. Once inducted, these child soldiers had no contact with their families and were subjected to exceptionally brutal training and discipline.81 Within the LTTE’s cadre of fighters, there was less uniformity than the image of the dedicated suicidal Black Tiger would suggest. Essentially, the disciplined true believers that made up much of the LTTE held captive a significant percentage of the rest of the organization and forced them to fight against their will.
Faced with these contradictions, the most pressing of Prabhakaran’s needs was the ability to control the image of the LTTE as perceived within the Tamil, Sri Lankan, and international communities. The commitment of his bombers served this agenda extremely effectively, suggesting uniformity within the LTTE that exceeded the reality. This allowed Prabhakaran to manipulate the expectations of these different audiences, making the LTTE appear more powerful than it truly was, and by extension making Prabhakaran seem to be more powerful than he was.82
Viewing suicide bombing as a technology allows one to contextualize the phenomenon more effectively within Prabhakaran’s control agenda and provides a plausible explanation for the two puzzling differences that set LTTE suicide bombing apart from suicide bombing elsewhere in the world during the 1990s and early 2000s: The first is the lack of suicide missions during the Indian occupation, and the second is the centralized control and extensive training of LTTE suicide attackers.
As noted, suicide bombing is a technology that requires careful cultural construction and management to make it sustainable. This process of construction may well explain the lengthy pause between Miller’s attack and the suicide missions that accompanied Eelam War II. Undoubtedly Prabhakaran could inspire or compel individuals to kill themselves in 1987, but suicide bombing requires more than this. The deaths of the attackers must have an attractive, transcendent quality to appeal to others in order for the phenomenon to feed back into itself and become self-sustaining. It took some time for such a sacred culture to take root and complement Prabhakaran’s previously established authority, but once it did, the combination of sacred cause, unquestioned leadership, and military necessity combined to form one of the most effective suicide-bombing complexes ever seen.
Prabhakaran’s desire to extend his personal power over the entire movement explains the differences that set LTTE suicide bombing apart from other cases. Control within the LTTE was never shared and authority was not delegated. Unlike the faith traditions in Imperial Russia and war-torn Lebanon, the faith of the LTTE was manifested in a living person, who could control how the tools of the faith would be used. No other individual, not even Ayatollah Khomeini, had this type of unquestioned control over the symbols of revolutionary faith. Accordingly, suicide bombing within the LTTE was unique, remaining part of Prabhakaran’s personal control agenda throughout the struggle, never escaping his meticulous oversight or assuming a life of its own as in other contexts.
In May 2009 the twenty-six-year struggle of the LTTE to create an independent homeland ended when the LTTE was militarily defeated by the Sri Lankan armed forces and Vellupillai Prabhakaran was killed. Because of the viciousness of the fighting on both sides, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives as well.83 In the final months of the struggle, Prabhakaran had continued to dispatch suicide bombers, using them on at least three occasions, but to no avail. Months after the end of the fighting, tens of thousands of Tamil refugees were still living in refugee camps. The tone of the Sri Lankan state tended to be one of triumphalism rather than reconciliation, raising the question of whether the basic problems that had fueled the Tamil insurgency had been (or would be) addressed.
As of two years after Prabhakaran’s death, there had been no further suicide attacks by former Black Tigers, not even to avenge his death. Ironically, this situation may well indicate that Prabhakaran was too successful in centralizing power and personifying the cause for his followers. He left no successor—he probably did not trust anyone enough to confer such a status on anyone—so the movement collapsed with his death. Lacking leader and thus cause, the pressures that had driven members of the Black Tigers to commit suicide for two decades vanished, and so the use of the Black Tigers seems to have ended with the death of their user.