Tamil Tigers cornered as war wanes

In 2006, Tasha Manoranjan decided to take a year off from school for an unusual reason. The 20-year-old Ohioan had read that violence had been escalating in northern Sri Lanka, the home of her Tamil ancestors, where she had spent the summer two years earlier.

Concerned, Ms. Manoranjan decided to return. She spent the next year traveling through northern Sri Lanka and teaching in group homes for girls, many of which had been bombed out and lacked electricity and plumbing.

Ms. Manoranjan found herself trapped in a cycle of violence that had raged for nearly 30 years between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Today, government soldiers have Tiger fighters cornered in the northeast with their backs to the coast. Sri Lankan forces anticipate an end to a seemingly interminable war. But Ms. Manoranjan says that peace is unlikely to come.

“I think it´s unreasonable to think the war will end because the government has nominal control over there. It is not winning the hearts and minds of the Tamil people,” she said.

The Tamil Tigers, who are fighting for the secession of Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil north, have been classified a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department since 1997. Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, they were considered the world´s leader in suicide bombings.

Yet the Sri Lankan government, in its campaign to root out the Tigers, has also been criticized for inflicting civilian casualties during battle.

Ms. Manoranjan says the government carpet-bombed the north every day, forcing her and her students into underground bunkers as Sri Lankan jets roared overhead.

In August 2006, an orphanage in Sencholai that Ms. Manoranjan called home two years earlier, was destroyed by a bomb, killing 61 schoolgirls, most of them 17 to 19 years old.

“It was so tragic because, if they had been born in America, like I had, their lives would have been totally different. They could have been happy and lived in peace,” Ms. Manoranjan said.

The Tigers were established in the 1970s by rebel-leader Velupillai Prabhakaran after decades of discriminatory measures against the Tamils by Sri Lanka´s Sinhalese majority.

The Tigers used conventional tactics at first, but in 1987 they created the elite Black Tiger suicide squad. The first suicide bombing, carried out against a Sri Lankan army camp, killed 40 people.

A 2002 cease-fire between the government and Tigers began to unravel with a series of Tamil attacks three years later, and in 2008, the government officially ended attempts to negotiate peace.

With their backs against the sea, the Tigers last month appealed for a cease-fire, which the government rejected.

“Instead of surrendering as the entire international community and the Sri Lankan government has called them to do, [the rebels] are calling [on] the very people who have asked them to surrender, to save their miserable skins,” said Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona, according to the Associated Press.

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