COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- It's often forgotten that while suicide bombing started in the Middle East, the people who perfected suicide as a weapon of war were the Tamil Tigers militia here in Sri Lanka, the island-state off the southern tip of India.
In the last decade, Tamil suicide bombers, many of them women, killed about 1,500 people, including an Indian prime minister and a Sri Lankan president. And in a bizarre twist, the Tigers filmed many of their suicide bombings to show and motivate their troops.
But since last December a cease-fire between the Tigers -- who have been militating for a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil Hindu minority in the northeast -- and the government, which is dominated by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority, has halted all suicide bombings. No one can be sure it will last, after 18 years of civil war. But it's still worth examining how suicide was defused here, and whether any of this might apply to Palestinians and Israelis.
To begin with, one of the key factors in halting Tamil suicide bombings was the Tamil diaspora, living in North America, Europe and India. This Tamil diaspora had been the main source of funding for the Tamil Tigers. But the Tamil diaspora is made up largely of middle-class merchants and professionals, and when in the late 1990s the United States, Britain and India all declared the Tigers a "terrorist" group, not freedom fighters, the Tamil diaspora became embarrassed by them and started choking off their funds.
"The Tamil diaspora started out as a force encouraging Tamil radicalism, but eventually it evolved into a source for moderation," said Suresh Premachandran, head of a Tamil rights party in Sri Lanka. "Sept. 11 changed that even more. People here knew after that there would never be any sympathy for any suicide bombers."
Unfortunately, in the Middle East Arabs and Muslims continue to indulge, justify, praise or provide religious legitimation for Palestinian suicide bombers, even after Sept. 11. The Palestinians have convinced themselves, with the help of many Arabs and Europeans, that their grievance is so special, so enormous that it isn't bound by any limits of civilized behavior, and therefore they are entitled to do whatever they want to Israelis. And Israelis have convinced themselves that they are entitled to do virtually anything to stop it.
