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The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been fighting a war for the national liberation of Tamils living in the north and east of Sri Lanka since the early 1970s. This chapter addresses a series of questions concerning both organizational and individual motivations. Why were the Black Tigers formed? How and why have they been deployed? Why did the intensity of their use Xuctuate? Who becomes a Black Tiger? Why have they acquired such a powerful reputation? The first section gives a brief history of the conflict. The second looks at the Black Tigers in the context of the LTTE, the third at the Black Tigers as a unit, and the fourth at what little can be said about personal motivations. The chapter concludes with some conjectures about the Black Tigers at both the organizational and personal levels.

In the months between January and May 2009, the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) unleashed a full military offensive against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers) in Sri Lanka's northern districts. This was to be the final phase of a war for a separate Tamil state which killed more than 100,000 people, damaged the country's economy, and fundamentally changed and arguably diminished the Sri Lankan polity. Over the twelve months or more since the end of the fighting, increasing evidence has emerged of a military operation that systematically and deliberately ignored the lives of civilians in its pursuit of LTTE rebels or which targeted civilians as LTTE sympathizers. There is also growing evidence of war crimes having been committed by SLA troops. This chapter addresses the question of why the principles of a Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) were not invoked. A major reason why the international community was not able to exercise more authority in relation to Sri Lanka, particularly in the final stages of the anti-LTTE war, was because it was both blocked in the UN Security Council by China and Russia, and it was blocked on the ground by China and India both actively supporting the government of Sri Lanka.

In campaigns involving suicide terrorism, individual operatives and parent societies can rarely ‘surrender’ in the conventional wartime sense; however, terrorist organizations sometimes terminate their campaigns. The reasons why they do so are widely misunderstood. This overview begins with the Assassins and moves through the history of suicide terrorism. It explains the surprising findings of research done on hundreds of modern groups, with case studies on the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict examined in greater depth. The conclusion discusses the unique challenges, especially for democracies, of compelling groups that use suicide terrorism to end their operations and surrender.

“Religion and Terrorism: The Need for a Multidimensional Model.” Chapter 1 stresses that religiously motivated terrorism is very complex, and no single perspective or discipline can completely account for it. The idea that any single model can enable us to predict terrorist actions is rejected. This chapter touches on issues of defining both terrorism and religion, reviews past research on the psychological and social facilitation of violent behavior (Milgram, Zimbardo, Waller, Bandura) and its relation to terrorism, and discusses the contested relationship between religious and political factors in the genesis of religious terrorism through an analysis of Pape’s book Dying to Win and the different ways that religious terrorists fuse religion and politics.

In December 2001, a ceasefire was initiated to put an end to the brutal war that has been going on for years between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/Tigers) and the security forces of the government of Sri Lanka. The ceasefire was pursued in order to finally settle the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils. A campaign aimed at establishing an independent Tamil nation state—Tamil Eelam—over a part of the island of Sri Lanka commenced in the mid-1970s with the formation of the Tamil United Liberation Front within the political mainstreams. Soon assuming the form of a secessionist insurrection marked by guerrilla warfare and terrorism, the campaign had, by the early 1990s, become one of the most brutal intra-state conflicts in the world. The role performed by Norway as facilitator of Sri Lanka's peace effort was only the tip of the iceberg of foreign involvement in the country's conflict.

This chapter begins with a brief recapitulation of the conditions that prevailed in Sri Lanka in the period leading up to the peace efforts initiated in December 2001. It focuses on both the basic features of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)-led secessionist campaign as well as the problems and constraints that were encountered in some of the earlier attempts at negotiating with the Tigers. In the context of the paramountcy of devolution among the solutions being prescribed for Sri Lanka's national problem, this chapter concludes with a brief study of devolution as a modality of conflict resolution. First, it chronicles the peace negotiations made between the Sri Lankan government and LTTE, including one under the sponsorship of India and another initiated by Chandrika Kumaratunga. This chapter argues that neither the LTTE nor the majority of Tamil political groups of Sri Lanka could have a genuine desire for a peaceful resolution of the ethnic conflict.

