In Sri Lanka, Dying to Be Equals

In a land where women are prized for their quiet passivity, one of the world’s most ruthless guerrilla groups is riding toward victory on the strength of its female fighters.

The women of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, rebels waging a war for an independent homeland in this island nation, are emerging as the movement’s most important weapon after thousands of men have died in battle.

With vials of cyanide hanging from their necks, women Tigers are shooting their way into government bunkers and police stations. They are hacking to death men, women and babies. Women Tigers are wrapping their bodies with explosives and killing dozens in suicide attacks. As the men fall, the women fighters are stepping into the upper ranks of a guerrilla army once reserved exclusively for men.

Seetha, a 22-year-old leader of 1,500 women fighters, stands just over 5 feet tall, wears her hair neatly trimmed and says she might one day like to have a family. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and toting a machine gun, she talks with the cool confidence of a battle-hardened commander.

“It’s difficult to say how many people I’ve killed,” said Seetha, who gave up her real name when she became a Tiger. “Sometimes after a battle, there might be 50 or 75 bodies lying around. It’s hard to say how many of them were mine.”

Seetha is one of thousands of Sri Lankan women who have joined the Tigers, changing not only the face of the notorious rebel army but also challenging long-held views of their gender in this traditional society.

The Tigers’ ranks were filled only with men in 1983, when the predominantly Hindu Tamil rebels launched their struggle against Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority Sinhalese government. Now, after 17 years of fighting and with more than 55,000 Sri Lankans killed, women make up a third of the fighting force, which some experts number at as many as 15,000 fighters.

Stripped of their old identities, the women are proving just as ruthless as the men: In September, a squad of mostly women Tigers armed with swords and knives entered the Sinhalese village of Borapola and butchered 48 civilians. In December, a woman suicide bomber threw herself at President Chandrika Kumaratunga and blew herself up, blinding the Sri Lankan leader in one eye. A couple weeks later, another woman exploded herself outside the prime minister’s house, killing 10 other people.

“Soldiers have reported hordes of women attacking,” one military source said.

Anton Raja, a Tiger spokesman, said the use of women in war is part of a larger vision of the guerrilla leadership to liberate Tamil women from the bonds of tradition.

“In the old society, women were cultured and nice. We loved them, but they had no major role outside of the kitchen,” Raja said. “We went around to the women and told them: ‘You are the equal of men, you have the same rights, you can join us in the struggle.’ ”

The result, according to Raja: “Hundreds and hundreds of women signed up to fight.”

Recruiting Women Out of Necessity

Many Sri Lankans dispute the idea that the Tigers and their secretive, dictatorial leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, are some sort of guerrilla feminists. They say that Prabhakaran did not decide to recruit women until the war drained his pool of available men. The first woman fighter died in action in 1987--four years into the war.

“I don’t think the Tigers are motivated by any sense of women’s rights,” said Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Tamil lawyer in the capital, Colombo. “They use women as cannon fodder.”

Maheswary Velautham, also a Tamil lawyer in Colombo, said that by taking to the battlefield, Tamil women are reinterpreting their traditional duty to give everything for their family. “Women have always sacrificed for their families, and that is what the women Tigers are doing,” she said.

The Tigers have a reputation for being one of the world’s most sophisticated and coldblooded guerrilla armies. In a region with few telephone lines and fewer cars, Prabhakaran has created a present-day Sparta, where nearly every family contributes to the war effort. His small force of guerrillas has seized the Tamil heartland on the northern and eastern fringes of the island and fought an army of more than 100,000 to a standstill.

Suicide bombers known as Black Tigers have killed a Sri Lankan president, an Indian prime minister and hundreds of civilians. After a Black Tiger hit the Sri Lankan Central Bank in 1996, killing 73 people, the U.S. government declared the group a terrorist organization.

Tamil women are taking over crucial roles in the rebel group as the civil war enters a decisive phase. A Tiger offensive in November rolled back territorial gains the government had spent months making, prompting Sri Lanka’s leaders to propose direct negotiations with the rebels. Meanwhile, fighting is raging across the north and east.

Many Tamil women guerrillas say they joined the Tigers after brothers, husbands and fathers died in battle or disappeared while in the custody of Sri Lankan security forces--which many governments and organizations have blamed for torture and summary executions.

Seetha, the young Tiger commander, was a little girl when her 18-year-old brother, Sugumar, disappeared. Seetha said her brother was not a member of the Tigers, and she blames the Sri Lankan army for his death. When she turned 14, she joined the rebels.

“My brother was an innocent,” Seetha said, sitting outside her headquarters in this rebel-held village near Sri Lanka’s eastern coast. “I am fighting to avenge his death.”

Since then, Seetha has fought in battles across the island, including some of the bloodiest in the Vanni region of the north. On a recent foray, she led an attack on a police headquarters in the eastern Sri Lankan town of Vakaria. She says she lost four women but that her platoon killed 17 government soldiers and took the police station.

