Death by Fire – the Tigers’ End-Game

Author: Rover

After 30 years of self-destruction of its cadre with the intention of terrorizing innocent civilians by creating suicide bombers, LTTE is now encouraging self destruction of their remaining cadre in protest of being annihilated for being suicide bombers and terrorists! Seriously, how smart is this? Here I analyze generally why people resort to death by fire, the explicit message the LTTE is trying to convey by this, and the futility of this primitive practice.

People practice self-immolation for two major reasons: renouncement and devotion.

Renouncement: In the modern context, the most common form of self-immolation for renouncement is as a political protest. Usually, someone from the weaker political entity would burn oneself in protest of the practices of a stronger and deviant political force. This was the case when Thich Quan Duc, a Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhist monk burned himself in protest of the mal-treatment that was inflicted upon the clergy by the Ngo Dinh Deim’s government. In another case, a University of California (at San Diego) student burned himself in protest of the active presence of US troops in Vietnam. There are numerous cases of self immolation for renouncement that I won’t go into in detail here.

Devotion: The most famous example of self immolation for devotion is the archaic Hindu practice of Sati, where a new widow jumps into the burning pier of her dead husband. This practice has now been banned in India; and was never condoned by Mahabarata (a prominent Hindu religious text). In another case of devotion, with the schism of the Russian church, entire villages of the orthodoxy (Russian Orthodox Church) burned themselves and termed it “Baptism Fire”. This is just one example out of many, especially by fundamentalist religious sects, for who practiced mass self immolation to express devotion.

Importantly, however there are two more reasons for death by fire, which are usually not much talked about. These are forced burnings and self-immolation for cursing.

Forced burnings - It is known that during the time of the historical Rus' people (mostly ancient Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians) when a slave owner died, a loyal female slave was burnt with the master. In India, forced burnings of wives who didn’t want to perform Sati when their husbands died, are reported. In the west, infidels and witches were burned at a stake. Though “forced burnings” is not strictly a practice of self-immolation, I include it here, as you see later, because someone can be MENTALLY forced to do this.

Self-immolation for cursing – This is little known, but at least two groups of people in India, the Charans and Rajputs self immolate to bring a curse upon someone who had perpetrated a foul deed upon them (or their people). Both these groups are North Indian Aryan (not South Indian Dravidian) sects that are renowned for their martial abilities. Interestingly, they perform self-immolation only against a closely related entity; faced with a distantly related foe, they always wage violent war. This character is important in what I am going to talk in relation to the LTTE.

Several hardcore LTTE supporters and perhaps even former suicide cadre of the LTTE recently self-immolated. I am not going to mention any names or instances of these here, as this could be of propaganda value for the LTTE. Anyway, these protests were in support of the LTTE who is facing an imminent military annihilation at the hands of the Sri Lanka defense forces.

The LTTE self-immolations, I argue, are a combination for all the four reasons (renouncement, devotion, forced burning and self immolation for cursing). Through these, it disparages the government’s military campaign against the LTTE, where the Tigers have lost significant amounts of land (which they call Eelam) and cadre. These immolations are clearly a message to the west and the Tamil community in general to join in greater protest. But protest for what?!

Through self-burning, LTTE cadre also show devotion to the cause (attaining Tamil Eelam) – it is well known that LTTE have a culture very much different from the other Dravidian Hindus. The true Tigers venerate their leader and the land they live instead of Hinduism, which they consider to be a para-desha concept; lack of respect for Hinduism is shown by the killing of Hindu priests, desecrating Hindu temples (The mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappa was killed by the Tiger leader at point blank inside a Hindu temple), and constant changes of their names (Eelam is now called Ezham, and Prabhakarana is called Paripaharan ect.). Interestingly, though normally Hindus prefer to cremate (burn) the bodies of their dead and float the resulting ashes in a sacred river, LTTE prefer to bury their dead so that they can build cemeteries that can later be glorified. I find this practice very interesting, as their organization is founded on the principles of glorifying the dead, as much as glorifying terrorism and violence (perhaps I will write a separate article on this practice later).

There is a enormous social pressure by the LTTE leadership to its members to protest in strongest possible terms; and this includes forced self-immolation. This has been prevalent throughout its history. One of the main reasons for the west to ban this organization was the harassment of the Diaspora by the LTTE (illegal taxation ect.). One might protest my third claim, but one must remember that LTTE is not a group of freedom fighters. They are a world renowned group of terrorists; who have pioneered and mastered the self-destruction of human beings, the suicide bombings. So self immolation of the LTTE is not recent, if you consider suicide bombing as a form of self immolation (destruction) where you also kill other people; forced self immolation after all, is only small deviation from the psychology that is involved in suicide bombings.

From some of the letters that were found at some of the immolation sites, it is evident that the LTTE hate Buddhism and Sinhalese deeply, and that the people who immolated themselves prominently cursed these two factors. But unlike the Charnas and Rajputs of India, who are North Indian Aryans, it seems it is the first time that Dravidians that indulged in this practice to a significant level. So LTTE is yet again innovative in an unenviable way, in giving the decent Dravidians a foul name.

Now a rumor is spreading around that the LTTE leaders and its cadre entrapped in Wanni are going to commit suicide (by fire or otherwise). Fire has fascinated the first ape-men since they first started walking upright. So the death of these primitive LTTE terrorists too could very well be by fire. But I urge others LTTE supporters, especially the LTTE supporting diaspora not to get distracted by the LTTE efforts to play to the lower instincts of man. Think through your head, before setting yourself alight for a guy who thought only about himself. In addition this rumor is spread, I think, to encourage mentally forced self-immolation (that I talked about above).

Finally anyway, thousands of Sri Lankan and Indian civilians and soldiers, including two heads of states (one from India and the other from Sri Lanka), who died by the fire of the LTTE suicide bombers will undoubtedly not object to the last few of these suicide cadres (or those who are closely associated with them) attaining death by fire, if they must (!), without dragging other innocents around them to go to the fiery hell hole with them.