Those engaged in efforts to establish a Tamil-dominated sovereign nation state in Sri Lanka at some point of time in the future believe that its geopolitical survival and economic viability would depend crucially on its territory encompassing not only the predominantly Tamil northern plains of Sri Lanka, but in addition at least the island's resource-rich eastern lowlands. This chapter examines the ‘Karuna revolt’ led by Vinayanamoorthi Muralitharan, alias Colonel Karuna alias Karuna Amman, the military wing leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the eastern province districts of Batticaloa and Ampara. It discusses the impact of the revolt on electoral politics of Sri Lanka in the context of the impending parliamentary elections (scheduled for 2 April); the durability of the on-going ceasefire and the prospects for a resumption of peace negotiations between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE; and the future of the LTTE.

This chapter spans the first two years of the presidential tenure of Mahinda Rajapaksa, a period of dramatic change in the main configurations of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. At the commencement of the period there was, on the one hand, a new president who was tentative about his policy stances in respect of both national security as well as the secessionist challenge, and, on the other, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leadership who has contributed substantially to Mahinda Rajapaksa's electoral victory. Following Rajapaksa's election, the LTTE leaders launched a series of military offensives. The relentless intensification of Tiger belligerence in the early months of the new regime should be understood in the context of the remarkable success Rajapaksa achieved in consolidating his grip over the politics of Sri Lanka's south.

This chapter discusses key material and discursive contestations over Ruhuna National Park's meaning during Sri Lanka's recent civil war. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Ruhuna was subject to sporadic closure because of infiltration by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatists (LTTE, or ‘Tamil Tigers’). The chapters shows how the park was therefore a key material and imaginative geography through which Sri Lankan nationhood was contested, from its militarization involving checkpoint and surveillance culture through the 1990s, through to the semiotic rejections and reclamations of words like ‘tiger’ and ‘jungle’ played out in the national press through the 1990s. This chapter also concludes on Ruhuna National Park by emphasizing its implication as a site of nature irreducibly connected with the political geography of Sri Lanka's ethnicized politics of nationhood.

This chapter covers the events and trends of the first twelve months of the ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The idea of negotiating with the LTTE found endorsement from the clergy of different religions including prominent Buddhist monks. The new government remained highly dependent on the backing of the international community to carry through its strategy of resolving the ethnic conflict. Certain basic contradictions in the entire approach, ignored for a time in the initial euphoria of peace, had begun to affect public perceptions and impact upon the negotiation process. Since the signing of the MoU, there were many reported violations of its terms by both the government as well as the LTTE, including arms smuggling. In the post-ceasefire months, the MoU provided an opportunity to the LTTE leadership to further consolidate its hegemony over Tamil politics in Sri Lanka. This chapter also considers the response of the Muslims to the peace negotiations between the government and the LTTE.

This chapter examines how interactions between Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers were flawed on either side even before Rajapakse was elected President. The programme for reconstruction and rehabilitation sanctioned by the donor countries remained frozen as there was little movement in the peace talks. Unresolved issues, such as the High Security Zones (HSZs), which affected many Tamil civilians in the north, introduced fresh complications into the discourse. The proposal for setting up an Interim Self-Governing Authority (ISGA) failed to take off as the LTTE raised the bar rather high. Or, that is how the government saw it. Moreover, fresh strains between President Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe made it difficult to make any advance in the peace process. At that point, the LTTE were confident of playing on these contradictions.

Chapter 5 analyzes two billionaires within transnational diaspora politics, whose ethnonational identity generates security concerns for communities abroad. The Jewish-American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has been financing a free newspaper, Israel Hayom, which has become the most widely read daily in Israel, staunchly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and the “entrenchment–expansionism” position vis-à-vis Palestine. His interventions in the Israel–Palestine conflict ran counter to the majority views of American Jewry and undermined President Obama’s foreign policy. The second case examines whether the hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam helped to fund the insurgency of the LTTE (“Tamil Tigers”) in his former home state Sri Lanka. While the case once produced spectacular headlines, upon closer inspection the political agency of Rajaratnam appears as very limited. He seems to have largely conformed to the demands put on the Tamil diaspora by the LTTE, and the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism policies restricted his options severely.

