Tamil Tiger Terrorism

 

Ellie Stanton & Alison Tan

Singapore American School

The Youtube Project 

 

The Background

Historians believe that the Sri Lankan civil war, an ongoing conflict since the year 1983, stems from the period in which Sri Lanka was under British rule (1796-1948).  Before the colonial period, the local kingdoms Kotte and Kandy were under the control of the nominally Buddhist Sinhalese.  Jaffina was considered to be under Tamil, a Hindu minority, control.  The Sinhala called their country Sri Lanka, and the Tamils called theirs Tamil Eelam.  Tea and rubber estates were developed and Tamils were brought over from India to work the plantations.  The Sinhalese residents refused to work for the slave wages offered by the British.  However, as the colonial occupation continued, the Sinahlese who had refused to work for the British found themselves passed over for education and employment opportunities which instead went to the Tamils.  The result of British rule was the Tamil domination of the island's economic and political life; a situation which be ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamils that had been absent in the early part of the 20th century.

A power shift occurred when the British left in 1948 and Sri Lanka was granted independence with a new Sinhalese government.  The political balance was tilted further away from the Tamils when the citizenship of Indian Tamils, a community of descendents of Indian plantation workers considered separate from Sri Lankan Tamils, was stripped by legislation passed by the government of D.S. Senanayake in 1949.  Traditionally Tamil areas in the north and the east of the country were "colonized" by Sinhalese in government organized schemes often under the guise of development.  One example is the 1947 completion of the Gal-Oya dam project built on Tamil territory. Although land surrounding the reservoir should have been given to the Tamil families displaced by the construction, it was given Sinahlese to colonize.  The ethnic makeup was completely changed in areas that were traditionally homeland to the Tamil.  Sri Lankan politics continued to frustrate the Tamils in its Sinhalese natinalism.  A defining point in the nation's history is the Sinhala Only Act of 1956.  The consensus among all the island"s communities was that English be replaced as the country's official language; the government, however, made English and Sinhala the new official languages, and not Tamil.  The result was Tamil employees who were not fluent in Sinhala, including those working as officials in the government, lost their jobs.  For the Federal Party, headed by S.J.V. Chelvanayakam under the beliefs that Tamils were the original inhabitants of the island and thus promoted Tamil natinalism, this was the final straw. By 1956, following violent attacks and riots by the Sinhalese on Tamil workers migrating into their territory to find work, Tamil youth began forming militant groups in retaliation.  The nation was divided under political strife, with leftist parties and Tamil extremists engaged in a communal clash with the Sinhalese government under Junius Richard Jayawardene.  The beginning of the war is often thought to be marked by the killing of 13 government soldiers by a land mine in July of 1983.  The mine was planted by the most prominent of the militant groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Up until the land mine incident, the war had largely consisted of assassinations carried out by the LTTE.  They emerged the vanguard of all militant groups by slowly eliminating other Tamil Nationalist organizations through violent means.  As a result, many Tamil "splinter groups" have ended up working for the Sri Lankan government as paramilitaries and political parties opposted to the LTTE's vision of an independent state.   Despite several attempts at ceasefire or peace, the agreements between the government and the LTTE have been repeatedly violated by the violent militant group- including thousands of human rights crimes and atrocities that have earned them the label as a terrorist organization to this day.  The LTTE have attacked non-military targets including communter trains and buses, farming villages, temples and mosques resulting in the massacres of civilians and unarmed policemen.  The LTTE is also known to use child soldiers, some as young as 9, as frontline troops or as suicide bombers; the children themselves are often recruited by force, or tricked into joining.  The LTTE continues to violate human rights in their movement for self-determination.  

The Issue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WUxgSV3IgE

The Solution

In order to make the SAS community more aware, we have decided to use our artistic capabilities to make a statement about LTTE terrorism in the school. We will turn three hallways into large-scale graphic novel panels, depicting the atrocities in Sri Lanka so that observers will be emotionally moved. The graphics will follow the journey of two young children who were taken from their home and enlisted as child soldiers in the LTTE army. We will use only black, white, and red, for a greater impact. At the corner of each “panel”, we will have directions to the next part of the ‘story’. All artworks will be labeled by a recognizable tag that will have the name of our project and directions on how to contribute to the fight against human rights violations in Sri Lanka.

In this way, we are making the SAS community aware of the issue in a simple manner; we are making it unavoidable to students. They will have an opportunity to contribute or learn more about the topic because of the information we provide them at each site. We feel that that this will force people to acknowledge the turmoil in Sri Lanka by using engaging aesthetics.

The Charity:

The Asian Human Rights Commission is an organization dedicated to The Asian struggle for rights and freedoms against oppression in civil society and the political oppression. The Asian branch of the Human Rights commission, their charter states that “the reaffirmation of rights is necessary now more than ever before. Asia is passing through a period of rapid change, which affects social structures, political institutions and the economy. Traditional values are under threat from new forms of development and technologies, as well as political authorities and economic organizations that manage these changes.”

MLA Bibliography

14 Civilians Killed, 35 Wounded in Aerial Bombardment. 2007. Youtube. 23 Oct. 2007.                        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqXIBoxnnws

"A War Strange as Fiction." The Economist 7 June 2007.

"Child Soldiers of the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)." 2001. South Asia Terrorism

            Portal. 25 Sept. 2007. <http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/shrilanka/terroristoutfits/

            child_solders.htm>.

"Fact Sheet on Child Soldiers in Sri Lanka." Human Rights News. 11 Nov. 2004. Human Rights Watch. 27 Sept. 2007.

           http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/11/slanka9662.htm.

"Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 1 Oct 2007, 11:13 UTC.

            Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 1 Oct 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=

            Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eelam&oldid=161533879>.

"LTTE: A Trail of Atrocities." 14 June 2007. Ministry of Defence Sri Lanka. 25 Sept. 2007 .

            http://www.defence.lk/LTTE%20Attrocities/LTTE_Atrocities14june.pdf.

LTTE Child Soldiers. 2007. Youtube. 23 Oct. 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z9FVIPYaEE.

McGowan, William. Only Man is Vile: the Tragedy of Sri Lanka. 1st ed.

            HarperCollinsCanadaLtd, 1992.

"Sri Lankan Civil War." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Oct 2007, 12:19 UTC. Wikimedia 

            Foundation, Inc. 1 Oct 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sri_Lankan_War

            &oldid=161772964>.

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