COLUMN ONE : Rebels’ Weapon: Cyanide : With a cult of suicide, the Tamil Tigers rank among the world’s most dedicated guerrilla groups. Their liberation war in Sri Lanka has entered the realm of fanaticism.

Inside his sandbagged bunker at the Sri Lankan army’s front line, Capt. Randu Hathnauda rubbed the old shrapnel wound in his forehead as he described--with as much respect as horror--the brutal commitment of the enemy bunkered down just a few hundred yards to the north.

“Very good fighters,” said the 26-year-old veteran of eight years of civil war in this island nation off the southern tip of India. “When I was in the siege of Elephant Pass, they charged us, and we were shooting them. At the moment they’re hit, they are eating cyanide--even small girls. I have seen it so many times.

“You shoot them. They are wounded. They take cyanide. They vomit. And they die. They have motivation.”

And they are out there, in the bunkers just beyond the no-man’s-land from Capt. Hathnauda’s forward position--at the entrance to the part of this war-torn country now held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They are not visible from this position, but others have seen them: about a dozen of the so-called Black Tigers, young men and women in combat fatigues and wearing telltale thin black ropes around their necks.

It is the same style of rope worn by Tamil Christians. But there are no crucifixes at the ends of these. Instead, there is a simple white cyanide capsule that brings death within seconds.

Still farther up the road in Kilinochchi, the first major Tiger-held town here in northernmost Sri Lanka, are more signs of the ruthless dedication of one of the world’s most extraordinary terrorist groups: They are the coffin makers of Kilinochchi, and they have been busy for the past several weeks, filling the latest order of the Tiger leadership: Five thousand simple plywood coffins, each one now earmarked for a Tiger.

The cyanide, the coffins--such are the preparations for Armageddon by an insurgent army that has gradually driven its war of liberation into the realm of fanaticism.

The Tamil Tigers, with their cult of suicide and self-sacrifice, were briefly thrust onto the center stage of international terrorism last year when a young woman rigged as a human suicide bomb--and later identified as a Tiger--blew up former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

On the surface, the Tigers appear little more than the Asian guerrilla equivalent of the Rev. Jim Jones and his Guyana suicide cult, which also met death by cyanide.

But in the months since Gandhi’s assassination May 21 during an election rally in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as investigators in India and Sri Lanka have pieced together the mosaic of the Tigers’ international terrorist network, they have developed respect for the organization’s motivation and discipline.

“They’re so deeply committed, they prefer death to being caught,” said one senior investigator in Tamil Nadu, where 26 Tiger suspects have committed suicide by cyanide just before capture--more than the total number of those arrested as suspects in the Gandhi killing.

“I think they’re the most dedicated and disciplined guerrilla group in the world--so many so willing to die just like that, and so happy to do it,” he said.

In the early 1980s, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Rajiv’s mother, India was the Tigers’ chief benefactor, quietly allowing them to establish training bases and weapons depots in Tamil Nadu state. But soon after Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984 and her son became prime minister, he signed a treaty with Sri Lanka that sent tens of thousands of Indian troops, in the role of a peacekeeping force, to northern Sri Lanka to try to destroy the guerrilla movement that India had helped create.

Within two years, the military operation had failed, and the troops pulled out. But the Tigers viewed Rajiv Gandhi as their greatest nemesis--and a particular threat during the election campaign last spring, when he appeared poised to return to power.

Since his assassination, international sympathy for the Tigers, and for their original cause of equality for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, has fallen off sharply, not only in the West but also in India. And the group’s penchant for cyanide and suicide, according to most analysts, will ultimately prove symbolic of the future of this most unusual guerrilla force.

“I feel that they are on the way out. The last assassination was the one bridge too far,” said Samuel Chandrahasan, a radical Tamil refugee in India who once served as the Tigers’ chief legal adviser and civilian advocate.

In the words of a veteran Tamil relief official who has seen the thousands of new coffins in the Tiger-held region around the Tamils’ northern stronghold of Jaffna: “I think they know this is the end. They’re expecting the final attack--preparing for the final battle.”

Still, here at the entrance to the sizable territory the Tigers still hold, it appears at first glance as if they have never been closer to victory.

