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Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam
The Birth of the Tiger
Movement
From "Liberation Tigers and the
Tamil Eelam Freedom Struggle" by the Political
Committee of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, 1983
Anton S. Balasingham
 The
revolutionary ardour of the Tamil youth, which
manifested in the form of indiscriminate outbursts
of political violence in the early seventies,
sought concrete political expression in an
organisational structure built on a revolutionary
political theory and practice. Neither the Tamil
United Front nor the Left movement offered any
concrete political venue to the revolutionary
potential of the rebellious youth.
The political structure of the Tamil United Front.
founded on a conservative bourgeois ideology could
not provide the basis for the articulation of
revolutionary politics. It became very clear to the
Tamil masses and particularly to the revolutionary
youth that the Tamil nationalist leaders, though
they fiercely championed the cause of the Tamils,
have failed to formulate any concrete practical
programme of political action to liberate the
oppressed Tamil nation. Having exhausted all forms
of popular struggle for the last three decades,
having been alienated from the power structure of
the Sinhala State, the Tamil politicians still
clung onto Parliament to air their disgruntlement
which went unheard, unheeded like vain cries in the
wilderness.
The strategy of the traditional
Left parties was to collaborate with the Sinhala
capitalist class and therefore their theoretical
perspective was subsumed by the hegemonic ideology
of that dominant class; which was none other than
chauvinism. This suicidal class collaboration made
the Left leaders to turn a blind eye to the stark
realities of national oppression; it made them to
ignore the revolutionary conditions generated by
the Tamil national struggle; it made them incapable
of mobilising the revolutionary aspirations of the
Tamil militants.
Confronted with this political vacuum and caught up
in a revolutionary situation created by the
concrete conditions of intolerable national
oppression the Tamil revolutionary youth sought
desperately to create a revolutionary political
organisation to advance the task of national
liberation. It was in this specific political
conjuncture the Tiger Movement took its historical
birth in 1972.
The movement was formed by its
present leader and military commander Velupillai
Pirabaharan. At the time of its inauguration the
movement called itself The Tamil New Tigers and
later on 5th May 1976 the organisation renamed
itself as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
From its iinception the Tiger movement took into
its ranks the most resolute, the most dedicated
most zealous young Revolutionaries.
Structured as an urban guerilla
force, discipilined with an iron will to fight for
the cause of national freedom, the Tigers emerged
as the armed resistance movement of the oppressed
Tamil masses. As a revolutionary liberation
movement it provided a concrete organisational base
to the insurrectionary spirit of the rebellious
youth and soon established itself as the armed
vanguard of the national struggle. The Tiger's
commitment to armed struggle as the form of popular
mass struggle was undertaken after a careful and
cautious, appraisal of the objective conditions of
the national struggle, with the fullest
comprehension of the concrete situation in which
the masses of people were presented with no other
alternative other than to resort to revolutionary
resistance to advance their national cause.
Prabakaran, the leader of the Tiger Movement, is an
ardent young revolutionary, born on the 26th
November 1951, in the coastal town of
Valvettiturai, a place famous for its militancy
against Sinhala State repression. Ho was drawn into
revolutionary politics when he was sixteen, and
earned the name 'Thamby' amongst the
co-revolutionaries as he was very young.
Pirabaharan represented the aspirations of the
rebellious Tamil youth who, having become
disenchanted with the failures of non-violent
political campaigns, resolved to fight back the
barbarous form of state violence perpetrated on
their people. Pirabaharan soon organised a
politico-military structure which found an
organisational expression to the revolutionary
ardour of these militant youth. Showing an
extra-ordinary talent in planning military strategy
and tactics and executing them to the amazement of
the enemy. Pirabaharan soon became a symbol of
Tamil resistance and the Tiger Movement he founded
became the revolutionary movement to spearhead the
Tamil national liberation struggle.
Ideologically bound to the revolutionary theory and
practice of Marxism and Leninism, our movement
firmly believes that its commitment to armed
struggle is not an alternative to mass movement.
The revolutionary armed resistance must be
sustained and supported by the mobilised masses.
