In a cataclysm of terrible bloodshed, the Tamil insurrection in Sri Lanka has reached its end. The last 1,500-2,000 fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the main rebel force, were inextricably penned into the island nation’s northeast corner by government forces in the final week of April. The Tigers’ defeat climaxes a 26-year war that killed more than 100,000 Sri Lankans, minority Hindu Tamil and majority Buddhist Sinhalese alike – the oldest ongoing major conflict on Earth, according to the UN.
It also marks the wane of savage ethnic-minority rebellions that dominated the geopolitical stage for a generation.
From Southeast Asia to Central Asia, across the former Communist Bloc and large swaths of Africa to Basque Spain and Northern Ireland, “national liberation movements” based on ethnic or tribal identity were the globe’s principal source of conflict in the 1990s.
There were widespread predictions that such uprisings would define much of the 21st century, just as the confrontations between fascism, communism and democracy had defined the 20th.
Yet today, at almost every turn, violent ethnic nationalism has yielded to negotiated peace agreements, sheer exhaustion or – as in Sri Lanka – final, devastating defeat.
THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN
The sense of impending doom hung everywhere over the Jaffna Peninsula, the main stronghold of Tamil separatism, when I traveled there on assignment during a brief ceasefire in 2005. Everyone I spoke to was waiting, morosely, for the war to return, as it did several months later.
“I expect an assault any day,” a young Sinhalese captain on the ceasefire line told me. He only hoped he wouldn’t be maimed or captured. “It would be much better if they kill me,” he said, gesturing at a hill to the north where a Tamil Tiger company was dug in.
“We’re ready to die for what we believe in,” his Tiger counterpart said, when I was escorted to the rebel position under a white flag.
What were those beliefs after 26 years of uncompromising, brutal war? The usual answers were “the right to independence for our people” – which less than half of Sri Lanka’s Tamils backed – or more commonly, “equality, justice and a real voice in the country’s future.”
Yet objectively, those goals had been largely achieved in the political and economic sphere. The Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, now has a growing and prosperous Tamil middle class. A friend who accompanied me to Jaffna – incognito, because he was the scion of one of the island’s most prominent Sinhalese families, an ideal kidnapping target for the LTTE – was married to a Tamil, the granddaughter of tea plantation workers who was herself a foreign-educated investment banker.
The boundaries that once kept Tamils poor and powerless had long since been crossed. But the war went on, in part because the LTTE had been created expressly for armed insurrection and that was all it knew. Along the bloody road since 1983, “the struggle” had come to justify methods that fatally eroded the movement’s moral standing and community support.
The Tigers were among the first national liberation armies to employ suicide bombers, often young women. A young Tamil fighter blew herself up at the side of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, decapitating the former Indian prime minister in revenge for the military support he’d sent to Colombo in the late 1980s.
As the material demands of ceaseless war accelerated, the Tigers began acquiring arms with money earned as drug couriers between Asia and Europe, as traffickers in illegal immigration, or through extortion rings in overseas Tamil communities in Britain, France and Germany. By the mid-1990s, they were forcibly recruiting children as young as 13 years old as fighters and using human shields – comprised of Tamil civilians from LTTE-held territory – in operations against the government.
In its broad outlines, what happened to the LTTE, its descent into crime and glaring abuses of human rights, was the story of many ethnic national liberation movements. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which went to war with the Turkish government in 1984, has been implicated in many of the same illicit activities as the Tigers – as have the Kosovo Liberation Army, and renegade factions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque Homeland and Freedom organization (ETA). Each of them resorted, with varying degrees of frequency, to assassinations and other acts of extrajudicial punishment meted out to dissident members of their own communities.
The end result was a steady erosion of internal political consensus – and at worst, its replacement with a rein of terror far harsher than the state oppression it was meant to combat.
The revolution devoured its children.
THE TEMPLATE OF EX-YUGOSLAVIA
The rise of ethnic rebellion coincided precisely with the decline of the Soviet Union and its allied Communist bloc nations, which had buried minority cultural identities under a façade of socialist homogeneity throughout the Cold War.
But tensions bubbled furiously under the homogeneous surface, and exploded across the map with the onset of Perestroika in 1987 and the full collapse of the USSR in 1991. Thousands died in the ethnic uprisings of formerly Soviet Chechnya, the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh district of Azerbaijan, the Abkhaz and Ossetian regions of Georgia and the Russian-settled eastern half of Moldava.
By mid-decade, ethnic conflagrations were sweeping through Africa, the setting of ideological proxy wars between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War. The Rwanda and Burundi killing fields together swallowed 1.2 million people. Millions more died when the murderous hostilities between ethnic Tutsi and Hutu were exported to the eastern Congo.
The European template for ethnic insurrection was forged in the ruins of Yugoslavia, where three major wars – in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina and Kosovo – were ignited in less than eight years. The role of insurgent minority was filled in all of them by ethnic Serbs, who never sought the moral high ground, much less held it. Their roving death squads, indiscriminate artillery assaults on civilian populations and full-scale massacres only ended with heavy intervention by NATO.
The excesses in ex-Yugoslavia gave ethnic nationalism a bad name, in a world that had been sympathetic to it when the communist Bloc foundered. What the Serbs fought for – the retention of their ancient homeland, a state that acknowledged their ethnic and cultural identity, mastery of their own “destiny” – echoed the rhetoric of nearly every other national liberation movement.
By the end of the 1990s, I’d made that echo part of my standard interview repertoire on the road, eventually asking leaders of Kurdish, Tamil, Armenian, Abkhaz, Irish Republican and Basque nationalists parties how they could distinguish their aims, grievances (and sometimes their methods) from those of the Serbs.
The question made my subjects visibly uncomfortable. No one really answered it.
A DISTURBING LEGACY
A decade later, the total elimination of the Tigers and their three-decade war is approaching in Sri Lanka. While tensions certainly remain in ex-Yugoslavia, there is scant evidence that Serbian minority populations are prepared to re-embrace violence in the name of creating a separate state in Bosnia-Herzogovina or in the infant independent nation of Kosovo. Armenia and Azerbaijan, with Turkey’s surprising mediation, seem headed toward a non-military solution in Nagorno Karabakh, and even Chechnya is quiet– albeit under the heel of a pro-Moscow autocrat.
The latest symptom of decline is in northwestern Spain, where a new regional government was installed this month after elections that humbled the once-powerful Basque nationalist coalition, which had held power for 30 years. The incoming parliamentary leader, socialist Patxi Lopez, maintains that Basque voters have decisively rejected separatism. His chief priorities, he says, are to “put an end to the terrorism of ETA” and address “the real concerns” of voters, focusing on the sagging economy.
The turnabout in Spain follows the 2007 compromise settlement between nationalists and loyalists in Northern Ireland. A remarkably smooth working relationship has developed there between the Rev. Ian Paisley, longtime firebrand of the slim loyalist majority and now first minister of the Northern Ireland parliament, and Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the IRA who serves as deputy first minister.
A similar trend toward inclusion – and away from the PKK’s call for an independent Kurdistan – is gathering momentum in Turkey’s war-torn southeast. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an ’s ruling Justice and Development Party has won a majority of Kurdish votes in recent elections with a policy enshrining cultural rights and local autonomy.
The high-water mark of militant ethnic nationalism has passed. It leaves behind a disturbingly ambiguous legacy and a collective toll estimated at 6.5 million lives.