LTTE invades Lanka’s tea bastion

Once employed in Colombo as a shop assistant, he had to give up the job after being repeatedly harassed by the police. “Theysaid all Tamils are Tigers and I thought it was best to come back here to the estate before they put me behind bars,” he said.

Rajamurthy is one of the thousands of victims of generations of systematic state-sponsored deprivation of the Indian Tamil community. Sri Lanka earns billions of dollars from tea exports every year, but those who work on its tea estates form the poorest and most illiterate segment of the country’s population.

Despite the suffering and the humiliation they undergo every day, Indian Tamils have so far carefully kept away from the bloody militancy and divisive politics of their brethren in north-east Sri Lanka.

However, that may change before long. While the swelling numbers of disaffected estate youth are looking for ways to vent their frustration, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), recently driven out of its traditional strongholds, is in search of new pastures. A combination of the two threatens to not only shatter the tranquility of the tea estates but also disruptSri Lanka’s largest industry and the lifeblood of its economy.

The Sri Lankan government believes such a threat is imminent. In Parliament, as Deputy Defence Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte cited large-scale infiltration of the LTTE into the tea estates as one reason for imposing an island-wide emergency, a goods train derailed in a mine explosion near here last week, the latest in a series of bomb attacks in the area.

Police blamed the Tigers and swiftly picked up 24 boys from the nearby estates. “This is a direct LTTE job. No one here can improvise a mine like that,” said a senior police official of the area. However, the ham-handedness of the police may have only contributed to worsening the situation. Police officials admitted there was no evidence against most of those arrested and that they would be compelled to release them without framing any charge.

“That is exactly what the LTTE would like — indiscriminate arrests and harassment of Tamils. Twenty more boys will return to the estates,embittered and alienated, looking for revenge,” said Krishnasamy Vivehanandhan, lawyer and former deputy mayor of Sri Lanka’s tea capital Nuwara Eliya. Surrounded on all sides by the majority Sinhalese community, the practical-minded estate Tamils do not believe separatism is the answer to their problems, but the cult status surreptitiously accorded to Velupillai Prabhakaran by the estate youth equals only that of Tamil film star MG Ramachandran.

Most may not even know what Prabhakaran’s cause is and those who do know, do not identify with it, because Indian Tamils are not demanding political autonomy, only more jobs, more education and more health. “`But Prabhakaran is hero-worshiped because they see him as the only leader capable of taking on the government while their own leadership sucks up to the rulers,” said Vivehanandhan.