The invincible power of the organised masses, we
believe, must be activated as the force of popular
resistance. Adopting Lenin's teaching that armed
struggle 'must he ennobled by the enlightening and
organising influence of socialism', our movement
has chartered its political programme integrating
the national struggle with class struggle defining
our ultimate objective as national liberation and
socialist revolution. With the conviction that
armed struggle is the highest expression of
political practice and must be channeled into a
process of socialist revolution, the Tiger
movement, from its earliest stages, engaged in
developing and building political and military
bases among the popular masses.
A Mandate for Secession
The emergence of the Tiger Movement marked a new
historical epoch in the nature and structure of
the Tamil national struggle extending the
dimension of the agitation to popular armed
resistance. While our Movement was engaged in
organising and developing its politico-military
structure, great events of extra-ordinary political
significance began to unfold in the Tamill
political domain. It was the time when national
oppression assumed such severity and harshness that
made joint existence between the two nations
intolerable and impossible.
It was at the peak of this national
oppression, when secession became the inevitable
political destiny of the Tamil nation, the Tamil
United Front called for a national convention in
May 1976 at Vaddukoddai where a historical resolution was
unanimously adopted calling for complete political
independence of the Tamil nation. It was at this
conference that Tamil United Front changed it name
to Tamil United Liberation Front. The convention
outrightly condemned the Republican Constitution of 1972,
which "has made the Tamils a slave nation ruled by
the new colonial masters the Sinhalese who are
using the power they usurped to deprive the Tamil
nation of its territory, language citizenship,
economic life, opportunities of employment and
education thereby destroying all the attributes of
nationhood of the Tamil people". The convention
resolved that "restoration and reconstitution of
the tree, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of
Tamil Eelam based on the right to self determination inherent
o every nation has become inevitable in order to
safeguard the very existence of the Tamil nation in
this country".
The General Elections of July 1977 became a crucial
testing ground for the secessionist cause of the
Tamil United Liberation Front. The T.IJ.L.F. asked
for a clear mandate from the people to wage a
national struggle for secession and accordingly the
Front explicitly stated in the Manifesto:
.Hence the Tamil United Liberation Front seeks in
the general election the mandate of the Tamil
Nation to establish an independent sovereign'
secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam that
includes all the geographically contiguous areas
that have been the traditional homelands of the
Tamil speaking people in this country".
The Manifesto further stated:
"The Tamil Nation must take the
decision to establish its sovereignty in its
homeland art the basis of its right to self
-determination. The only way to announce this
decision to the Sinhalese Government and to the
world is to vote for the Tamil United Liberation
Front".
The Manifesto finally pledged
"The Tamil speaking
representatives who get elected through these
votes, while being members of the National State
Assembly of Ceylon, will also form themselves
into the 'NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF TAMIL EELAM which
will draft a constitution for the State of Tamil
Eelam and to establish the independence of Tamil
Eelam by bringing that constitution into
operation either by peaceful means or by direct
action or struggle".
In reference to the Tamil question
the verdict at the elections was very crucial. It
was fought precisely on a decision to secede. In a
political sense, it assumed the character of a
plebiscite, a public expression of a nation's will.
The Tamil speaking people voted overwhelmingly in
favour of secession, or rather, the people of Tamil
Eelam exercised through a democratic political
practice, their right to self -determination, their
right to secede and form an independent State of
their own. Thus, the Tamil question assumed a new
dimension. Its no longer a question to be resolved
by District Councils or by Federal system, nor by
negotiations and pacts. It is no longer a question
to bargain for concessions. It has become a
question of national self-determination, a question
of an inalienable right of a nation of people to
decide their own political destiny. The Tamil
nation did proclaim its determination to he an
independent sovereign State, and this national will
was articulated through a popular democratic
practice. This was the specific mandate given to
the T.U.L.F. leadership, an authentic irreversible
mandate stamped with the popular will, a mandate to
establish an independent sovereign socialist State
of Tamil Eeelam.
The Repression and
Resistance
The General Elections of 1977
resulted in a massive victory for the extreme
right-wing United National Party (U.N.P,) with
nearly 85 of the seats in Parliament. The
traditional Left Parties were completely wiped out
without a single seat, and the Tamil United
Liberation Front, for the first time in Ceylon's
political history, became the leading opposition
Party in Parliament. The stage was set for a
confrontation; the Tamils demanding secession and
separate existence as a sovereign State and the
Sinhala racist ruling Party seeking absolute State
power to dominate arid subjugate the will of the
Tamil nation to live free. The intensity of this
contradiction took its manifest form soon after the
elections into a racial holocaust unprecedented in
its violence towards the Tamils.
