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Tigers change stripes - India Today
(By: Sandeep UNNITHAN)
Bandoliered Tigers in checked shirts, slacks, sneakers
or sandals, wielding T-56 rifles engaged in a ferocious defence of their
shrinking territory.
These visuals from the war in Sri Lanka-the only
access to a war that is out-of-bounds for journalists-could have been
taken at any point in the island republic's endless internecine strife
including their three-year battle against the Indian Peacekeeping Force
(IPKF) in the late 1980s.
But, wait a minute, what ever happened to those
distinctive horizontal green and yellow striped camouflage uniforms that
the Tigers proudly unveiled around a decade ago?
Indian military analysts see several possible reasons
for these. The throttling of the Tiger logistics line to India owing to
coordinated patrols by the Indian and Sri Lankan navy-among other
contraband, consignments of uniform cloth have also been intercepted
from Rameshwaram.
A second, more plausible reason, says Colonel R
Hariharan a former military intelligence official, is because "wearing
civvies allows the Tigers to melt into the population."
One of the most haunting visuals from the second Iraq
war five years back was of piles of green uniforms and military boots as
Saddam Hussein's defeated million-strong Baathist army dissolved into
the population.
The distinctive striped disruptive-pattern uniforms,
said to be the brainchild of Adele Ann (the Australian-born wife of late
Tiger ideologue Anton Balasingham) were extensively paraded about in
propaganda visuals and the pattern became the template for a host its
other arms-grey stripes for the Black Tigers and sky blue for their
fledgling 'Vaanpuligal' or Air Tigers.
Now it turns out, they were just that. Photo ops which
would bring in a semblance of conventional military style legitimacy to
the world's second deadliest guerilla force. (They have since been
overtaken by the Hizbollah).
International convention mandates a uniform to
distinguish a soldier from a non-combatant, but for a guerilla for whom
stealth and subterfuge are assets as he weaves through the population,
this can be an encumbrance. Indeed, propaganda photographs, featured on
pro-Tiger websites like www.tamilnet.com show a row of uniformly attired
Tiger guerillas in round French military caps, with a grim-faced supremo
Velupillai Prabhakaran presumably after the customary last meal with the
leader. When these Black Tigers have carried out their suicide attacks
as they did in Tuesday's attack and their bodies displayed on the Lankan
ministry of defence website www.defence.lk, they are usually attired in
Sri Lankan military uniforms.
With the Sri Lankan military's four-cornered push into
the Tiger heartland of Kilinochchi, they can see plenty of striped
uniforms along the way; sans their occupants.
Courtesy : India Today |
