Striped Raid

The Tamil "tigers" are defeated, but it's too early to rejoice. The northeast of Sri Lanka will resemble the Russian North Caucasus for a long time to come

They invented the suicide belt, were the first to use kamikaze terrorists on a large scale and recruit women to carry out terrorist attacks. The head of the Moscow office of BBC Monitoring, Yevgeny Konovalov, recalls that back in the 70s, at the institute, in the Tamil course, they showed leaflets with instructions on how to blow up telegraph poles. Such leaflets were printed in their printing houses by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Sri Lankan rebel group that has nothing to do with the Islamists. Almost all "tigers" are Hindu vegetarians.

The "Tigers" were not just a terrorist underground, but a full-fledged army with its own aircraft and navy. They even had their own squad of combat swimmers who mined the ships of the Sri Lankan Navy.

At the end of last year, the Sri Lankan military, on the orders of President Mahinda Rajapakse, moved from low-intensity positional warfare to an all-out cleansing of rebel-controlled territories. They did not take into account the number of victims and the opinion of the world community. In just a couple of weeks, the separatists were forced out of the cities and villages and driven into the jungle in the east of the island. “Then there were still doubts that the operation could be completed,” says Airat Akhmetov, head of the Russian Cultural Center in Sri Lanka. But doubts were soon dispelled.

On May 18, the President of Sri Lanka announced the end of the civil war, which had lasted for about 30 years. Rajapakse delivered the first part of his speech in Tamil, the language of the defeated enemy. Then he switched to the state language - Sinhala. On May 19, the authorities presented to the world the corpse of the leader of the Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran. He never managed to crack through the cyanide capsule he always carried with him. And May 20 was declared a holiday: crowds of people took to the streets of the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo. Everyone honked, beat the drums and, as on the most important holidays, treated each other with milk, rice and honey. “This is a big win for all of us. For 30 years we lived in fear, not knowing what will happen tomorrow,” says Colombo resident Budhapriya Ramanayake.

However, the inhabitants of Sri Lanka and now can not be sure of the future. The long-standing armed conflict between the Tamil separatists and the federal Sinhalese is reminiscent of the war in Chechnya. And here and there the war ended not with a peaceful settlement, but with the victory of the stronger side. And now everything depends on the desire or unwillingness of this strong side to solve the problems that forced the weak side to take up arms.

"TIGERS" FOR SURVIVAL

As in the Middle East, it all started in 1948, when the British colonizers left Ceylon. After 1956, the Sinhalese majority made sure that its language became the only state language. Before that, English was also used, in which Tamils, the main ethnic minority of the country, 18% of the population, communicated with the Sinhalese. Fearing unrest, the authorities delayed the publication of the law for two years. The fear was not in vain: the first Sinhalese-Tamil clashes occurred when the law was printed.

In 1972, the Sinhalese renamed Ceylon to Sri Lanka and proclaimed Buddhism the main religion. This greatly offended Hindu Tamils. Discontent grew until the middle of the decade, when, in response to a violent crackdown on a domestic quarrel in Jaffna in the north, the Tamils ​​demolished a police station. Tamil pogroms swept across the country.

Anti-Tamil sentiment peaked in 1977 during parliamentary elections. Then the Tamil party for the only time became a legal opposition. “Imagine a Hindu temple - a large building with a spacious courtyard, and around - a huge fence. And this whole courtyard is filled with a crowd of frightened [Tamils]. There is a police cordon around the fence, not letting the [Sinhalese] rioters inside. And along Colombo, buses covered with white paint with the inscription “death to the Tamils” drove around, ”recalls Tamil expert Boris Volkhonsky.

The situation of the Tamils ​​changed in the early 1980s with the rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The "Tigers" demanded the creation of an independent Tamil state - Eelam, acquired a flag and an anthem. The militants had a short conversation with moderate Tamils ​​- politicians who advocated a united Sri Lanka were simply destroyed.

From the first days, the movement was led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, responsible not only for crimes in Sri Lanka, but also sentenced in absentia to death in India for the murder of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Known to the Tamils ​​by the nickname Tambi, which can be translated as "brother", he kept his followers in fear: thousands of them were destroyed on his orders. Many chose to blow themselves up by tying themselves with explosives.

For 26 years, there were three Tamil wars in Sri Lanka - by the end of the 20th century, the "tigers" controlled a fourth of the island. But in 2004, Akhmat Kadyrov was found among the "tigers". The Tamil commander Vinayagamurthy Muralidaran, better known as Colonel Karuna, defected to the side of the government. He controlled the east of the country. For the Tigers, this was the beginning of the end. According to Yevgeny Konovalov, in 2005 information processing of the population was already in full swing on the island: terrorist animals were attacking, it was time to save the country.

HIGH PRESSURE

However, the Tamil propaganda machine has always been more active than the Sinhalese. And after the defeat of the "tigers" she earned with renewed vigor. For a week now, demonstrators have been besieging Westminster in London, the UN building in New York, marching in thousands of people through Berlin, Paris and Toronto, demanding that their governments put pressure on the Sri Lankan authorities and stop violence.

There are about 4 million Tamils ​​in Sri Lanka. But in neighboring India, in the state of Tamil Nadu, there are 60 million of them. There are also impressive diasporas in Indonesia, Malaysia, East Africa, Europe and North America. “In addition, there are a huge number of websites about Tamils ​​on the Internet,” says Boris Volkhonsky. “Sinhalese propaganda only works inside Sri Lanka and cannot be compared with the international resonance of Tamil.” Columbia University professor Valentine Daniel says that many in the diaspora are ready to continue to support war - guerrilla, terrorist or whatever. Among the Sinhalese, too, there are many thirsty for blood. “There are lunatics on both sides, and very evil lunatics,” says Daniel.

According to Volkhonsky, there are no guarantees that the civil war will not resume. “She was quiet for a while. The Tigers have gone home. The situation in many ways became similar to the period after the civil war in Russia. During the day people lived in villages and plowed the land. And at night they went to kill the Reds,” says a Russian Tamil scholar. Now it all depends on whether the government will restore the agrarian economy of the Tamils ​​and create jobs for them, the expert said.

This will not be easy to do. Valentine Daniel notes that the economy of Sri Lanka is in the deepest crisis: 94% of GDP goes to service external debt, and 50% of the country's income is spent on military needs. “The fighters will now join the ranks of the unemployed,” says the American professor. Earlier, he recalls, when the next Tamil war was ending, former militants went into criminal activity: the number of robberies and kidnappings sharply increased.

Huge, by local standards, funds will have to be spent on yesterday's enemies. If Chechnya is one of 83 Russian subjects, then Sri Lankan Tamils ​​are one fifth of the population. “The Tigers have lost their leadership, their organizational structure has been destroyed, their weapons have run out, the fighters have left, there are no funds,” Volkhonsky sums up. They don't have the strength to go to war. But they can successfully conduct terrorist activities.” Approximately the same as militants continue to do in the North Caucasus.