Tamil Tigers Turn Sri Lanka Into State of Terror : Asia: Violent separatists seek independent state on island nation, and are willing to slaughter whole villages and suicidally blow up heads of state in order to achieve it. Group also is suspected of killing India’s Rajiv Gandhi.

They wear combat fatigues and poison necklaces. They kill without mercy--sometimes entire villages, including women and children--and then fade into the jungle.

Sometimes they blow themselves up along with their intended victims. Thin black ropes coiled around their necks conceal cyanide capsules, which they swallow when captured.

By any standard, Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are among the most fanatical of the world’s aggressive ethnic separatist organizations.

“The Tamil Tigers are an extremely violent organization,” said a State Department official. “They operate in cities and the countryside, and their list of assassinations is impressive.”

Since 1983, when the Tigers took over an independence movement among the Tamil peoples of northern Sri Lanka--the ancient land of Ceylon--as many as 40,000 people have died, victims of both the Tigers and military death squads sponsored by a government that is also fighting a pro-Communist movement in the south.

“Separatist groups like the Tamil Tigers have no international forums in which to resolve their disputes in a peaceable manner,” V. Rudrakumaran said. “That’s why they resort to arms.” Rudrakumaran, a native of Jaffna, a city on the Sri Lankan peninsula of the same name in the north, is a Tamil sympathizer who practices law in New York.

Rudrakumaran said that because the Tigers lack international recognition, such organizations as the United Nations have not become involved in helping to settle the struggle.

The Tigers, with an estimated force of 10,000 armed combatants, want a separate autonomous state carved out of traditional Tamil lands in the north of the island nation, along with a contiguous area in the east that contains a valuable port and rich agricultural lands. “Eelam” is the old Tamil word for Ceylon.

The Sri Lankan government might be persuaded to allow a Tamil state on the Jaffna Peninsula, but the government is unlikely to yield the eastern territory, observers say.

The chief leader of the guerrillas, Velupillai Prabakaran, is not considered likely to risk face-to-face negotiations with the government, because in addition to masterminding the bloody warfare, he is sought by both Indian and Sri Lankan authorities for the assassinations of many high-ranking officials. They include former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

The elusive warlord remains entrenched in Jaffna, which has been ravaged by years of siege. The guerrillas rule the peninsula as a totalitarian state, with checkpoints and a network of informants who keep track of outsiders.

The Tigers and those they control live in squalor, without running water, electricity or sewers.

The Tamils point to a long history of oppression by the government, which is dominated by another ethnic group, the Sinhalese.

Three-quarters of the country’s 15 million people are Sinhalese, who are mostly Buddhists. Ceylon became independent from Britain in 1948 and took the name Sri Lanka, a Sinhalese word, in 1972.

The predominantly Hindu Tamils make up 18% of the population. The remaining 7% are Tamil-speaking Arab Muslims.

Roots of the present struggle go back centuries, when there was a Tamil kingdom in the north and two Sinhalese kingdoms in the south. To simplify administration, in 1883 British bureaucrats brought the areas together into one unit.

After independence, the British left a constitution that provided safeguards for ethnic and religious minorities. But a socialist government dominated by the Sinhalese--who claimed that the British had long favored the Tamils over them--soon began dismantling these guarantees.

Tamils complain that they have been reduced to the state of beggars in their own land, systematically discriminated against in education and jobs.

The government has made some concessions to the Tamils in the last several years, but the separatists refuse to lay down their arms until they are free.

The Tigers launched the current insurgency in 1983, when they pushed aside or consolidated several other separatist groups and became the single organization willing to wage war on the government.

During the insurrection’s early stages, India, a largely Hindu country with a sizable segment of ethnic Tamil peoples, allowed the Tigers to carry on training and establish weapons depots in the state of Tamil Nadu.

This support was withdrawn in the late 1980s. Under an agreement signed by Indian Prime Minister Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Junius Jayewardene, an Indian peacekeeping force occupied northern and eastern Sri Lanka from 1987 to 1989.

Without the Tigers’ consent, India and Sri Lanka imposed a cease-fire in the civil war and agreed to some steps toward greater home rule in Tamil areas.

The Tigers, who considered the accord a sellout by India, never joined in the cease-fire. After suffering some 1,000 casualties from both Tamil and Sinhalese extremists, the Indian troops left Sri Lanka, and fighting continued.

Gandhi, by then considered an archenemy, was assassinated, presumably by a Tiger extremist, in 1991 as he campaigned for reelection.

Subsequently, Sri Lankan President Premadasa pursued a mixed policy. While modifying some anti-Tamil laws and cracking down on Sinhalese chauvinism, he simultaneously increased military pressure on Tamils in the north and east.

In 1993 Premadasa was assassinated by another suicide bomber believed to have been a Tamil Tiger.

Fighting has continued sporadically. The Tigers employ classic guerrilla tactics of striking, then retreating to their Jaffna stronghold. Last November the government suffered its most serious defeat, losing some 800 soldiers. About 450 Tiger insurgents died.

“The international community should come up with some forum to resolve these disputes in a legal and equitable manner,” said attorney Rudrakumaran. “Otherwise, the fighting is likely to go on.”