Never before have they wielded such control over the northern region that for a decade they have sought to divide from Sri Lanka as a separate, Tamil-only state called Eelam. And the war that has cost tens of thousands of lives among Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils and its majority Sinhalese since the Tigers took up arms to “liberate” Jaffna in 1983 is at a virtual standstill, with Capt. Hathnauda’s men and the Tiger forces maintaining essentially the same positions they have held during the last 18 months.

In the Jaffna Peninsula itself, home to nearly 1 million Tamils and virtually no Sinhalese, the Tigers have consolidated not only their military control but also their stranglehold on power over every aspect of civilian life.

They have formed a police force and set up informal courts that act with brutal efficiency to keep crime low and fear high. They have tax officials who systematically collect and issue receipts for a minimum of two gold sovereigns--the traditional basic unit of Tamil savings, worth about $250 each--from each family. Those too poor to afford the tax are told to give a son or daughter to the Tiger army instead.

The Tigers also man makeshift immigration posts at every entrance to the north, forming de facto international borders, and they tax all travelers into and out of their region. They control a Jaffna-based Tiger radio station, four Tamil-language newspapers, all public transport and the distribution of all the thousands of tons of relief goods that international agencies send by ship into the besieged region.

And now the Tigers even make their own Eelam license plates.

“It’s a de facto situation today,” said former Tiger lawyer Chandrahasan, who is committed to an independent, but democratic, Tamil Eelam, free of Sri Lankan control but also of the Tigers’ monopoly on power. “It’s de facto divided. The only thing is that the world has yet to recognize that Sri Lanka has been divided.”

But Tamil civilians have been forced not only to recognize that division but to endure its price--a price that is growing equally heavy for the Tigers as well.

In the 18 months since the guerrillas came out of their jungle hide-outs and seized control of the north, fighting fiercely against the occasional Sri Lankan army assaults that have chipped strategic pieces out of the Tigers’ territory, the Sri Lankan government has maintained a limited but effective economic embargo of the region.

“The ordinary civilians are quite desperate because the economic blockade is really very cruel,” said Neelam Tiruchelvam, a prominent Tamil political analyst in Colombo, the capital. And, he said, the Sri Lankan army’s siege of the region, combined with the Tigers’ stubborn hold on it, has made life there almost medieval.

The first signs of the siege’s toll on the hundreds of thousands of northern Tamils were evident at a Sri Lankan government checkpoint just a mile or so behind Capt. Hathnauda’s front line. There, one typical afternoon last week, thousands of Tamils stood for hours in a milelong line in the tropical sun, waiting for soldiers to check every parcel the civilians were taking home across the government’s last line of control.

The soldiers’ border search, so complete that it included ripping open sealed boxes of crackers, focused on 40 banned items--a list that testifies to the Tigers’ resourcefulness. In addition to firearms, batteries and all auto parts, a police official said, they routinely confiscate all candles and soap bars because the Tigers use them to seal their land mines.

Any fabric that remotely resembles jungle fatigues is taken away, as is shampoo, because it contains an ingredient the Tigers use to manufacture their cyanide capsules.

“It’s going from bad to worse,” a 57-year-old retired government worker named Gunaratnam said when asked to describe his life in Tiger-held Jaffna.

Gunaratnam, who stood near the end of the line at the checkpoint, said he had to leave the peninsula a month ago because he had not been able to collect his monthly pension of $62 for the past 13 months. But before he reached home again, he said, he would have to pay more than half of that in taxes to the Tigers and pedal 90 miles by bicycle on his 36-hour journey.

Asked whether he blamed the Tigers or the government for his plight, Gunaratnam said: “It’s an endless story. It will go on until my death.”

Another Tamil in the line, a clerk in the government irrigation department who asked not to be identified by name, described life in the Tigers’ besieged land as desperate and hopeless, a mood that increasingly is eroding the Tigers’ once-universal popular support.

“People already have lost hope,” the man said, adding that there has been no electricity since June, 1990, and that items such as gasoline are now so scarce and expensive that residents use just a teaspoonful of it to start a motor scooter that they then run on kerosene.

“The Tigers had sympathy, but in my opinion, their sympathy is diminishing because the people are suffering for nearly two years without a solution. And the militants are also taxing us too much for their struggle.”

But he conceded that, even amid the despair, the Tigers’ attraction is still so great that he recently sent his only son to Denmark because “I feared he might join them.”

“You see, despite this extreme situation in the north, the (Tigers) are still able to mobilize and recruit into suicide squads,” said Tamil analyst Tiruchelvam.

