Webcast: ‘My Daugther The Terrorist’


(By Beate Arnestad, CNN, December 14, 2009) - Editor’s note: Below is a compelling blog post that looks at the 26-year long civil war in Sri Lanka from the perspective of a filmmaker who met two young Tamil women planning to be suicide bombers. We do not know for sure what happened to the two women she interviewed, though there is a report both survived the war. We know even less about most of the suicide bombers’ victims, many of them possibly innocent civilians from the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka. What we do know is that the war is finally over, after the loss of more than 70,000 lives and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

For a few years I lived in paradise: in a tropical environment on an island called Sri Lanka. Every morning I woke up in my four-post bed in Colombo –watching the dawn creeping in through my mosquito net and listening to the awakening sounds of all the tropical birds greeting a new day. I had moved to Sri Lanka from Norway because my husband had been posted there.

But paradise was not perfect. There were many slum areas and stray dogs eating garbage. There were countless beggars, dirty street children and pollution. There was also an unavoidable military presence.

There was a ceasefire in effect, but the city was not back to normal. Every major street was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers. “What do they fear?” I asked.

The reply was always the same: “The terrorists, the Black Tigers, these crazy suicide bombers.”

I found there was very little written on the group except that they had begun operations in 1987, that about 30% were believed to be female, and that their most famous action was the murder of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Therefore, I decided to make a documentary film and find out more about this group. More …

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/14/my-daughter-the-terrorist/

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/14/webcast-my-daugther-the-terrorist/

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One Response to “Webcast: ‘My Daugther The Terrorist’”

  1. Dr C P Thiagarajah - December 15th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    All the talk of HR and democracy are empty garbage. It is only for the majority community. If you are a minority it is irrelevant. This story demonstrate it. If authors like Beate do not do hard work the Tamil minorities will be wiped out in another five years. The UN under Ban is a joke. According to Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press, Ban could have stopped the genocide of the 30000 Tamil civlians. He did not do that. Instead he gave time to Basil Rajapakse when he met Ban at the UN. There was no read-out of the meeting. Why was that?

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