Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (16 page)
We, motivated by an unceasing yearning for national liberation, are forced to oppose you, a puppet of the state. When we meet at the battlefront, you become the sacrificial lamb.
Hathnuada, determined to become nobody’s lamb, said this of the Tigers that afternoon as we stood with him in his bunker: “They are crazy. They are motivated. And as fighters, they are very good.”
The Tamil journalist N. Ram is one of the few who have spoken at length with Prabhakaran, who lives in the jungle and shifts from bunker to bunker; his whereabouts are shielded by the suicide culture he cultivates, since Tiger cadres nearly always kill themselves before they can be captured and interrogated. “You won’t find our people in jail,” Prabhakaran once told Ram. “It is this cyanide which has helped us develop our movement very rapidly.... In reality, this gives our fighters an extra measure of belief in the cause, a special edge; it has instilled in us a determination to sacrifice our lives and our everything for the cause.” He described his struggle as one between the forces of good, his fighters, and the forces of evil, the Sri Lankan state and its army. “The state’s army functions there as a racist, destructive military force; we carry on as a national people’s army for the liberation of the Tamil people.... We prepared the people for this crisis.... We were determined to demonstrate our resistance, our fight in an all-out, foolhardy way. Whatever be the numbers of fighters we lost, we would not give in—that was our decision.... Can we afford to be peaceable in our ways in the face of a ruthless enemy? We certainly cannot, that’s the truth.”
Political ideology, in the ordinary sense, is the least of it. Prabhakaran spoke to Ram vaguely about “socialism and Tamil Eelam,” an independent Tamil homeland. In Trincomalee and in the jungles of the north, I questioned various Tiger “political officers” at length about their program. They, too, talked vaguely about socialism and housing, but essentially they had no program. At one stage in 1990, when the Indian Peacekeeping Force withdrew from Sri Lanka, the Tigers possessed uncontested control of the northern island region they designated as part of independent Eelam. Western donors were prepared to funnel nearly $750 million in reconstruction aid to the Tigers if they would begin the transition from guerrilla fighters to political administrators. Autonomy negotiations with the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government were making progress. But when you talked with the Tiger officers in the battered northern cities during this period, you could feel that they simply could not handle politics. They were itchy and uncomfortable behind their desks with their pistols belted to their fatigues. All these civilians with problems—houses burned down or bombed out, wells dried up, roads unpassable. The Tigers had promised for years to solve these problems, but now, when it was possible to try, they discovered that they lacked the temperament. They wanted to fight. Peace made them edgy. Within three months, they staged incidents to start the war again, kidnapping a few hundred Sinhalese policemen, taking them into the jungle, and massacring them with machine guns. The Sri Lankan army responded with force. The Tigers abandoned the cities and went back to the jungle, back to what they knew.
After half a dozen trips to Sri Lanka and talks with Tigers ranging from preteen patrolmen to senior political leaders, I met S. C. Chandrahasan, a Tamil lawyer who worked closely with Prabhakaran in the early days of the Tiger movement and then broke with him, disillusioned. Now he works with refugees from the northern war. “I find nine- and ten-year-olds who can clean and load a rifle,” he said despairingly. “Among the young people, they were so full of hate. They were just so warped. We tried to introduce them to sports. The Tigers said we were trying to reeducate them.” I asked him to analyze the Tiger supremo, as the local newspapers call him. “Prabhakaran’s commitment is total,” he answered. “But as time went on, he became more and more powerful. He became a fascist. On the military side he is a genius, but other faculties have not been developed. They have not developed political faculties.... It’s quite clear that they’ve gone well beyond the limits of a group fighting for liberation. They’re going for methods of terrorism only.”