In this island wide racial conflagration hundreds
of Tamils were mercilessly massacred and millions
worth of Tamil property was destroyed and thousands
of them made refugees. The State police and the
armed forces openIy colluded with the hooligans in
their gruesome acts of arson, looting, rape and
mass murder. Instead of containing the racist
violence that was ravaging the whole island, the
Government leaders made inflammatory statements
with racist connotations that added fuel to the
fire. It was the Tamil plantation workers who bore
the brunt of this racial onslaught. 17,000 of them
became refugees and sought asylum in the Tamil
areas of the North and Fast.
The racial horror had a profound impact on Tamil
political thinking. While it hardened the militancy
of the revolutionary youth, it exposed the
political impotency of the Tamil bourgeois
leadership, who, having failed to fulfill its
pledges to the people. sought a collaborationist
strategy to placate the Sinhala leaders.
Jayawardane in his Machiavellian shrewdness soon
realised that T.U.L.F. leaders were not serious in
their secessionist demand but sought alternative to
deceive the Tamil masses.
The real threat of secession, the
Government thought, arose from the militant Tamil
youths who are unappeasable, irreconcilable and
committed to the core to the goal of an independent
socialist Tamil Eelam. The new regime, therefore,
utilised all means to crush the revolutionary
youth, the very ground from where the cry for
political freedom emanated. The Government thus
embarked on a ruthless policy of repression,
delegating extra-powers to the police and military
to clamp down on the Tamil youth. Caught up in a
revolutionary situation and constantly victimised
by the Police the young Tamil revolutionaries were
forced to resist the State repression. The
dialectic of repression and resistance began to
unfold into a deadly national struggle ushering the
armed people's war that opened a new dimension in
the freedom movement of the Eelam Tamils.
Tiger Movement comes to
limelight
On the 7th April 1978, a police
raiding party headed by the notorious torturer
Inspector Bastiampillai suddenly surrounded a Tiger
training camp deep into the northern jungle and
held the guerrillas at gun point. One of our
commando leaders. Lieutenant Chelvanayagam (alias
Aman) tactfully swooped on a police officer,
snatched his 5MG and gunned down the police party.
Inspector Bastiampillai (do), Sub-Inspector
Perambalam, Police Constable Balasingham and Police
driver Siriwardana were all killed. Our geurrilla
Unit sustained no casualities. The incidents
alarmed the Government but created euphoria among
the Tamils since it signified the first major
incident of armed resistance against the repressive
state apparatus.
On the 25th April 1978, the Tiger movement for the
first time officially claimed responisibitity for
the annihilation of the raiding party and the
earlier killings of Police officers and Tamil
traitors. Thus, the Tiger Movement came to
limelight announcing itself to the world as the
revolutionary resistant movement of the Tamils
committed to the goal of national liberation of
Tamil Eelam through armed struggle. The Sinhala
Government reacted swiftly by enacting a law
proscribing the Tiger movement. The Government also
poured into Tamil areas large contingents of armed
units for the 'Tiger hunt' and brought the Tamil
nation under total military occupation.
Having intensified the military repression in Tamil
Eelam, Jayawardane introduced a new constitution on the 7th
September 1978, which bestowed upon him absolute
dictatorial executive powers and gave Sinhala
language and Buddhist religion extra-ordinary
status, and relegated a second-class status to the
Tamil language. While the Tamil Parliamentary Party
failed in its duty to register any mass protest,
the Tiger movement brought the matter to the
attention of the international community by blowing
up an AVRO aircraft, the only passenger plane owned
by the national airline (Air Ceylon). The incident
was a humiliation to the Government but boosted the
moral of the Tamil freedom movement.
The Tigers stepped up the campaign
by raiding a Government bank (Tinnevely People's
Bank) on the 5th December 1978 appropriating 1.68
million rupees of state money. In this daring
daylight raid two police officers were shot dead
and another seriously wounded Our guerrilla
fighters escaped without any casualty, taking away
the weapons from the enemy.
To stamp out the growing armed resistance the
Government took draconian measures. On the 20th
July 1979 Jayawardane's racist regime enacted the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, which
contained the most infamous provisions that
contravened the very principles of the Rule of Law
and violated the norms of human justice. This
notorious law denied trial by jury, enabled the
detention of people for a period of eighteen months
and allowed confessions extracted under torture as
admissable in evidence.
