Armed groups and sexual violence: When is wartime rape rare?

Politics and Society

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 131-162

  Wood, Elisabeth Jean ^a,b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b SANTA FE INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

Human rights; Political violence; Rape; Sexual violence; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 47549086751     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329755     Document Type: Article

References (154)

1. and Elisabeth Jean Wood, "Sexual Violence during War: Toward an Understanding of Variation" in Order, Conflict and Violence, ed. Stathis Kalyvas, Tarek Masoud and Ian Shapiro (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 323-51.
2. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000);
3. and Lisa Boswell Sharlach, "Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda," New Political Science 22, no. 1 (2004): 89-102.
4. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978);
5. Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
6. and Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
7. International Criminal Court (ICC), Elements of Crimes (UN Doc. PNICC/2000/1/Add.2, 2000) Article 8(2) (e) (vi)-1.
8. Ibid., Article 8(2) (e) (xxii)-2 to (xxii)-6.
9. Wood, "Variation, in Sexual Violence."
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.; and Wood, "Sexual Violence during War."
12. Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, "Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War," American Political Science Review 100, no. 3 (2006): 429-47.
13. Joshua A. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
14. Amelia Hoover, "Disaggregating Violence during Armed Conflict: Why and How" (unpublished manuscript, 2007);
15. and Wood, "Sexual Violence during War."
16. A version of the substitution argument is made by evolutionary psychologists Thornhill and Palmer: Men will develop a genetic predisposition to rape as they will be better off in propagating their genes if they rape women. See Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, The Natural History of Rape: Biological Basis of Social Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
17. See Wood, "Variation in Sexual Violence," for a discussion of this and other biological arguments for rape .
18. Enloe, Maneuvers, 11 7.
19. In establishing the "comfort stations," Japanese officials sought "to prevent anti Japanese sentiments from fermenting [sic] as a result of rapes and other unlawful acts by Japanese military personnel against local residents in the areas occupied by the then Japanese military, the need to prevent loss of troop strength by venereal and other diseases, and the need to prevent espionage." See "On the Issue of Wartime 'Comfort Women'" by the Japanese Cabinet Councillors' Office on External Affairs, August 4, 1993 (E/CN.4/1996/137, p. 14),
20. cited in UNESCO, Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and Slavery-like Practices during Armed Conflict, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13 (New York: United Nations, 1998), appendix 9(a).
21. The most well-known case is the rape of twenty civilians by the U.S. Army's Charlie Company during the My Lai massacre in 1968 (see sources cited in Wood, "Variation in Sexual Violence"); various forms of sexual violence, including sexual torture and rape, occurred elsewhere.
22. See the transcripts of the Winter Soldier Investigation (1971), http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML-docs/Resources/Primary/ Winter-Soldier/ WS-entry.html;
23. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Bantam, 1975);
24. and Gina Marie Weaver, "Ideologies of Forgetting: American Erasure of Women's Sexual Trauma in the Vietnam War" (PhD diss., University of Houston, 2006).
25. Dara Kay Cohen, "The Role of Female Combatants in Armed Groups: Women and Wartime Rape in Sierra Leone (1991-2002)" (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 2008).
26. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report (2005), http://trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/index.s.html.
27. Goldstein, War and Gender.
28. Elizabeth Hillman, "Front and Center: Sexual Violence in U.S. Military Law", Politics and Society 37:1 (2009): 101-129.
29. Among many other sources, "The direction, operation, and control of a human organization whose primary function is the application of violence is the peculiar skill of the officer." Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-military Relations (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957).
30. Mark Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
31. Huntington, Soldier and State, 73-74;
32. and Guy L. Siebold, "Core Issues and Theory in Military Sociology," Journal of Political and Military Sociology 29 (2001): 140-59.
33. Siebold, "Core Issues."
34. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper, 1974);
35. and Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay, 1996).
36. Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
37. In Shils and Janowitz's original formulation, the primary group included not just the soldiers but their immediate commanding officer; primary group cohesion referred to the strong social bonds between the soldier peers and between the soldiers and the officer. See Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, "Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II," Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 281. Some subsequent literature focused on the peer bonding relationships alone, but an important strand of the literature emphasized the link between the peer group and the hierarchy through the unit commanders. Military sociologists continue to analyze patterns of group cohesion;