Another Tamil leader who knows Prabhakaran said that over the years, the Tiger suicide cult had solidified around two principles. One was that Prabhakaran himself was the reincarnation of Tamil warrior kings of the Middle Ages, particularly the ancient “Raja Chola,” a Sri Lankan Tamil ruler during the period of the Chola dynasty who went off to fight in India and China and was renowned for his prowess. The use of these myths, the old codes, to build a personality cult around Prabhakaran was reflected in the Tigers’ practice of forcing new recruits, young boys, to swear loyalty to Prabhakaran himself, rather than to the liberation movement or the Tigers. The second principle was to rely on the deep hatred felt by the ethnic Sinhalese for the ethnic Tamils. This racist hatred among the Sinhalese would in time produce actions by the Sri Lankan army or others that would confirm Prabhakaran’s most extreme judgments and tactics. Thus the Tigers would be sustained. Prabhakaran relies “on the inherent irrationality of the south, the inherent extremism,” this Tamil leader said. And for most of the last decade, Prabhakaran has been fortunate to have Sinhalese enemies he could count on.
The Tigers are a stark example, but elsewhere in the region the same principle operates. A talented leader with credible claims to history and strength in a brutal present can launch the most extreme attacks on his or her enemies, then withdraw and wait for the enemy to confirm that such action was necessary in the first place. This has been true as much in politics as in war.
As the accused murderer of Rajiv Gandhi, Prabhakaran is a complicated case because he developed his military strength through secret training and weapons provided by the government of Gandhi’s mother. Later, after Indira was assassinated, Prabhakaran met Rajiv himself in New Delhi. When Gandhi signed the 1987 accord with Sri Lanka’s government authorizing the deployment of Indian troops on the island, ostensibly to secure the Tamil population Prabhakaran wished to “liberate,” the Indian government flew the Tiger leader to its capital to explain the deal and urge him to cooperate. Prabhakaran sat in an office with Gandhi for several hours. Evidently flattered by the attention, the LTTE leader flew back to Jaffna and made a public speech praising Gandhi. “The Indian prime minister offered me certain assurances,” Prabhakaran told a Tamil audience on August 4, 1987, according to a translation made available by the LTTE to the Indian journalist Mohan Ram. “He offered a guarantee for the safety and protection of our people. I do have faith in the straightforwardness of the Indian prime minister and I do have faith in his assurances.” That professed faith did not last long. Prabhakaran broke his agreement and went to war with the Indian army as soon as he was able. In that same Jaffna speech, he offered a hint as to why, a preview of the attitudes that continue to define Sri Lanka’s predicament years later.
A peace agreement, Prabhakaran said, “affects the form and shape of our struggle. It also puts a stop to our armed struggle. If the mode of our struggle, brought to this stage over a fifteen-year period through shedding blood, through making sacrifices, through staking achievements, and through offering a great many lives, is to be dissolved or disbanded within a few days, it is naturally something we are unable to digest.”
6
Through the Looking Glass
We should take certain measures to bring in a little more sanity into
politics.
—
General Zia ul-Haq
General Zia ul-Haq
W
hen I arrived in South Asia in 1989, the single most momentous mystery in the region—and there were many—concerned the death of Zia ul-Haq, the middle-class Pakistani general who seized power in a 1977 coup, imposed martial law, and held on to the country’s highest office until August 17, 1988, when he died in an unexplained plane crash along with many of his top generals, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, and an American general.
hen I arrived in South Asia in 1989, the single most momentous mystery in the region—and there were many—concerned the death of Zia ul-Haq, the middle-class Pakistani general who seized power in a 1977 coup, imposed martial law, and held on to the country’s highest office until August 17, 1988, when he died in an unexplained plane crash along with many of his top generals, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, and an American general.
