This week, Sri Lankans woke up to an amazing new reality. Their long national nightmare seems to have ended, suddenly and violently, with the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Never heard of him? Perhaps the phrase “Tamil Tigers” is familiar. Prabhakaran commanded the militant group known in Sri Lanka by its acronym LTTE, for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
For 25 years, the Tigers fought state forces in battles and massacres ranging all across the teardrop-shaped island in the Indian Ocean.
The suffering has been staggering, with upwards of 80,000 people displaced, assassinated, mutilated, and slaughtered. Children and women, farmers and politicians, bus drivers and journalists – no one was safe. Both sides committed shocking violence.
The news that Sri Lankan forces had finally cornered and killed Prabhakaran took me back nearly 18 years. In 1991, shortly after a Tiger bomber had detonated herself and the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, I had gone with another journalist to Sri Lanka to find out more about these people.
In Colombo, we found a driver. Back then, the Tigers controlled large swathes of northern Sri Lanka, including the entire Jaffna Peninsula; the rebels had boats, a couple of planes, and ran a repressive parallel government.
Once there had been politically moderate Tamil leaders; Prabhakaran had ruthlessly eliminated them all.
Several hours north of the Capital, we met an army barricade. The Sri Lankan army officer was polite but unyielding. So we wedged ourselves back in the tiny car and drove eastward.
Along with the north, the Tigers held a long, narrow strip of coastline. In this region, the army controlled the roads during the day but withdrew to fortified camps at night. This time, we got through.
The next morning, our driver found a man who could put us in touch with someone who could help us make contact with the Tigers.
After some travail, we found ourselves in a remote village surrounded by silent, fascinated locals. A tall, austere man stepped out of the crowd and said he’d take us to the LTTE.
At dawn the next day, the man, Nithi, reappeared with breakfast, bicycles, and a dead-faced teenager armed with an automatic rifle.
“How much longer?” we would gasp, as the sun beat down and our bikes churned through soft sand past rice paddies and through groves of palm trees. Each time, Nithi would reply, “Less than an hour.”
Twelve grueling hours later we jolted into the Tigers’ camp, where Nithi was greeted as the high-ranking officer he turned out to be.
I was sunburned, dehydrated, and indignant: “How do you expect us to believe anything you say, when you lied all day about how long it would take us!”
“We don’t know where we are, and they have guns,” my companion murmured, “So let’s not antagonize them.”
As it happened, the Tigers were fine hosts. They fed and watered us, and spent hours answering our questions. The political chief of the eastern command talked about the historic grievances of the mostly Hindu Tamil minority against their mostly-Buddhist Sinhalese countrymen (the colonial British had favored the Tamils; after independence in 1948, the majority Sinhalese favored themselves).
The militants emphasized army cruelties towards Tamil civilians; they waved away mention of LTTE atrocities. Around their necks we saw cyanide capsules strung on loops of cord. The Tigers were famous for this: Even the youngest militants wore vials of the poison in case of capture.
“What now?” we asked. The civil war had being going for eight years. The ostensible aim was an ethnic Tamil homeland of some sort.
There’d been ceasefires – broken by the Tigers. There’d been offers of dialogue – rejected by the Tigers. What did they want? What was the goal?
The militants’ response was in many ways the most shocking part of the trip, for there was a howling emptiness at the core of their purpose. We pushed, but they simply had no answer to the question. They were living to kill, and killing to live – and what the killing might render was something they seemed not to have considered.
After 25 years, the Tamil Tigers got nothing: Not an independent state; not the esteem of the civilized world, which rightly regarded them as terrorists. Sri Lanka has lost a quarter-century and tens of thousands of precious human lives.
And so it ends, with a bang—and also a whimper.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
