Bombshell (24 page)

In September 2006, Menake was given orders to blow up the Sri Lankan prime minister, Ratnasiri Wickremanayake. In spite of her reluctant recruitment to the cause, she enjoyed the notoriety and star treatment she received prior to going on her mission. On the eve of the attack, like all suicide bombers, Menake was given her last meal with an LTTE leader, in her case Pottu Amman, second-in-command and head of intelligence. She was offered the meal of her choice, which included chicken, fried rice, vegetable curry, and vanilla ice cream. “Amman said I would be known as a
mahaveera
, or great warrior, and venerated in a way I'd never been in life. Only then would I be given a military rank, based on the importance of my target.”
⁸⁰
Menake recalled that Amman was tall and handsome. For her, he seemed like a movie star.
⁸¹
Also according to standard procedure, a photographer took one last photo of Menake and Pottu Amman, so that after she was dead, it could be decorated with garlands and incense and placed on display at the center of her village.

For several days, Menake stalked the ritzy quarter where the prime minister lived. However, in a neighborhood where jeans and miniskirts were the norm, Menake's
salwar kameez
made her look like she did not belong. On the third day of her reconnaissance, the authorities stopped her outside the prime minister's mansion. They demanded her ID card. When it showed that she was from Jaffna, a Tamil and LTTE stronghold, she was taken in for questioning. The cyanide vial around her neck meant only one thing: that she was an LTTE operative. At the Boosa detention center, Menake revealed her plan and, eventually, informed on her handlers.

THE END OF THE REBELLION

From 1983 until 2009, the LTTE fought the Sri Lankan government for a separate state for the Tamil minority. In that time, more than 70,000 Sri Lankans were killed, tens of thousands fled
abroad, and some 600,000 were displaced internally. Children on the way to school were routinely abducted and forced to become child soldiers—by both sides. Sri Lanka became infamous for its number of disappeared. More than 60,000 people were abducted by government militias, never to be seen again. Before its decimation in May 2009, the LTTE was considered one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world. By using persuasion and extortion throughout the Tamil diaspora (notably in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the U.S.), in what the Tigers referred to as the Nandavanan system, they also become one of the world's most successful and prosperous.

Although a promising peace process was launched in 2002 under the auspices of the Norwegian government, politics and personalities ultimately intervened. The process was annulled in 2006, not by spoilers within the terrorist organization, as one might expect, but by the Sri Lankan government's extremist wing. While denying that a military solution was the best solution, the government launched major offensives against the LTTE throughout 2007 and 2008 and finally destroyed the organization in 2009.

After army commander Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka barely survived an assassination attempt by LTTE in May 2006, government forces actively sought to assassinate as many of the organization's leaders as they could. That same year they killed the LTTE's political chief, its military intelligence leader, and the head of its naval unit, known as the Sea Tigers. In May 2007, they killed the leader of the Charles Anthony Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Nakulan (whose nom de guerre was Nagulan), a personal friend and comrade of Prabhakaran. Brigadier S.P. Tamilselvan, the LTTE political chief, was assassinated on in November 2007 in a targeted aerial bombardment by the Sri Lankan air force. Tamilselvan had been one of the chief negotiators between the Norwegian SLMM
(Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission), the Sri Lankan government, and the Tigers.

From 2006 until 2009 the government targeted the women of the LTTE specifically. In September 2006, an alleged government death squad killed V. Thangaratnam, a female leader who had organized protests against the Sri Lankan Army's occupation of private land.
⁸²
In May 2007, government troops killed “Mala,” the leader of the Sothiya regiment.
⁸³
In January, an LTTE area leader, Sudarmalar, and eighteen others were killed by government troops during clashes in Mannar. On May 25, 2008, government troops killed Lieutenant Colonel Selvy, deputy leader of the Sothiya regiment, during a battle at the Mannar “forward defense line.”
⁸⁴

In May 2009, everything changed for the female Tigers and for the organization as a whole. During a pitched two-hour gun battle with Sri Lankan special forces in which a rocket was launched into his armor-plated ambulance, Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed. Several of the LTTE's highest-ranking lieutenants; Prabhakaran's son and heir apparent, Charles Anthony; and as many as three hundred cadres also perished in the battle.

The battle followed several months of intense fighting, targeted assassinations, and attacks against the civilian population in areas where the LTTE were most popular. Among the dead were both militants and peacemakers. The Sri Lankan army did not discriminate between those with “blood on their hands” and those members of the organization who were working toward reconciliation to end the twenty-six year civil war.

Although the organization has been decapitated and hostilities have officially ceased, Tamil calls for separation have not come to an end. According to the public opinion surveys that I conducted, both Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils want regional autonomy and devolution of central power. The Tamil diaspora in Canada,
the United States, the UK, and Australia remains steadfast in its demand for autonomy and freedom.

While the LTTE is gone, its legacy lives on. Irish expatriates in the diaspora became radicalized in the 1920s after British atrocities (the term for human rights abuses at the time) in Ireland. The Palestinian movement was directed from abroad for forty years until they inspired a second generation of Palestinians to rise up against the Israeli occupation. If the underlying grievances that first led the Tamil groups to abandon parliamentary opposition and turn to violence are not addressed, the conflict will become multigenerational, as was the conflict in Northern Ireland and as is the conflict in Palestine. Although the West (outside of Canada and the UK) paid little attention to the conflict in Sri Lanka, there is much to learn from the ways in which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam integrated women into nearly all the echelons of the struggle.