38. see the analysis of U.S. servicemen's combat motivations in Iraq by Leonard Wong, PhD, Col. Thomas A. Kolditz, Lt. Col. Raymond A. Millen, and Col. Terrence M. Potter, Why They Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2003), http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/ pdffiles/pub179.pdf;
39. and the subsequent debate, Robert J. MacCoun, Elizabeth Kier, and Aaron Belkin, "Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat?" Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 4 (2006): 646-54;
40. and Leonard Wong, "Combat Motivation in Today's Soldiers," Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 4 (2006): 659-63.
41. Shils, "Cohesion and Disintegration"; but see Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991) for a distinct interpretation emphasizing collective responsibility for war crimes as a disincentive to surrender.
42. An argument sometimes made is that the presence of female combatants in combat units will disrupt the formation of the necessary bonds among the male combatants. For a review of available evidence, see Leora N. Rosen, Paul D. Bliese, Kathleen A. Wright, and Robert K. Gifford, "Gender Composition and Group Cohesion in U.S. Army Units: A Comparison across Five Studies," Armed Forces & Society 25, no. 3 (1999): 365-86.
43. Grossman, On Killing.
44. For an argument emphasizing the importance of collective drills over horizontal bonds for group cohesion and performance in state militaries, see Anthony King, "The Word of Command," Armed Forces & Society 32, no. 4 (2006), 493-512;
45. as well as the subsequent debate, Anthony King, "The Existence of Group Cohesion in the Armed Forces," Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 4 (2007): 638-45;
46. and Guy L. Siebold, "The Essence of Military Group Cohesion," Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 2 (2007): 286-95.
47. On informal rituals and hazing, see Donna Winslow, "Rites of Passage and Group Bonding in the Canadian Airborne," Armed Forces & Society 25, no. 3 (1999): 429-57;
48. Hank Nuwer, "Military Hazing," in The Hazing Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 141-46.
49. Ljubica Jelusic, "Ritualization of Emotions in Military Organization," in New Directions in Military Sociology, ed. Eric Ailed (Whitby, ON: de Sitter, 2005).
50. Grossman, On Killing; and Osiel, Obeying Orders.
51. Carol Burke, Camp Ail-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight (Boston: Beacon, 2004);
52. and Goldstein, War and Gender. Burns describes various metaphors in the U.S. military that relate arms and sex, and also suggests that this particular marching chant is no longer allowed. Richard Allen Burns, "This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun ... : Gunlore in the Military," New Directions in Folklore 7 (2003).
53. Goldstein, War and Gender, 362-71.
54. Wood, "Variation in Sexual Violence."
55. Hoover, "Disaggregating Violence"; Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 234-50;
56. and Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 2.
57. Osiel, Obeying Orders, 155-56;
58. and Goldstein, War and Gender, 364.
59. Robert J. MacCoun, "What Is Known about Unit Cohesion and Military Performance," in RAND, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment, National Defense Research Institute, MR-323-OSD (Santa Monica, CA: Rand), 296. There were over one thousand attempts to murder officers in Vietnam;
60. see Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing. Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999), 198.
61. Humphreys, "Handling and Manhandling."
62. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.
63. Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín shows in his comparison of paramilitary and guerrilla combatants in Colombia that initial socialization, discipline, and incentives are sufficiently different as to account for differences in violence between the two groups. See Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, "Telling the Difference: Guerrillas and Paramilitaries in the Colombian War," Politics and Society 36 (1998): 3-34.
64. Dara Kay Cohen, "Explaining Sexual Violence during Civil War: Evidence from Sierra Leone (1991-2002)" (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 2008).
65. William D. Henderson, Why the Vtetcong Fought: A Study of Motivation and Control in a Modern Army in Combat (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979).
66. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
67. Hoover, "Disaggregating Violence."
68. On the origins of the conflict, see E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
69. Kumari Jayawardena, "Ethnicity and Sinhala Consciousness," in "July '83 and After," special issue, Nethra 6, no. 1 and 2 (2003): 47-86;
70. Elizabeth Nissan and R. L. Stirrat, "The Generation of Communal Identities," in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Jonathan Spencer (Routledge, 1990);
71. Daya Somasundaram, Scarred Minds: The Psychological Impact of War on Sri Lankan Tamils (New Delhi: Sage, 1998);
72. Jonathan Spencer, "Introduction: The Power of the Past," in Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict, ed. Jonathan Spencer (Routledge, 1990);
73. and S. J. Tambiah, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
74. Obeyesekere identifies three sites where political violence was increasingly institutionalized in the decades after independence: market towns where Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim businessmen competed; areas undergoing colonization by Sinhalese; and Colombo. See Gananath Obeyesekere, "The Origins and Institutionalisation of Political Violence," in Sri Lankan Change and Crisis, ed. J. Manor (London: Croom. Helm, 1984), 153-94.
