முடியா கணக்கேடுThe Unfinished Ledger

Between 1983 and 2009 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam grew from a small armed cadre into the de facto government of a contiguous territory in the north and east of the island. They ran a civil administration. They ran courts. They ran a police force. They printed identity documents. They taxed. They conscripted. They were proscribed in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the Terrorism Act 2000, in the European Union in 2006, in the United States in 1997, in Canada in 2006, in India in 1992. They are proscribed in the United Kingdom at the time of this writing. This chronicle does not call for that proscription to be lifted. It records what is on the record.[uk-ta-2000-proscription][ltte-eu-listing][ltte-fto-1997][caspersen-de-facto]

What is on the record is also that this de facto governance was bought, in part, by acts that the same record finds were grave breaches of international humanitarian law. Child recruitment, attested by the United Nations and by Sri Lankan human rights monitors. Forced disappearances of dissenting Tamils. Suicide attacks on civilian targets. Coerced taxation of the diaspora. The killing of rival Tamil political leaders, including the 1989 killing of Amirthalingam and the 2005 killing of Kadirgamar. The chronicle records these as the record finds them. It does not redistribute the moral weight by averaging it against the architecture that preceded it.[un-poe-2011-darusman][hrw-ltte-child-recruitment][ohchr-oisl-2015]

What it does insist on is attribution discipline. After 3 March 2004, when the eastern commander known as Karuna broke from the Vanni leadership and took his cadres with him, the field was no longer a single entity in a single command. What was, in 2003, an attributable LTTE act in the east was, by 2005, often an act of the breakaway faction operating with the knowledge — sometimes the assistance — of the Sri Lankan security services. The post-2004 period is, on the record, a period in which attribution requires more than the label. It requires year, district, faction, command. The chronicle does not collapse those distinctions.[tmvp-state-cooperation-record][icg-final-days-2010]

It also does not collapse the diaspora. The diaspora that funded the LTTE — by collection, by coercion, by conviction, by extortion, in different proportions at different times — is not the same diaspora that is reading this chronicle today. A large fraction of the financial record is a record of duress: shopkeepers and small-business owners in north London, Toronto, Paris, Zurich, who paid because the cost of not paying was assessed, by them, as higher than the cost of paying. To record that history is not to accuse them. It is to refuse the convenient simplification that the entire diaspora was a willing financier of an armed movement. The legal record, in the United Kingdom and in Canada, has been careful on this point. The chronicle is careful too.[r-v-arumugam-uk][canadian-tro-record]

What the chronicle will not do is name commanders, give operational detail, reproduce insignia, or perform any of the gestures that the criminal law of the United Kingdom — under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 — would read as support for a proscribed organisation. What it will do is point, for each claim made here, to a Tier-A source on the public record. The case file in /case/ltte-era holds the longer treatment. The chronicle holds the shape.