This chapter covers the twelve-month period from April 2003 during which major transformations occurred in the political configurations, both of the government of Sri Lanka with its dichotomous power arrangement as well as of the monolithic Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). These had a profound impact on the ceasefire and the ‘peace negotiations’. There was growing disenchantment in the electorate with the performance of the United National Front (UNF) and its leader Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe. Two significant events define the temporal scope of this chapter—the announcement on 21 April 2003 of the decision by the LTTE high command to suspend its participation in the peace talks, and the defeat of the UNF at the parliamentary elections held on 5 April 2004. This chapter also highlights the confrontations between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the UNF leadership.

Since late 2007, the forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been largely confined to the wilderness of northern Vanni from which, however, its leadership has directed a series of random attacks of devastating effect on various targets—mainly of commuter traffic—in other parts of Sri Lanka. These attacks appear to be driven in part to provoke a Sinhalese backlash in the form of mob attacks on Tamil civilians living in areas of mixed population in Sri Lanka. It has seldom been possible to sort out the truth from fiction in the published stories on the direct confrontations between the armed forces and the LTTE. One internal dimension of the crisis is seen in the recent resurgence of several anti-LTTE political organizations among the Tamil community of Sri Lanka. A distinction between the LTTE interests and those of the Tamils of Sri Lanka is being drawn with clarity and vehemence. Despite these developments, there is still a long way to go before Sri Lanka could resolve the ethnic conflict and achieve lasting peace.

This chapter describes the political and economic conditions that paved the way for the declaration of a ceasefire by the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in December 2001. Efforts made in the months that followed with the objective of initiating a search for a resolution of the ethnic conflict culminated in the commencement of a series of direct peace negotiations between the two sides in September 2002. From short-term perspectives the ceasefire could be regarded as a product of the victory of the United National Front (UNF) at the parliamentary elections of December 2001. The agreement between the government and the LTTE entered into on 22 February 2002 was intended to formalize the suspension of the campaign of war and terrorism conducted by the LTTE. The agreement took the form of an MoU, which contained a series of conditions and courses of action to which both the government and the LTTE had committed in the course of its preparation by the government of Norway.

The final phase of the eleven-year tenure of Chandrika Kumaratunga as president of Sri Lanka was a period during which the country was battered by a tsunami and incessant waves of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terror. The chapter begins with the parliamentary elections of 2 April 2004 in which the United People's Freedom Alliance won more seats than the United National Front (UNF) to regain a flimsy hold of the national legislature, and ends at the presidential election of 17 November 2005 in which the People's Alliance candidate Mahinda Rajapaksa edged past his rival Ranil Wickremasinghe, the leader of the UNF. Each of the five parts into which the chapter is divided serves as an analytical commentary on contemporary events of relevance to the state of the ongoing ceasefire.

This chapter examines why the peace process in Sri Lanka failed to find a constitutional settlement for the country’s ethno-territorial cleavage, and even enthroned a government hostile to Tamil aspirations for regional autonomy. It first provides a historical background on the ethnic division between Sinhalese and Tamils before turning to the period of constitutional engagement in Sri Lanka, focusing in particular on the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and highlighting its various weaknesses as a model of conflict transformation and constitutional transition. The chapter also analyzes the outcomes of the peace process and the lessons that can be drawn from it. Two features of Sri Lanka’s political culture that became evident in the failure of the peace negotiations are identified: the hyper-competitive nature of party politics and the elitism of constitutional politics.

This chapter focuses on external interventions in the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka exemplified mainly by the pressures brought to bear by the West upon both the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to abandon violent confrontation and instead seek a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Such pressures on the government have taken several forms, from advice and moral persuasion to threat of action against alleged human rights violations. This chapter begins with a study of the changing perceptions concerning human rights as postulated by the United Nations, attempting to contextualize such postulates both in the efforts of human rights activists to ‘globalize’ humanitarian ideals, as well as in the counterpoising desire on the part of most states to safeguard national sovereignty. It then examines external interventions which Sri Lanka has had to encounter in the recent past. Finally, it presents a detailed case study of a multipronged human rights intervention in an episode of the Sri Lankan conflict: the Muttur tragedy.