Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka's Bloody Civil War.

• Author: Smith, Anthony
• Position: Book review

TAMIL TIGRESS: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka's Bloody Civil War

Author: Niromi de Soyza

Published by: Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011, 308pp, A$32.99.

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In May 2009 the government of Sri Lanka declared an end to a civil war against the separarist Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in which more than 100,000 people died. Led by the tyrannical figure of Prabhakaran, who was himself killed in 2009, the LTTE were as much a danger to fellow Tamils as to Sinhalese, effectively winding up other Tamil political movements. Tigers themselves could be executed by their superiors for a range of arbitrary reasons. Tigers wore cyanide capsules and were not supposed to be taken alive--many would commit suicide rather than be captured when the army finally overran their positions in 2009. The LTTE developed and extensively used suicide terrorism, employing the so-called 'Black Tigers' (many of them women), to sow dread amongst the majority Sinhalese population and to take the lives of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993. As a result, a lot of countries declared the LTTE a terrorist entity. Yet for many Tamils angry at what they saw as government atrocities, the Tigers were the only option they could conceive of, particularly as choices narrowed.

This is the background to Niromi de Soyza's memoir of life as a guerrilla soldier (now an ordinary mother living in Sydney), the importance of which is an explanation as to how a studious, middle-class seventeen-year-old (perhaps therefore not the 'child' one conjures up from the title) defied the wishes of her family to join a (female) Freedom Bird unit. The events described here occur in the late 1980s before the Tigers routinely recruited large numbers of women: de Soyza's version has her actively seeking out membership from sceptical recruiters. This leads us to two themes--status and gender.

Prabharakan's ideology was officially secular/leftist, albeit with the heavy dose of Tamil nationalism and a cult of Prabharakan's own personality. Simultaneously with the separatist struggle against the unitary state of Sri Lanka, it represented a challenge to the caste structure of Tamil society. But one's place in society permeates this book. On the back cover de Soyza is described curiously as 'mixed race', which is in fact a reference to the fact that her (northern) father was from the Tamil community that arrived in Sri Lanka in the second...