Who are the Tamil Tigers, and are they terrorists?

18 May

Who are the Tamil Tigers?

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a resistance group also known as the Tamil Tigers, were founded in 1976 to call for an independent state from Sri Lanka. This is after decades of discrimination and violence perpetrated against the Tamil ethnic minority in the northern and north-eastern part of Sri Lanka.

Initially, the Tamil Tigers were one of many Tamil groups advocating for the rights of the Tamil minority. Other groups included the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation, the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, and the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front, amongst others. However, the Tamil Tigers became the primary group pushing for the creation of the independent state of Tamil Eelam.

What happened?

The conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government escalated to a bloody war that wound up killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The Tamil Tigers were eventually defeated in 2009, 26 years after the conflict formally began. The Sri Lankan government has been accused of carrying out a genocide of Tamils in those final months of the war, noting that at least 40,000 if not more than 150,000 people were killed. The Sri Lankan government has yet to be held accountable for these war crimes.

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Are they terrorists?

Many Tamils celebrate the Tamil Tigers as freedom fighters who fought against a genocidal regime that disenfranchised Tamil and Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka.

However, the legacy of the Tamil Tigers is complex. Some Tamils lost members of their family to the Tamil Tigers. The Tamil Tigers also forcibly expelled Muslims from the North under suspicions of collusion with the Sri Lankan government, and committed others atrocities, which led many governments to brand the group as a ‘terrorist organisation’.

But the words 'terrorism' and ‘terrorist’ are not helpful in trying to understand political organisations. In most contexts, terrorism means to compel people to a course of action to achieve a political objective through the use of violence. Interestingly, that is also the definition of war.

So what is the difference between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers? To put it simply, state actors, like the Sri Lankan government, are considered ‘legitimate’, and non-state actors, like the Tamil Tigers, are considered ‘illegitimate’ – and branded as terrorists.