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LTTE's credo now finds takers among plantation Tamils in Lanka

Sri Lanka's once peaceful tea plantations may be heading for a violent upheaval, with the educated estate youth drawing inspiration from the bloody separatist campaign in the north-east to give vent to their frustration.

Myopic government policies, callousness of the law-enforcing agencies and the failure of the estate management to understand the aspirations of the plantation youth are all inexorably pushing the situation to an explosive point, workers and observers in the central hill district said.

The situation has been further complicated by the disillusionment of the plantation workers with their traditional trade union leadership on the one hand and the ''hero worship'' of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leader V Prabhakaran on the other, they said.

This admiration could be behind a series of bomb blasts in this town and other parts of the region in the past one year in which electricity transformers, fuel depots and tea factories had been targeted.

In the latest such attack, a passenger-cum-goods train was bombed and derailed just on the outskirts of Hatton town on August 8, but the local police are still clueless about the perpetrators of the blast.

''It is a straight LTTE job,'' said a police official in Hatton, but admitted that investigations so far had thrown up no firm evidence of the Tigers' involvement.

The government had cited these bombings as evidence of infiltration by the LTTE into the hitherto peaceful tea country and justification for imposing island-wide emergency last week.

It said the LTTE, which was on the run in the north due to intensified military operations, wanted to destabilise the central hills and undermine the tea industry, the backbone of the island's economy.

The rebels also planned to kill estate workers' leader and cabinet minister S Thondaman, the government claimed. Estate trade union leaders, close to the scene of the train bombing for suspected involvement were to be released due to lack of evidence.

The others, including two from the eastern Batticaloa district where the LTTE is active, were being detained for further questioning, they said.

It is apparent that the police have not learned many lessons from the experience of the north-east. It was such indiscriminate arrests and high-handedness that led to the alienation of the Tamils in that region.

In Hatton, too, such arrests have already spread fear and suspicion among the estate workers.

''Many of them return angry and bitter because they are brutally assaulted and tortured in the police stations to extract a confession,'' said an elderly worker P Kalimuthu.

Vel Rajamurthy, 27, is a typical frustrated estate youth. Though he passed the matriculation examination five years ago, he is unemployed, like many other young men in Hatton town. According to trade union figures, there are over 75,000 educated unemployed in the region.

His education secured him a job as a salesman in a Colombo firm, but the constant harassment by the police in the capital forced him to give up his job and return to the estate, there the management denied him work saying he should have registered with the company when he was 16 which would have meant dropping out of school.

Another youth, Pon Ganesh, narrated his experience of being assaulted mercilessly by policemen at checkposts when he ventured out of the estate. ''We wish we had weapons and money,'' he said wistfully. ''We never considered ourselves as Jaffna Tamils, but now the Sinhalese are telling us that we are all alike. If that is so, why should we say we are different,'' he asked angrily.

If it continued like this, a situation similar to the one in the north-east could develop in the estates, too, said Rajamurthy. The one million strong Tamil plantation workers, officially identified as Tamils of Indian origin, were brought to the island by the British over 200 years ago as indentured labour to work in their coffee and tea estates in the central hills.

The community, which is the most economically and educationally backward in the island, considers itself to be ethnically distinct from the Sri Lankan Tamils, who inhabit the island's north-east.

An Indian Tamil lawyer, K Vivehandan, in the hill resort of Nuwara Eliya, said it was unthinkable even a few years ago that the estate Tamils would make common cause with the LTTE's separatist campaign.

''But many youngsters here now believe that Prabhakaran's violent campaign is the answer to their problems,'' he said.

The LTTE chief, too, could be using the frustration of the estate youth as part of his war strategy, he pointed out.

The perceived feeling among the youth that they are trapped in the drudgery of the estates for life because of their ethnicity and that only Sinhalese are given government jobs even in the plantation areas could veer more and more of them towards violence.

In such a situation, people like M K Raji, 58, who said he always quoted his leader Thondaman's exhortation not to resort to violence to his children, may soon find themselves in a minority.

UNI

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