A political dog whistle is a code word that sounds reasonable, but which the faithful can hear. In the US it would have been something like ‘states-rights’ for slavery and segregation. In the Sri Lankan context, many people are using ‘accountability’ to perpetuate the Eelam war by other means. This blogger Anapayan puts it well: “Tamil nationalists’ demand for accountability is not meant for reconciliation or justice rather a political maneuver to suit their incompatible political agenda.”

The LTTE Great Heroes Day is coming up, and the JVP’s November Heroes Day just passed. Both groups terrorized, tortured and tried to kill their way to political change, and yet both feel that there is something to commemorate. While I support mourning the dead, I think it’s folly to say that they died for something more than sociopathic assholes promoting a corrupted cause.

The rump LTTE doesn’t have a head so much as two cheeks, Vinayagam and Nediyavan. Instead of fighting for Eelam, however, they’re fighting each other over event halls in the UK and over who gets to control the LTTE’s international wealth. Makes a loud farting noise, but not much sense. DBS has been covering the LTTE abroad recently, and I’ve collated some interesting parts.

According to DBS Jeyaraj, the latest LTTE meet-up had less than 3,000 attendees, down from 35k in 2004 (and more in protests at the end of war). The is partly due to the declining popularity of violent, distant separatism, and also divisions within the LTTE. Rather oddly, one of the splits seems to be that the Vinayagam doesn’t want to hold a Pongu Thamil until Prabhakaran returns. Presumably with Jimmy Hoffa and the 12th Imam.

People have said that war should have no civilian casualties. Rather than change the frame, the Sri Lanka government responded and said ‘there were no civilian casualties’. This was dumb. They’re only now starting to admit that civilians did die. That’s a start. I was watching the government’s response to Channel 4′s Killing Fields, Lies Agreed Upon. It sucks just as much, only in the opposite direction.

Every slander against Arab protestors was true of the LTTE. They were violent, sectarian, and foreign influenced. How is/was Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka different from the Arab Spring? I don’t mean federalism (good idea, people deserve to be troubled by a government that at least speaks their language). I mean separatism, the idea of a separate state for the Tamil race in the North and East of the island.

Started watching ‘The Killing Fields Of Sri Lanka’. So far I find it biased and framed completely wrong. I mean, who cares how you frame blood, of course, but the issue is that it makes the information completely undigestible in Sri Lanka. The upshot seems to be not that how the war was conducted was wrong (agreed) but that the war itself was wrong (disagreed). I say this not in the sense that I like war, but in the sense that the last push ended a war which had been blazing for 30 years.

FirstPost has run an interview from KP saying that Indian political parties used the Tamil cause for votes. Well, duh. And the LTTE used them. It was a mutually exploitative relationship. I liked FirstPost when it came out, but they have some rather loose standards for a news site. This article, for example, says that this is KP’s first interview since the war ended in 2009. It’s definitely not. Off the top of my head he’s given interviews to:

It seems something of a tautology. Suicide bombers are suicidal. This is, however, not the dominant view. According to Mia Bloom at Penn State, “You don’t want to conflate the Western ideas of suicide with something that is, in the Middle East, a religious ceremony.” I still find that most western analysts of suicide bombing falter, however, when they make it a Middle Eastern or Muslim thing. The Sri Lankan example is proof that it isn’t and a scientific study of the thing has to go beyond the 9/11 bias of focusing on a strange Muslim threat. I once read a profile of a Sri Lankan suicide bomber in Marie Claire which talked about how she was repeatedly raped at 7 and how other LTTE bombers were from similar background. In that vein, these scholars Williams and Lankford may be on to something when they say that many suicide bombers have suicidal tendencies themselves. The bombing organizers they interviewed, for example, have none.

I was reading Adele Balasingham’s autobiography The Will To Freedom, which I randomly found in a used bookshop. The wife of late LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham, she wrote a self-serving and blinkered autobiography, which is nevertheless interesting for her personal access to late LTTE leader Prabhakaran and other assorted terrorists. What I found most interesting was how total psychos tend to be humanized via food. She writes how Prabhakaran’s passion was food and cooking and how he often sent over dishes for her and Anton. She also details his fastidious dress and cleanliness habits and how he despised smoking and drinking. All very admirable and connectable human traits, but she entirely elides incidents like the multiple suicide bombings he ordered, or the hacking to death of border villagers, or the machine gunning of innocent worshipers in Anuradhapura. Instead, the story she wrote is about some pristine liberation struggle where Prabhakaran enters as a friendly neighbor, helping with food and travel arrangements. Interesting personal anecdotes, but not really representative of history. That is, even mass murderers must eat, as humans do. That doesn’t make them humanitarians.