I recently finished Robert A. Pape’s very interesting book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House). It’s refreshingly data-driven and non-ideological, if a bit out of date — the paperback edition is 2005, and news moves fast, in Iraq and elsewhere.
One of Pape’s arguments is that suicide terrorists, and the militant organizations that deploy them, are not outcasts from their societies, but rather valued and respected members of those societies. They are not, in other words, shadowy figures who have rejected the values of the surrounding population. In the social context in which they operate, they are “normal.”
Easy enough to accept. But there’s something missing, and it peeks through in a footnote on the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, on page 318. Pape cites the following passage from a 2000 report by the International Center for Ethnic Studies:
One by one their rivals and opponents among the Tamil separatist groups succumbed to the relentless violence of the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] … [which] systematically eliminated all rival groups, culminating in the brutal massacre of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization and the killing of its leader, Sri Sabaratnam, between 1 and 3 May, 1986.
So, if the Tigers have indeed managed to become a popular force in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka, they did not come by that popular support innocently. They achieved it through brute violence.
To gauge the actual public support of a given terrorist group, one would have to factor in pure fear, no? In the vast majority of cases, these “liberation” groups turn their violence on the people they claim to be liberating. This is something you’d think would carry more weight in Pape’s analysis.
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