Stoking The Flames

摘要

With kerosene and a box of matches, Sivaprakasam, a 60-year-old former civil servant, turned himself into a screaming fireball on February 21st. He was the fifth resident of Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state that is home to 65m Tamils, to burn himself to death this year in protest at Sri Lanka's brutal campaign against its Tamil Tiger rebels. Tamil Nadu is known for self-immolation. Chennai, its capital, is dotted with monuments to seven "martyrs" who died in 1965, in a successful protest against the encroachment of Hindi on the Tamil language, deemed by its speakers India's oldest and richest.rnThe recent suicides will not save Sri Lanka's rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte), who for 25 years have fought for an Eelam, or homeland, for Sri Lanka's Tamils. Their embattled scrap of northern Sri Lanka is shrinking fast. Nor will the fiery protests in India do much for thousands of civilians held hostage by the ltte. India's government, a coalition led by the Congress party, has quietly backed Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in his two-year effort to wipe out the Tigers. One reason is personal: Congress's leader, Sonia Gandhi, lost her husband, Rajiv, a former prime minister, to an ltte suicide-bomber in Tamil Nadu in 1991.