“The youngest, most raw cadres really have no sense of fear. So there is something about the spirit of the movement, despite its extraordinary authoritarianism and fascism.”

Referring to the Tigers’ founder and undisputed leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, he added, “In fact, what he has done is create the most perfect fighting machine.”

Prabhakaran is the core and the key to understanding the Tigers. In a recent interview with Time magazine, his only one in nearly two years, the Tiger leader explained that he initiated the suicide cult by wearing the cyanide capsule himself.

“I started the movement with the firm resolve that I will never be caught alive by the enemy,” he said. “That has spread down the ranks.”

In fact, it was Prabhakaran who introduced militancy to the Tamil cause. The movement had long been viewed by the world as a just struggle by a minority ethnic group that was, for decades, the target of official discrimination by the majority Sinhalese--themselves discriminated against during the long British rule over the land then known as Ceylon.

When Britain granted the island independence in 1948, it handed power over to the Sinhalese, who quickly imposed a formal program known as “Sinhalese only” to reduce the Tamils’ dominance in key government jobs.

In the face of continued Sinhalese repression, particularly in the Jaffna region where the Tamils predominate, Prabhakaran’s Tiger army soon came to be seen as saints and saviors. And the Tiger leader skillfully harnessed the support of more than 54 million Tamils just across the narrow strait that separates Jaffna from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Prabhakaran then built training and supply bases in south India and deftly created a sophisticated international fund-raising network with front groups in the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada. With articulate political representatives such as attorney Chandrahasan citing human-rights abuses, Prabhakaran’s group raised tens of millions of dollars, much of which was used to buy arms.

The Tigers, traditionally members of the Tamils’ Hindu seafaring caste, bought a small fleet of oceangoing vessels, which sailed under Panamanian flags carrying weapons from Europe and Singapore to Tiger bases either in south India or on the northern shores of the Jaffna Peninsula.

“Gun-running has to go along with drug-trafficking, and it played an important role in fund-raising as well,” said a former Tiger official who asked not to be named. “Prabhakaran really managed to create an enormous and sophisticated international network. If you take all the guerrilla groups in the world, they’re one of the best.”

Of Prabhakaran personally, the official added: “His commitment is total. But as time went on, and he became more powerful, he became molded into a fascist--one of the most extreme fascist leaders in the world.”

Although far less blunt, even Chandrahasan, who was once the Tiger leader’s personal lawyer, voiced unprecedented criticism during a recent interview with The Times in Madras, India.

“On the military side, he’s a genius,” Chandrahasan said of Prabhakaran. “But the other faculties have not developed. If they had, the Tigers would not be in this mess. Diplomacy is much more important in a liberation struggle, and that’s something they have not developed at all.

“I think they have really been controlling the public at the point of the gun, and they really don’t have the confidence they can win popular support.”

Analyst Tiruchelvam agreed.

“The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was a major turning point in the history of Tamil militancy,” he said, adding that if Indian investigators ultimately document the Tigers’ connection, “I doubt very much that they will be able to recover from this. It signals a continuing decline in their ability to command the kind of support from the Tamil community that they need.”

Deepening the Tigers’ crisis is India’s massive post-assassination crackdown on the guerrillas’ supporters and supply lines in Tamil Nadu. With that, and with flagging international support, the Tigers have been virtually cut off in their northern peninsula stronghold, where Prabhakaran remains in a heavily fortified bunker.

The Sri Lankan army is widely believed to be preparing for an all-out assault on the Tiger-controlled north. An obvious deadline: a scheduled February meeting in Paris of a consortium of Sri Lanka’s international donors, who historically have been sensitive to the country’s human-rights record.

“Once the money is approved, the shooting will start,” said one Tamil analyst in Colombo, noting that Sri Lanka has asked for more than $800 million in aid this year from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other key donors.

It is a mood reflected in Capt. Hathnauda’s bunker.

“We are going to Jaffna,” said the young officer, still unwed at 26 because, he said, “I’ve been too busy fighting to find a wife.”

Reflecting on the hundreds of his countrymen slain by the Tigers and on the shrapnel he took in the head during the 30 days he and his division were besieged by the Tigers on a strategic isthmus called Elephant Pass, the captain added:

“We are ready to go. We’d like to go. So many rockets they have fired at us, so many bullets. We will go to Jaffna. Now, it’s only a matter of time.”