Like many of her comrades, Seetha says she does not regard it as extraordinary that a rice farmer’s daughter in a traditional culture would be leading troops in battle.

“The women are being raped and killed,” she said. “The men are fighting--why can’t we?”

Suresh, a male Tiger officer in the area, shrugged off the presence of women fighters. A foot soldier until he was badly wounded, Suresh says he fought alongside women for years.

“The women are dying just like the men,” Suresh said. “I don’t mind working with them.”

Strict Rules Apply to All

Tiger women are held to the same cult-like standards as the men: no sex outside marriage; no marriage for anyone with less than five years’ service; abstention from alcohol and cigarettes; the mandatory name change; and unquestioning allegiance to Prabhakaran. Violators have been executed.

One of the eeriest commandments is the requirement to commit suicide rather than surrender. Men and women fighters carry vials of cyanide, usually around their necks. Sri Lankan soldiers often find Tiger cadres writhing on the battlefield, their mouths frothing from the poison.

“If I am arrested, I have been ordered to take the cyanide,” said Srilaya, a commando, as she opened a bottle of Coke using the ammunition magazine from an AK-47.

The presence of large numbers of women in the Tigers has forced the mostly male leadership to change some of its rules. One of the biggest debates was about hair: Tamil men historically treasure long, straight hair on women, yet it hinders the women’s movement during battle. In the early ‘90s, Prabhakaran declared that the women would be permitted to crop their hair.

“There were huge debates on whether women should be allowed to cut their hair,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan scholar who has written extensively about the Tigers.

Some women, like Seetha, jumped at the chance to trim their locks, but others couldn’t break with the old style. One combat veteran, a 24-year-old woman code-named Banu, let her jet-black hair grow down her back. If she goes into battle, she braids it and wraps it around her head. Others don tight black caps.

“Sometimes during an attack, when I am going through a fence, my hair gets caught in the barbed wire,” Banu said.

Another big change was marriage. In the beginning, male fighters were prohibited from having sex at all. In 1981, before the rebellion began in earnest, a senior Tiger was forced to leave the organization when he refused to stop seeing a woman.

Four years later, according to several Sri Lankan sources, Prabhakaran fell in love with a woman who had been carrying on a hunger strike against the Sri Lankan government--and got married himself. He decreed the rule that soldiers could marry--and retire--with five or more years of combat experience. Rebel leaders encourage their fighters to marry one another to reduce the risk of espionage.

Sri Lankan officials have long charged that Tiger leaders recruit children, who are easier to mold into pure fighters. Rebels deny the charge, but the women’s camp here contained at least one girl, code-named Yadusha.

Yadusha, a quiet 14-year-old with close-cropped hair, said the Sri Lankan army killed her uncle, Pushpara, in 1988. Another uncle, Thiyagarajay, died fighting when he was 19. When her brother, a Tiger commando named Dayaparan, died three years ago, Yadusha decided to take his place. She said she hasn’t seen any action yet, but she already wears a cyanide pill around her neck. “When they call me, I’ll go,” she said.

Experts say it is people such as Yadusha--young and with a grievance--who sign up to become the rebels’ ultimate martyrs: Black Tiger suicide bombers. More than two dozen suicide bombers struck urban targets in the 1990s, often killing scores of civilians. Women have carried out several of those missions, often relying on their gender to slip through checkpoints staffed by men. A woman Black Tiger, code-named Dhanu, in 1991 killed herself and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, a bitter enemy of the Tamil rebels.

Black Tigers also are used regularly on the battlefield, particularly against targets that can’t be hit by mortars. A suicide bomber typically will crawl hundreds of yards and then hurl herself into a bunker.

“They use them like artillery,” a military source in Sri Lanka said.

No Looking Back on What Might Have Been

Little is known about how Black Tigers are trained or selected--except that the suicide bomber gets a private meal with Prabhakaran before he or she embarks on a mission. Some of the women here said Black Tigers were selected from a pool of volunteers. The unpaved roads around the camp are studded with billboards depicting martyred Black Tigers dressed in their signature black uniforms.

In the nearby town of Kokkdichcholai, the Selvayam family prepared a funeral for their 22-year-old daughter, Thenrubi, killed in December during a battle. When Thenrubi hit the five-year mark as a Tiger in 1999, her mother traveled across the country to plead with her to come home. Thenrubi told her mother she did not have her commanders’ permission.

“I wanted my daughter to come home and get married and have babies,” said the sobbing mother, Theeyadani Selvayam.

The women in Arasadithivu say they will keep fighting until their imagined country, Tamil Eelam, finally exists. Most of the soldiers say they are too busy to wonder what their lives might have been like had they never gone off to war, but a few say they think about it from time to time.

“Sometimes I miss the life that my sisters have,” said Banu, whose two siblings, one married with children, lead more ordinary lives. “But they have their lives, and I have mine. I’ve made my choice.”