Pragmatic Action & Enchanted Worlds: A Black Tiger Rite of Commemoration

Michael Roberts,   … a reprint of an article in Social Analysis,  Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2006, 73–102. **

The de facto LTTE state in Sri Lanka has established a number of calendrical rituals to honour and remember its fallen heroes and heroines, the māvīrar. These are the personnel who have died in battle or fallen as part of the LTTE goal of political independence, namely, Thamilīlam or Eelam as the latter is more widely labelled. The most significant of these moments is Heroes Day on 27 November when their ­talaivar, or “Leader,” Velupillai Prabhākaran (more properly Pirapakaran) also delivers a peroration for 25 minutes immediately prior to the lighting of the flame of sacrifice at 6.06 p.m. at the designated tuyilam illam (resting places) for the māvīrar.[1] As Chritiana Natali discovered (2005) the Tamil people do not see these sites as “cemeteries.” Rather they are “portrayed as temples.” Binded, like the people she talked to, a demi-official LTTE site described the locations as “holy places.”[2]

Lone Cell Assaults: From Boston to Westmead-in-Sydney to the Unabomber. Inspirations and Enabling Conditions in Comparative Perspective **

Michael Roberts, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where the title is slightly different: http://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/lone-wolf-assaults-from-boston-to-westmead-home-invasion-to-the-unabomber/

The recent bomb outrage in Boston has sent tidal ripples along the media networks around the world.  It appears that the bombs were hidden in pressure cookers packed with nails/ball bearings and put in backpacks which were placed on the pavement among onlookers. “Similar easy-to-make roadside bombs are used in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Stewart 2013). But such bomb-making techniques are also clarified on internet sites. Among the first readings one headline in The Australian said: “Stamp of lone wolf more than al-Qa’ida” (Maley 2013). The contention here was that “in recent years, so-called “lone wolf” attackers — people who acquire radical ideology and weapons skills online — have become the greatest concern for counter-terrorism officials, who have virtually no way of detecting the activities of these people” (Stewart 2013).The absence of “chatter” on internet among jihadi circles after the event is one reason for this suspicion.  suspected bomb pack

Under Scrutiny: FIRE AND STORM reviewed by Sanderatne

Nimal Sanderatne, courtesy of Groundviews … http://groundviews.org/2013/04/17/review-of-fire-and-storm-by-michael-roberts/

     When Michael Roberts left Peradeniya in the late seventies, he was part of an exodus of intellectuals from the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, arguably one of the best universities at that time. The exodus of academics at that time was compelled by the economic difficulties faced by university dons. It was the second wave of such emigration that diminished the intellectual life of the university and country. The Arts Faculty of the University of Peradeniya never regained its prestigious academic status after that. Today the University of Peradeniya cannot take pride in intellectuals of the eminence of E.F.C. Ludowyck, E.R Sarachchandra, H.A.de S. Gunasekera, Fr. Ignatius Pinto, Ian Van den Driesen and many others.

Sri Lanka and the Defeat of the LTTE by KM de Silva reviewed

Colonel Hariharan

KM de Silva’s Sri Lanka and the Defeat of the LTTE (Penguin books, 2012 ISBN 9780143416524) looks at the rise and fall of LTTE in the context of  South Asia and the India-Sri Lanka relationship, says R Hariharan. The story of Velupillai Prabhakaran’s rise from the backwoods of  Jaffna to build the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), one of the most  dreaded terrorist organisations, and his fall in the battlefield can be told in  many ways. Sri Lanka historian KM de Silva in his latest book looks at the rise  and fall of the LTTE in the larger context of South Asia and the India-Sri Lanka  relationship.

The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination: The Inside Story … Part Four

L.Annadoure, courtesy of the Sri Lanka Guardian and  Times Now TV …. SEE http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2012/01/inside-story-rajiv-gandhi-assassination.html for Part I et seq AND http://transcurrents.com/tc/2010/01/killing_rajiv_gandhi_dhanus_sa.html for leads to Killing Rajiv Gandhi: Dhanu’s sacrificial metamorphosis in death? by Michael Roberts in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Number 1 …  http://www.informaworld.com/rsac

The Special Investigation Team which had been constituted to investigate into the Assassination of Shri Rajiv Gandhi had comprised in it Mr.DR Karthikeyan  who was  Inspector General of Police/Joint Director  of Criminal Bureau of Investigation and the  Chief of the Special Investigation Team, 5 Inspectors General of  Police, 8 Superintendants of Police from Criminal Bureau of Investigation,14 Deputy Superintends of Police and 44 Inspectors of Police. The Chief Investigating officer was one of the Superintendents of police Mr.K.Ragothaman who has written a book in Tamil under the caption “Rajiv Gandhi Kolai Vazhaku” in November 2009 which has been published by Kizhakku Pathippagam, Chennai. The Chief Investigating officer who, at page No.205 in Chapter 30-‘May Speak Henceforth’,  pours forth the distress, a sense of contrition and feelings of remorsefulness  for the deliberate failure on the part of the chief of Intelligence Bureau Mr.M.K.Naraynanan in  returning the video cassette with which the videographer  was video graphing the sequence of events  in the course of the political rally at the place at Sriperumpudur  some time  before the incident of bomb blast. But the question is whether such belated spurt of feelings was genuine or spurious or it was a an act of pretence of excuse for some act of failure on the part of the Special Investigation Team in general or knowingly had the Chief Investigating officer Mr.K.Ragothaman been privy to things which he ought not to have done but he had done much against his Will and conscience and contrary to principles of justice has to be  assessed a fresh in the light of a Television programme telecast in Times Now TV at 9.PM on 30.10.2012.