Although some women willingly gave their lives for the cause, they were only represented within the military leadership, especially at the lieutenant-colonel level. There were few, if any, female political leaders at the very top. Women provided more than support: they had their own tank battalions; they were snipers, trackers, and spies; they planted claymore mines; they engaged in hand-to-hand combat; and they killed on demand, just like the men. The female tank unit of the LTTE successfully routed the Sri Lankan Army several times and won great battles. But off the battlefield, the women did not experience the same level of equality one would expect from an organization that depended on their fighting spirit and that regularly paid lip service to the principle of gender equality.

THE CRUCIAL LINKS

An Islamic state must be the goal of all people … Once that has been achieved, we will live together in peace.

—Paridah binti Abas, 2005

Our family is not afraid of execution. Because life and death [are] only in the hands of God.

—Paridah binti Abas, 2008
¹

PARIDAH

Paridah binti Abas is a classic example of a female member of the terror group Jemaah Islamiya (JI). Born in Singapore on September 30, 1970, into a middle-class family, Paridah was one of six children of Abas bin Yusuf. She attended a secular high school and grew up planning to become a kindergarten teacher. Her father, Abas, had participated in the study groups established by two radical clerics, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and Abdullah Sungkar, in Malaysia. He was so inspired by Sungkar's teaching that he promised Paridah in marriage to one of Sungkar's most ardent students, Ali Ghufron bin Nurhasyim, infamously known as Mukhlas. In her autobiography, Paridah writes that this marriage
was arranged without her consent and was the occasion of intense parental pressure.
²

Paridah found out that she was getting married one night when she was out for a drive with her father. Abas informed her that he had chosen an Indonesian preacher named Ali Ghufron to be her husband. “Mukhlas” was devout and Abas told his daughter that he respected the young man's dedication to Islam and the cause. Paridah met Ghufron only once before the wedding, and only for five minutes, when she served him tea at her parents' house. On their wedding night, Paridah warned Ghufron that she was not like other girls. He supposedly replied that this was music to his ears: “Thank God,” he said. “You are the one I am looking for.”
³

Ali Ghufron had trained at bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1989. He regaled anyone who would listen with stories of the two mujahideen (meaning himself and bin Laden) fighting side by side. Paridah eventually grew to love him. She writes in her autobiography that she wants to thank her father for forcing her to marry Ali Ghufron. She never regretted the marriage. “Being the faithful wife of a man who is an earnest example of His Messenger is beautiful … I thank you, father.”
⁴

After the marriage, Paridah's brothers also became involved in JI's terror network. Hashim went to Afghanistan and eventually became mixed up with another radical cleric, Imam Samudra, and took part in terrorist attacks in Batam and Pekanbaru, Indonesia, in December 2000. Her other brother, Mohd Nasir bin Abas, became the head of JI's third division, Mantiqi 3. Her sister, Nurhayati, married a Malaysian preacher, Shamsul Bahri bin Hussein,
⁵
who also became involved in the network. Shamsul Bahri was eventually sentenced to three years in an Indonesian prison for helping plan the 2003 suicide bombing at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed twelve people.

In 2003, Paridah herself was tried for falsifying immigration
documents and faced a possible five-year prison sentence.
⁶
She was acquitted. Her more serious crime was likely aiding and abetting her husband's activities in Bali, where he organized the bombings that took 202 lives in October 2002. On the evening of the bombing, Paridah recalls hearing the blasts and the ambulance sirens, but suffering from nausea and being too pregnant to care. When her son was born, she named him Osama.
⁷

Her children consider their father to have been a hero. Even her youngest children allegedly support what he did. Paridah called her autobiography
orang bilang ayah teroris
, (
People Say Father's a Terrorist
). In its pages, she explains that Mukhlas was not a terrorist but a mujahideen, a Muslim guerrilla warrior. She claims her children feel that Indonesia owes a debt of gratitude to their father and should say thank you rather than vilify him and blacken his name. Paridah admits that her husband might have wanted to teach the tourists in Bali a lesson but claims that he had not intended to kill as many people as he did. In fact, both Paridah and Ghufron's brothers propagate the theory that the CIA added explosives to the bombs to make them more powerful and kill more people. Shockingly, there are people in Indonesia who prefer to credit this proposition and see conspiracies everywhere, than admit that there is an Islamist problem in their nation.

Paridah now lives in Malaysia, in Ulu Tiram, three hundred kilometers south of Kuala Lumpur, with her six children. She has had to raise her family on her own: Ali Ghufron spent five years on death row, from 2003 to 2008, before exhausting the avenues for appeal. He was finally executed by a firing squad on November 9, 2008, for his responsibility in planning the Bali bombings.

SCHOOLS FOR JIHADIS

Jemaah Islamiya is practically the ideal model of jihadi terrorism, and yet few Westerners have even heard of it. A shadowy militant
underground organization consisting of loosely assembled cells and individual militants spread across Southeast Asia, it originated in a radical Islamist group called Darul Islam, established just after Indonesia's independence. In the 1980s, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (
al Ikhwan al Muslimun)
became influential throughout the region.
⁸
At the same time that radical Egyptian clerics and their ideas arrived from the east, similar religious teachings arrived from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike many other societies, which were reshaped by the coming of Islam, most of Indonesia's existing social norms and values remained relatively unchanged. The Indonesian version of Muslim Brotherhood's Islamism was rendered almost completely local and retained a particularly regional flavor.
⁹
Society and gender relations did not change radically, and upper-class and high-caste Indonesian women were able to preserve their public roles.
¹⁰
Unlike other radical Islamist groups in the Arab world and South Asia, which tended to be male-centric, JI is consequently more “woman-friendly.”