Exit The Tiger

The government of Sri Lanka has announced that the leader of the “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam”, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in the sanguinary denouement of that nation’s long civil war.

This news will certainly come as a great relief to a great many people in that tormented island. Mr. Prabhakaran was a ruthless terrorist who gave the world such blessings as the explosive vest and female suicide bombers, and who also masterminded the assassinations of Indian prime minister Rajiv Ghandi (who was killed by a young woman who detonated herself as she greeted Mr. Gandhi with flowers) and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa.

It is said that when Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, defeated the Persian king Cyrus in 529 B.C., she had him decapitated, and threw his head into a vessel full of his own blood. “You who have lived so long on the blood of others,” she said, “now you may drink your fill.”

11 Comments

  1. Court says

    Good riddance. Those guys were real bastards. Atrocities galore. A friend of mine was working at an NGO there and had to flee the area when the Tigers started shelling the school he was working out of. Nice.

    Here’s hoping some stability will return. People who’ve been there tell me it’s absolutely beautiful with some of the best surf beaches in SE Asia. Tourists used to flock there. Hope they do so again.

    Posted May 18, 2009 at 11:51 am | Permalink
  2. James says

    Aren’t they a Christian terrorist group?

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 3:11 am | Permalink
  3. Malcolm says

    No, James, the Liberation Tigers are (were?) primarily a Hindu group. But their cause was not religious; it was based on ethnic separatism.

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 10:25 am | Permalink
  4. Court says

    From the NYT:

    Though the Tamils are largely Hindu and although he sometimes employed Marxist terminology, Mr. Prabhakaran’s movement was for the most part neither religious nor ideological. It focused on the creation of a Tamil homeland in the area known as Eelam, in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 10:28 am | Permalink
  5. Mary says

    They are supported by radical Christians in the west for sure, and they have both hindu and Christians. Their cause is to build a separate religious state than the Majority Muslims, and they are classified as a terrorist group.

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 12:31 pm | Permalink
  6. Malcolm says

    “Majority Muslims”? Are we talking about the same country here? The majority of the people of Sri Lanka are Buddhists, Mary. Muslims account for only about 7% of the population.

    You certainly have the “terrorist” part right, at least.

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 12:37 pm | Permalink
  7. Well, the ‘Good News’ is that one particular terrorist group has been crushed – for the time being – but the ‘Bad News’ is, apparently, that it was only done with enormous military aid from China. I wonder what the ‘quid pro quo’ will be? And How will India re-act with militant Pakistan to the north and a Chinese presence in the south?

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 12:59 pm | Permalink
  8. Mary says

    Sorry , you are right. i meant to note that there were large Muslim population in the north before the were mascaraed and ethnically cleansed during the 1990 when the LTTE forcibly expelled the entire Muslim population of Jaffna.

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 1:22 pm | Permalink
  9. Mary, could you give some sources for your statement that the LTTE were “supported by radical Christians in the west”? This is news to me, but I don’t know much about this conflict.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 7:39 pm | Permalink
  10. Mary says

    HJH,

    Here is an article about the connection but you can do that yourself too and you will find more, by the way, this is not a secret. Try wikipedia or look at this: http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?id=1141381467&type=articles
    also it is supported by The Christian Science Monitor

    Posted May 19, 2009 at 7:50 pm | Permalink
  11. Mary, I find only the article to which you’ve linked, nothing else. Wikipedia has nothing. The Christian Science Monitor has nothing. Now, I may have missed something in my Google search, but if so, could you link to the sites? I am very interested in religious violence and have blogged on the phenomenon. Certainly, there has been Christian violence at times, but I’d never heard of a Christian influence on the Tamil Tigers, or that Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a Christian suicide bomber. Most sites that I found stated that the bomber was Hindu. Also, I’d like links to your statement on radical Christians in the West.

    This is blogworthy if it can be supported.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

    Posted May 20, 2009 at 5:28 am | Permalink

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