The most demonstrative war movie of our times might well be called Guerrillas in the Midst. War, in the latter 20th century, has been defined by guerrilla fighters. The Viet Cong and the mujahedeen of Afghanistan were textbook cases. The story a highly mechanised superpower being humbled by young men (or women) sporting a pair of jeans, a Kalashnikov and a cause is a modern military parable.
Our latest televisual conflict has featured the young men and women of the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA). But this species of combatant is found in every one of the two or three dozen conflicts currently burning across the globe.
Not long after the Soviet pullout from Kabul, I can remember the little-reported Indian disengagement from Sri Lanka. New Delhi can command 1.3 million troops and had, over the years, invariably carried the day during the sporadic clashes with its arch-rival, Pakistan.
But in early 1990, pretensions of a regional super-power status, coveted since Nehru's time, had been soundly wrecked by the Tamil Tiger rebels of Sri Lanka's northern palmyrah jungles. Three years of an expensive military quagmire had been a political disaster for the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, compelled by the 55 million Tamils in the southern sub-continent to settle an ethnic conflict his own mother had helped to cultivate years before by arming and training youthful Tamil militants.
Within a year, he would be dead, killed with many others when a young female suicide bomber detonated an explosive body-package in his proximity. Her name was "Dhanu". Only later was it learnt that she had been in the Tamil Tiger Women's Wing, and possibly raped by Indian troops.
Batticaloa
The land south of the government-held town of Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka, sweltering beneath the flat equatorial blaze, is cleaved by a palm-fringed lagoon. One morning, early in January, I crossed by ferry into rebel territory. Although their worst excesses have been likened to those of the Khmer Rouge, the Tigers are tolerant, if not terribly encouraging, of an occasional foreigner's incursion into their lair.
Theirs is a near legendary capacity for violence. They have employed puritanism and brutality with equal measure in their 16-year war to establish "Eelam", a separate Tamil state for the island's north and east. Their suicide bombers have exploded themselves in packed markets, rocketed buses and executed suspected informers. Two young teenage boys, both armed with rifles, whom I met at a village called Paddipillai, epitomised this ethos.
Vial of cyanide
They had sworn to forgo alcohol, tobacco and sex upon joining the Tigers. Both pulled out the two-inch vial of cyanide cadres are instructed to bite, rather than be taken alive in battle. This guideline has a certain grim prudence. Capture by the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) usually means death by torture.
This is equally true of the young girl cadres who refused to let me photograph them. On the wall near a primary school was a mural extolling the glories of "Eelam". Their leader is the distant Vellupillai Prabhakaran, steeped as much in the lore of the ancient Tamil dynasties as in the guerrilla tactics of Castro, Guevara and Mao. Young male and female recruits, who work, train and fight separately, refer to him as Annai (elder brother).
Now, with the Indian Army long gone, the SLA is mired in a long and bloody campaign to open the northern A9 Highway into the traditional Tamil heartland of the Jaffna peninsula. In the east, Batticaloa remains an island of government control amid a sea of Tamils. I required army permission to pass from either area of influence. For several weeks, the Tigers managed to starve the town of electricity by blowing up its power lines.
Suicide fetish
The enmity between the minority Hindu Tamils and the majority Sinhala Buddhists runs deep. The Army and police are almost entirely Sinhalese and almost as stridently nationalist. Many of its rank and file are young and poorly-paid, and see protecting Sri Lanka, regarded as a "pure" citadel of Buddhism, as their sacred duty. While in Tiger territory, I would often reflect on why such a movement always has ready converts. In Ireland, suicide is a taboo subject. Here it is a fetish, cloaked in ritualistic idealism: Tigers are told their martyrs attain eternal life.
But, as Tamils outside the movement would tell me, it is a country with high levels of poverty and unemployment, yet a relatively well-educated population. Why hang around the village, waiting for the SLA to pick you up, torture and then dispose of you? The movement gives you a gun, a sense of selfworth and a direction in life: to fight. And that is why extremist para-military movements thrive in today's world.