Having enacted the law the
Government declared a State of Emergency in Jaffna
the northern Tamil capital and dispatched more
military units to Tamil areas under the command of
Brigadier Weeratunga with special instructions to
wipe out 'terrorism' within six months. Empowered
by law and encouraged by the State, the fascist
Brigadier unleashed military terror unprecedented
in its violence. Hundreds of innocent youths were
arrested arid subjected to barbarous torture and
several of them were shot dead and their dead
bodies were dumped on the road side. Their
oppressive measures caused massive outcry all over
the world and the Terrorism Act brought universal
condemnation by the world human rights movements
particularly by the International Commission of
Jurists and Amnesty International.
Tigers step up guerrilla
campaign
The political events that unfolded
since 1981 involved massive genocidal onslaughts on
the life and property of the Tamil community and
increased guerrilla campaigns of our liberation
movement.
On the midnight of 31st May 198!,
the Sinhala police went on a wild
rampage burning down the city of Jaffna This
state terrorism exploded into a mad frenzy of
arson. looting and murder. Hundreds of shops were
burnt to ashes, the Jaffna market square was set on
flames. A Tamil newspaper office and Jaffna M.P.'s
house were gutted. The most abominable act of
cultural genocide was the burning down of the
famous Jaffna public library destroying more than
90,000 volumes of invaluable literary and
historical works an act that outraged the
conscience of the world Tamils. The whole episode
was master minded by two Cabinet Ministers (Cyril
Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake) of Jayawardane's
regime who were in Jaffna during the riots and were
supervising the orgy of police violence.
An island wide racial conflagration flared up again
just three months after the burning of Jaffna, a
racial onslaught on the Tamils organised by leading
members of the Government, assisted by the armed
forces, and executed by gangs of Sinhala thugs and
hooligans. And again our people became the cruel
victims of Sinhala racist barbarity; victims of
insane sadistic orgy, victims of arson, looting,
rape and murder. Hundreds of our people, including
women and children were slaughtered, thousands of
them made homeless and millions worth of Tamil
property destroyed.
The repetitive pattern of this
organised violence that brought colossal damage in
terms of life and property to our people signified
the genocidal intent underlying this horrid
phenomenon. The objective of the chauvinistic
ruling class is nothing other than to inflict
maximum injury to the Tamils to terrorise,
subjugate and destroy the aspirations of our people
for political independence. Yet more and more the
oppression intensified the determination of our
people became more and more hardened with an iron
will to resist the forces of repression. As the
consequence of heightened repression the resistance
of the freedom fighters increased with such a
vehemence that it caused the destabilisation of the
Sinhala state and disrupted the civil
administrative system in Tamil Eelam.
On the 2nd July 1982 the Tiger guerrillas launched
a lightening attack on a police patrolling party at
Nelliady, Jaffna, killing four police officers on
the spot. Three police personnel were seriously
injured.
Another major incident of guerrilla
attack that shook the Sinhaha police system was the
successful raid on the well-guarded Chavakachcheri
Police station. On the early morning of 27th
October 1982 a Tiger guerrilla unit commanded by
Lieutenant Lucas Charles Antony (alias Aseer)
launched a well planned sudden attack on the Police
station, killing three police officers and injuring
several others. The rest of the police personnel
fled in terror. From the Police armoury we raided
thirty-three pieces of weaponary - nineteen
repeater guns, nine 303 rifles, two sub-machine
guns, two shot guns and one revolver. Two of our
guerrilla members sustained minor injuries. This
successful guerrilla raid forced the Government to
close down almost all the Police stations in the
North and the Police administrative system became
paralysed.
On the 18th February 1983 our freedom fighters shot
and killed Police Inspector Wijewardane and his
jeep driver Rajapaksa of Point Pedro Police
station. Inspector Wijewardane is notorious for
Police repression in that area.
On the 4th March 1983 at Umaiyalpuram, Paranthan,
our guerrilla fighters ambushed an army convoy and
in the gun battle that ensued several army
personnel were seriously injured and the rest fled
in fear. In that ambush two armoured cars were
damaged.