One glaring aspect of the mystery was that nobody seemed to want to unravel it. Zia was widely disliked. He was entangled in sensitive, shifting cold war geopolitics. Virtually any explanation of his death other than certification that it was an accident would complicate, if not badly disrupt, contemporary South Asian affairs. There was plenty of speculation. Some said the Americans killed Zia because of the general’s rightist Islamic ideology, an explanation which, if true and exposed, would be disastrous for the American government’s standing in the region and the world. Some said the Soviets did it in revenge for their defeat in Afghanistan, which, if true, would be disastrous for them but also potentially for the Americans, in part because it would discredit Gorbachev, then still the key figure in the negotiated end of the cold war. Some said the Indians did it, which, if true, would be particularly dangerous because it could lead to war between India and Pakistan. Some said Benazir Bhutto’s relatives and political allies in Pakistan, hardened enemies of Zia, had killed him, which, if true, would mean the end of Benazir politically and bad times for Pakistani democracy. Some said Zia’s rivals in the Pakistan army killed him, which, if true, would make everybody very nervous, since arresting a general for murder is not a simple proposition in Pakistan. For all these reasons and others, nobody in power seemed to want to investigate the August 17 plane crash seriously. So I figured that was enough reason for me to do it.
This explains why in April 1991 I found myself standing in the trash-strewn parking lot of a garden-apartment complex in suburban Chicago, Illinois, screaming at an overweight East European building manager who wore great rings of keys on his belt and who kept shouting “Vuck you! Vuck you!”
What else it may explain is not easy to summarize. This is the story in part of a journey into one of South Asia’s most introspective, incestuous, and psychologically tangled palace courts: the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, where lies and whispers are the ordinary language of political discourse, as they have been in subcontinental princely courts for hundreds of years. It is also a detective story in which, time and again, the main puzzle is not who or what or where, but why. Finally, it is a story about what happens when you look in the mirror and see a ghost over your shoulder—a predicament, I think, that plagues South Asian intellectuals and Western newspaper reporters considerably more often than other classes of people.
Pakistan is a country that sometimes appears to be organized around the greeting card aphorism “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” No nation is more entangled in conspiratorial fantasy. Generals and politicians will pull you aside at cocktail parties and, unprompted, spin elaborate theories about the most mundane national events, suggesting—furtively but vaguely—the moving presence of unseen hands, whether American, Soviet, Indian, or domestic. Nothing occurs in isolation. Everything is connected. The opposition leader flew to Dubai because the Arabs financed the mistress of her dead father, who lost office when the CIA used the Arabs to persuade the Pakistani military to stage a coup. And so on. Pakistan is like an out-patient who refuses his lithium—functional but deeply strange, trapped in mirrored interiors.
Yet the paradox is that no nation has more cause than Pakistan to believe in conspiracies. For the forty-five years of its existence, Pakistan’s destiny has been diverted time and again by small cliques of powerful men, native and foreign, who have plotted in secret. Its army, six hundred thousand strong, has staged several coups against civilian leaders—coups preceded by closely guarded conspiracies and extensive work by domestic intelligence agencies, whose wiretaps and attempted manipulations proliferate so awkwardly even today that anyone who spends time in the country inevitably begins to trip over them.
Moreover, during the cold war, which coincided with the first four decades of the country’s independent history, Pakistan became an unusually important bulwark against Soviet expansion for the Americans, particularly during the 1980s, when Pakistan was the staging ground for the semisecret U.S. program of military support for Afghanistan’s mujaheddin rebels. During that period, the United States pumped about $2. billion in covert aid through Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, ISI, for use by the Afghans. It also provided a similar amount of money directly to the Pakistan army and government, making Pakistan, in financial terms at least, the third-most-important American ally during the 1980s, after Israel and Egypt. Most aspects of this highly sensitive relationship were worked out in secret between American diplomats and spies and their Pakistani counterparts. Evidence of how sensitive Washington considers the relationship can be found in the way it classifies historical national security materials concerning Pakistan. Before I left for South Asia in 1989, mainly out of curiosity, I submitted a dozen or so Freedom of Information Act requests for materials held in Washington about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. All but the most innocuous were rejected in their entirety for national security reasons. An archivist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Library in Austin, Texas, where I dug out a few boxes of material from the 1960s, told me that the U.S. government still refuses to declassify reams of Pakistan-related documents thirty years old or more. He said that in his experience, the only country American classification bureaucrats are more paranoid about is Israel.
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