WORDS AND PHOTOS BY THOMAS HAUGERSVEEN, ASSISTED BY HENRIK PRYSER LIBELL

The Tigers think of their suicide soldiers, aka the Black Tigers, as “military trump cards.” As Sudar tells it, “Let’s say we’ve got a target. We’ll need to use at least 100 soldiers to defeat our enemy, and maybe 50 soldiers will be killed on each side. But if we use a Black Tiger we will have reduced our losses to one or two, while the losses for the enemy will remain the same. It’s simple mathematics. We want to create losses for the enemy that are as big as possible and reduce our losses to an absolute minimum.” I ask him about civilians killed in these attacks and he tells me that the Tigers don’t kill civilians: “Our enemy isn’t the Sinhalese people. They will be welcome to live on our land once we get it. But anyone who raises a weapon against the Tamil Tigers is our enemy.”

A female unit in basic training.

Later I meet Anbu [not his real name]. He has lost two daughters in the war. Each of them, code-named Thamarai and Painkathir, was killed in a fight against Sinhalese troops. “It was their own choice,” he said, “Now they’re martyrs. They died for our people. I could not possibly be more proud of them than I already am.” The fallen soldiers are honored in the biggest room in his house, and Anbu and his wife pray for them several times a day, kneeling in front of portraits of them in their green Tiger uniforms. “They chose to risk their lives so that we should have a better life,” Anbu told me. “They died for us—for our cause.”


TO BE CONTINUED
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