On the 2nd April 1983 the Tigers blasted the Jaffna
Secretariat building by bombs. Just a few hours
before a Government organised 'security conference'
to discuss ways and means to crush the Tiger
movement. The blast caused extensive damage to the
building and destroyed all State documents. Several
Government jeeps were set on fire.
On the 29th April 1983, the Liberation Tigers
assassinated three prominent supporters of the
ruling United National Party on the same day, as a
warning to all Tamil traitors who supported the
racist Government. Two of them were U.N.P.
candidates for the local elections (F. V.
Ratnasingham of Point Pedro and S. S. Muthiah of
Chavakachcheri) and the other, S. S. Rajaratnam, a
long time U.N.P. supporter, and the body-guard of
lJ.N.P's Jafina organiser K. Ganeshalingam As a
direct consequence of this action all the Tamil
U.N.P. candidates withdrew from the elections and
several Tamils resigned from the ruling party.
Tiger's Political Campaign
Succeeds
Responding to a mass campaign
launched by our movement the majority of the Tamil
people hymn predominately in the northern province
staged a mass boycott of local elections on the
18th May 1983.
Such a mass boycott of elections, unprecedented in
the political history of the Tamils, constitutes a
great political and propaganda victory for the
Tiger Movement. The T.U.L.F. which defied the Tiger
appeal, suffered an insulting humiliation and
irreparably damaged its political image, when 90%
of the voters in the North rejected the Party's
appeal to vote. The boycott was called by the
Tigers, who, for the first time, launched an
effective popular campaign appealing to the people
to shun the local government elections as a mark of
disapproval and rejection of the racist State
system that has imposed a reign of terror and
repression against the Tamils.
V. Pirabaharan chairman and the
military commander of the Tiger Movement in a
statement widely circulated among the people called
upon the Tamils to 'reject the civil administrative
machinery of the Sri Lankan state terrorists and
join the popular armed struggle directed towards
national emancipation'. He also accused the
reactionary bourgeois political Party, the Tamils
United Liberation Front. as functioning as agents
of the Sinhala racist regime and utilise the slogan
of 'freedom' to win the elections.
On the day of elections (18th May '83) just before
the voting started, time bombs planted by our
movement exploded at five polling booths in the
Tamil city of Jaffna causing panic and havoc among
the armed forces. On the same day, an hour before
the polling ended Liberation Tiger guerrillas
opened fire with machine guns on the army arid
police units guarding a polling booth at NaIlur,
Jaffna, killing an army corporal and seriously
wounding a soldier and two policemen. As a
consequence of guerrilla attacks, the Government
imposed a state of national emergency.
Reasons for the Recent
Holocaust
The causality that underlies the recent holocaust is manifold. It is
absurd to assume that our guerrilla ambush on the
midnight of 23rd July 1983 that killed fourteen
Sinhala soldiers and seriously wounded several
others precipitated the calamity. Riots had already
exploded at Trincomalee weeks before the guerrilla
ambush. Aided by the military, masses of Sinhala
hooligans went on a wild rampage at Trincomalee
massacring innocent Tamil people and burning down
their houses. Under the cover of Emergency and
Curfew the military openly colluded with the
Sinhala vandals in an orgy of arson, looting and
murders.
An all out genocidal assault on the
Tamils living in Colombo has been pro-planned by
Sinhala fascist groups led by leading members of
the ruling party. The recent outburst,
unprecedented in its destructive horror, is
therefore certainly an open manifestation of a
genocidal programme hatched by the fascist
leadership as the Hitlerian 'final solution' to the
Tamil national question.
There are two basic reasons for the ruling Sinhala
bourgeoisie to let loose a genocidal repression on
Tamils. Firstly, to divert the mass attention from
a deepening economic crisis brought about by a
dependent neo-colonial economy which has reduced
the Sri Lankan Government as a perpetual beggar to
western imperialist aid-giving agencies. The
popular resentment that has been accumulating from
massive inflation and mass unemployment as a
consequence of a disastrous economic policy has
been constantly diverted and channelled as
anti-Tamil hysteria. Secondly, the massacre of
Tamils on a genocidal scale the Sinhala fascist
ruling class always conceived as the only solution
to the national question. Mass killings and massive
destruction of property, these fascists wrongly
assumed, may humble the Tamils and wipe out the
Tamil national freedom struggle.
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