Rasalingam slashes Solheim’s grandstanding activity

Sebastian Rasalingam in the Island wherea different ttile was deployed: “Solheim and Prabhakaran”

Mr. Eric Solheim has used the book launch of BBC’s Frances Harrison to claim that he and the `international community’ offered an “organized end to the war which included the LTTE handing over weapons, registering LTTE caders and every single Tamil civilian supervised by international authorities and theUN, the US, India, etc.” He claims that this was ‘not heeded by Prabhakaran’ and the ‘international community’ could have done this even if the majority of people in Sri Lanka backing the Rajapaksa government did not want the self-appointed ‘international community’ to intervene.

From ‘Immolation’ to my Epitaph for Neelan Tiruchelvam

Michael Roberts … This article was originally printed in the Lanka Monthly Digest, September 1999, vol 6:2, pp. 56-57. It was then expanded significantly in some places, while citations and footnotes were added, for its re-printing within the book Fire and Storm. Essays in Sri Lankan Politics, Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2011, pp. 123-30 – ISBN 978-955665–134-8.

I: In February 1999 a Kurdish nationalist leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was caught by the Turkish authorities. Kurdish refugees in the Western world erupted in protest. In London a young girl Neila Kanteper set herself alight. In Sydney a young lad was caught on camera with petrol can and cigarette lighter as he threatened similar action. As I walked into the local news-agency in Adelaide that week the proprietor[1] waved the picture of Kanteper in flames in front of me and in considerable alarm inquired how anyone could take such an extreme measure. He could not ever take such a step, he said. His remarks gain in significance from the fact that they were unsolicited and had not been preceded by prior conversation. I was in a hurry and did not explore matters further, but I conjecture that his bewilderment stemmed not only from the method of death by fire, but also from such terminal commitment to a collective cause. The question, therefore, is whether in similar circumstances an act of martyrdom involving death by hand-gun would produce the same level of astonishment. Relatively speaking, death by gun seems to be so much more acceptable to the Western world than death by flame.

Hitchens in 2009 on the Tamil Cause … and its Fate under Pirapaharan

Christopher Hitchens, on 25 May 2009, in an article in SLATE entitled “The End of the Tamil Tigers. Insurgencies don’t always have history on their side” – see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/05/the_end_of_the_tamil_tigers.html **

In the late fall of 1978, I was approached by a Sri Lankan Tamil rights group, which visited the office of the socialist weekly in London where I was then working and entreated me to pay a visit to their country. I say “their” country, though they actually referred to it as “Ceylon”: the British colonial name that continued to be the country’s name after independence in 1948. It was only changed in 1972. The word Lanka is simply the name for island in Sanskrit, and the prefix Sri has a connotation of holiness, and the alteration generally reflected the aspirations and preferences of the Sinhalese-speaking and Buddhist majority. So the difference in emphasis there was pretty large to begin with. Image carried in Slate with caption “Sri Lankan soldiers with the remains of what’s said to be Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran”

Dedicated Soldiers and the Cyanide Pill of Protection

Michael Roberts

 Donald and Peter Field, Aussie signalmen extraordinary

A recent story about Australian soldiers working behind Japanese lines carrying cyanide pills to evade leaking information if taken prisoner (see below) brings to mind the LTTE policy of commiting all fighter recruits to the promise that they would BITE the kuppi (cyanide pill) they carried around their necks  if they were in imminent danger of being made captive.

Tiger fighters relax in camp, late 1980s –Pic by Shyam Tekwani (see below)

Grapevine rumour has it that, as the Soviet army closed in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker by swallowing cyanide. Other hearsay tales indicate that Velupillai Pirapāharan, the talaivar (leader) of the LTTE,  was inspired by this example and decided early in his career to adopt the precaution of carrying a pill around his neck in case he was captured; and  that this course of action was de rigeur for trained LTTE fighters from an early date.

Sharika Thiranagama: A Talk, A Book and More

City Talk: At Home with Violence: Ethnic LIfe in Colombo by Sharika Thiranagama

Colombo, where every anti-Tamil riot in Sri Lanka has begun, is, at the same time, a city of many Tamil-speaking (and other) minorities. This paper takes Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka and the urban heart of Sri Lanka to argue that Colombo has had to perform its Sinhala nationalist credentials constantly because it is “a city which is not one” (Tagg 1996). The paper examines the ways in which people make themselves at home in an ethnically divided city that has never fully been intelligible to its dwellers as one city. Here violence is taken as critical to Tamil phenemenologies of the city. Riots, bombs, and the checkpoints that crisscrossed Colombo made violence a constant feared spectacle of the urban, images of the possible bound by past violence. Yet Tamil spaces of relative safety also presented themselves, due to fear of the separatist LTTE and exploitation by other Tamils, as spaces of un-safety. This paper will takes these everyday practices of inhabiting Colombo as a minority to reflect further on the major dilemmas and political conflicts now facing Sri Lanka in its post-war future.