ஆயுத காலம்The armed period
The hardest dossier on the site. The peer-reviewed scholarship records that the LTTE both publicly opposed caste hierarchy and reproduced caste asymmetries in recruitment patterns and internal structure. The point is to hold the mixed record honestly, with the same safety rules as Dossier 04: no individuals named, no glorification, no demonisation, peer-reviewed sources only.
- No living individual is named on this page in connection to caste.
- No present-day village is named by caste.
- No survivor account of CRSV or disappearance is reproduced here. Magalir Avai, ITJP, PEARL and OHCHR are the appropriate venues for that record. UK 999 / Refuge 0808 2000 247 / SL WIN.
- The LTTE is neither glorified nor reduced to a caste organisation. Both readings are refused.
- Sources cited here are peer-reviewed monographs and journals, the International Crisis Group, and OHCHR.
What the scholarship records
Pfaffenberger's later essays and Thiranagama's In My Mother's House (2011) and the 2018 Ethnos paper jointly establish the mixed record. The LTTE published an explicit anti-caste line. It also recruited disproportionately, in some ethnographically documented phases and locations, from socially subordinated communities. Internal hierarchy, in Thiranagama's reading, did not vanish in the cadre and did not vanish in the territories where the movement governed. The honest sentence is the one neither side wants: the line and the practice were not the same line.
Why this is published, despite the difficulty
A self-determination case that depends on the claim "we had no caste, the movement was caste-pure, the diaspora is caste-blind" is not a self-determination case. It is a marketing position, and marketing positions break under the first serious scrutiny. The legal test is the relationship between a people and the state denying their rights — ICCPR Art 1, GA Res 2625 (1970), Quebec Reference (SCC 1998), Kosovo AO (ICJ 2010). No society on earth would pass an internal-purity audit; none has been required to. The right does not depend on the audit. The architecture's legitimacy depends on the audit being honest.
What this dossier does not do
- It does not catalogue cadre by caste origin. That would breach Rule 2.
- It does not name the village of any specific recruit. That would breach Rule 3.
- It does not aggregate caste counts of the cadre. That would breach Rule 4.
- It does not adjudicate atrocities. UN PoE 2011, OHCHR OISL 2015, ICG 2010 do that work, and TLTE supports a Tier-A truth process — see Dossier 04.
- It does not erase the line the movement publicly held. The line is part of the record too.
Cited Tier-A scholarship
- Pfaffenberger, B. (1982). Caste in Tamil Culture. Syracuse UP.
- Thiranagama, S. (2011). In My Mother's House: The Politics of Tamil Self-Determination. UPenn Press.
- Thiranagama, S. (2018). "The civility of strangers?" Ethnos.
- International Crisis Group (2010). The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora after the LTTE. Asia Report 186.
- UN Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka (2011). Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts. UN.
- OHCHR (2015). Report of the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL). A/HRC/30/CRP.2.
The single most common misreading of caste evidence in the Tamil record is to treat internal hierarchy as evidence that the unitary Sri Lankan state's denial of self-determination was justified. The legal test under ICCPR Art 1, GA Res 2625 (1970), the Quebec Reference (SCC 1998) and the Kosovo Advisory Opinion (ICJ 2010) does not condition self-determination on the claimant society being free of internal hierarchy. No society — Sinhala, Tamil, English, Indian, French — would meet such a test. TLTE engages caste honestly precisely because the right does not depend on hiding it.
TLTE collects no caste field. Min credit, the Council, the Witness Pass and Karuthu Vellam cohort floor (k=25, ε≤1.0 DP noise) are caste-blind by construction.
An Eelam civilisational future is caste-aware: it remembers Maviddapuram 1968, the Social Disabilities Act 1957, the Periya Purāṇam, Nandanar — and refuses to let any of them be flattened into a marketing slogan or a denial.