Intriguing role for Australian 'auntie' as Tigers enter new phase

Intriguing role for Australian 'auntie' as Tigers enter new phase

SYDNEY this week saw a gathering of notables from the Australian expatriate diaspora, mostly suits from the worlds of satellite TV, finance, science and open-fridge diplomacy.

Across the world, in a much stranger story of personal development, the reverence of a foreign people for another Australian expat was on display.

Dressed in the white sari of Hindu widowhood, the former Gippsland nurse Adele Wilby was chief mourner as 50,000 people filed past the open coffin of her husband of 28 years, Anton Balasingham, in London's Alexandra Palace Hall on Wednesday.

Balasingham, who had died a week earlier of cancer at 68, was the spokesman of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the fearsome Tamil Tigers who have been fighting for an ethnic homeland, or Eelam, in the north and east of Sri Lanka in a 23-year war that has cost some 70,000 lives.

As she recounted in her book Will to Freedom in 2001, Adele Balasingham became deeply immersed in the separatist struggle of the mostly Hindu Tamils against rule by the mostly Buddhist majority Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, becoming known as the "White Tamil".

By marrying Anton, she wrote, "I married the collective consciousness and history of a people: a man who embodied the Tamil psyche with all its strengths and weaknesses, greatness and failings."

Anton - with a doctorate and fluent English, plus an eclectic interest in religions, Marxism and Freudian psychology - smoothed the edges of the Tamil Tiger political position, built on a relentless guerilla struggle and a leadership cult around its chief, Velupillai Prabakaran, that many have likened to that of an ancient Hindu god-king.

"Adele was more than a mere partner who kept his house and nursed him in illness," observed

a visiting Tamil member of the Sri Lankan Parliament, M. K. Eelaventhan, in Sydney this week. "She has been something more moving to us: she was his intellectual partner."

Adele lived with Anton in Jaffna and its jungle hinterland for years under siege, escaping with him by sea to Thailand then London when he became ill in recent years.

Controversially, "Adele Auntie" became mentor to the female Tigers, seen posing with some with a pistol on her hip in one BBC documentary. Although she insists her role was always political and ideological, neither she nor Anton could be dissociated with the disturbing side of the Tiger campaign: the enlistment of young teenagers, the distribution of cyanide capsules, the cult of martyrdom around suicide bombers.

Whether she stays in London or returns to Jaffna, Adele could become an even more influential figure in Tamil politics, judging by the role of other widows in South Asia. As the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi - widow of Rajiv, the Indian prime minister blown up by a female Tiger - has shown, being a Westerner is not necessarily a barrier.

Whoever leads the Tigers, a new peace drive is certainly needed. About 2500 people have died in violations of a Norwegian-assisted ceasefire this year, with a rising tempo of abductions, assassinations, raids, shellings and bombings by both sides. A Sri Lankan Army operation is trying to cut Tigers territory in two by an operation south of Trincomalee.

Colombo politics, riven by intense inter-party competition and facing a nasty religious-nationalism among the Buddhist clergy, is unable to agree on a significant devolution of power into a working federalism.

The Tigers - running an intense, personalised dictatorship, killing and intimidating Tamil opponents, and still recruiting child soldiers - make their dream of a separate state utterly suspect to other countries in the region, let alone the Sinhalese on the same island.

Using its Israeli-supplied Kfir jets and Pakistani artillery, Colombo is gearing up for war, banking on attrition to break Tamil support for the Tigers. For his part, Prabakaran has shown with a recent assassination inside a heavily guarded precinct of defence ministry buildings in Colombo, and a raid on a navy base at Galle, that he is able to take his deadly fight to the Sinhalese heartland.

Lines of support for the Tamil struggle reach around the world, via the Tamil diaspora that includes top brains in academia, law, finance and other professions. The Tigers operate a worldwide system of taxation on expats, holding relatives back in Sri Lanka as hostage.

Just how ruthless this taxation is was shown in the murder of a Tamil-Australian engineer from Perth, Subramaniam Muthulingam, in 2002 while

on a visit to Colombo. He had earlier resisted pressure to channel donations from worshippers at Perth's Murugan Temple to the Tigers.

As governments, including Australia's, turn their attention back to the unresolved Sri Lankan conflict, the potential role of the Tamils' Australian "auntie" is intriguing.

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