To the Tamils of northeast Sri Lanka and to much of their global diaspora, Isaipriya was a star: a presenter and actress who came to symbolize the Tamil resistance.
She was beautiful, and she read the news on Tiger television and performed in romantic Tamil musicals, singing the praises of Tamil Tiger war heroes and the Black Tiger suicide bombers who raced their explosive-packed speedboats into the vulnerable sides of Sri Lankan Navy ships.
Isaipriya was respected and admired, not just by the people of the Vanni—the small region in north Sri Lanka where the secessionist forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had created a de facto state—but also by Tamils around the world, driven from their homeland by decades of discrimination, which occasionally exploded into outright pogroms among the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka.
"She was a lovely woman," said Benjamin Dix, who for four years was a UN staffer in Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the Tiger state. Dix knew Isaipriya, and he understood the moral ambiguity of her message. "She was incredibly gentle and respectful," he said, "but at the same time, she stood for and symbolized the movement of the Tigers, which was hard and brutal and completely focused on their objective of gaining Tamil Eelam and an independent state within Sri Lanka." Full story...
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She was beautiful, and she read the news on Tiger television and performed in romantic Tamil musicals, singing the praises of Tamil Tiger war heroes and the Black Tiger suicide bombers who raced their explosive-packed speedboats into the vulnerable sides of Sri Lankan Navy ships.
Isaipriya was respected and admired, not just by the people of the Vanni—the small region in north Sri Lanka where the secessionist forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had created a de facto state—but also by Tamils around the world, driven from their homeland by decades of discrimination, which occasionally exploded into outright pogroms among the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka.
"She was a lovely woman," said Benjamin Dix, who for four years was a UN staffer in Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the Tiger state. Dix knew Isaipriya, and he understood the moral ambiguity of her message. "She was incredibly gentle and respectful," he said, "but at the same time, she stood for and symbolized the movement of the Tigers, which was hard and brutal and completely focused on their objective of gaining Tamil Eelam and an independent state within Sri Lanka." Full story...
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