75. See also Tambiah, Sri Lanka; and Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
76. Tambiah, Sri Lanka, chap. 2 and 3. Gunasinghe persuasively argues that a contributing factor was the liberalization of the economy and Sinhalese fears that Tamil business interests would fare much better in the newly competitive context, given that they had not relied on state subsidies and had extensive links to Indian interests (Newton. Gunasinghe, "The Open Economy and Its Impact on Ethnic Relations in Sri Lanka," in Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka, ed. Deborah and Michael D. Woost Winslow (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), 99-114.
77. See Rajan Hoole, Sri Lanka: The Arrogance of Power. Myths, Decadence and Murder. (Colombo, Sri Lanka: University Teachers for Human Rights [Jaffna], 2001), 123-24, for an assessment of the evidence concerning fatalities.
78. Pradeep Jeganathan, "All the Lord's Men? Recollecting a Riot in an Urban Sri Lankan Community," in Sri Lanka Collective Identities Revisited, ed. Michael Roberts (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Marga Institute, 1998);
79. and Francesca Bremner, "Fragments of Memory, Processes of State: Ethnic Violence through the Life Histories of Participants," in Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka, ed. D. Winslow and M. D. Woost (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 137-50.
80. There appears to be no way to estimate the prevalence of sexual violence in the 1983 pogrom, given the anecdotal character of the violence and the scarcity of human rights and women's organizations collecting information at the time.
81. For an analysis of intra-Tamil politics drawing on the work of a leading Tamil intellectual and journalist, see M. P. Whitaker, Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka (London: Pluto, 2007).
82. Somasundaram, Scarred Minds.
83. To my knowledge, there have been, no medical or human rights violations surveys of the type carried out in other conflicts to assess the extent of sexual violence in the Sri Lankan conflict. Human rights experts who have assessed the feasibility of surveys of internally displaced persons' camps, for example, argue that conditions are not adequate for a number of reasons: Security for interviewers and interviewees would be difficult to ensure, given the presence of persons with a wide range of political loyalties living in the camps and the location of many near army bases (interviews, May 2007). Whether adequate support services exist for victims of sexual violence is also an issue. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) commissioned an assessment of the records of hospitals, police stations, and welfare centers in districts affected by the conflict.
84. See Kamalini Wijayatilake, Study on Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Selected Locations in Sri Lanka (Colombo, Sri Lanka: UNHCR, Sri Lanka, and Centre for Women's Research, 2004). The majority of incidents appear to refer to domestic violence by family members; the survey identified few cases of rape. The only directly conflict-related perpetrators listed were Home Guards (members of civilian defense militias). Care International Sri Lanka commissioned a survey on gender-based violence in the district of Batticaloa, but as the survey was of seventy-five victims identified through caregivers, there is no way to estimate prevalence
85. (see Shyamala Gomez, A Study on Gender Based Violence in the Batticaloa District (London: Care International Sri Lanka, 2005). If this small survey is at all representative, sexual violence not related to the conflict is much more frequent than sexual violence related to the conflict.
86. Interviews with human rights experts, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 2007.
87. See Amnesty International, Sri Lanka: Torture in Custody (London: Amnesty International, 1999), and Sri Lanka: Rape in Custody (London: Amnesty International, 2002), both at http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sri- lanka/reports.do;
88. Elizabeth Nissan, "Respect for the Integrity of the Person," in Sri Lanka: State of Human Rights (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Law and Society Trust, 1994), 61-88;
89. and the Final Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons in the Western, Southern, and Sabaramuwa Provinces (Government of Sri Lanka, September 1997). Somasundaram reports the result of a survey of 160 survivors of torture by state, militant, and Indian forces, but the distribution of perpetrators is not clear (Somasundaram, Scarred Minds).
90. See, for example, Elizabeth Nissan, "Overview," in Sri Lanka: State of Human Rights (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Law and Society Trust, 2001), 1-18.
91. Neloufer de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007).
92. Interview, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 2007. Given the political and social sensitivity of the topic, I promised all interviewees confidentiality.
93. de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka, 98, 285, and 312.
94. See also University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR[J]), "The Politics of Destruction and the Human Tragedy," Report No. 6 (1991). All UTHR(J) reports cited can be found at the Web site www.uthr.org.
95. Interview, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 2007.
96. Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71-72.
97. Kumudini Samuel, Women's Rights Watch Year Report 1999 (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Women and Media Collective, 1999), 8, 30-31.
98. DBS Jeyaraj, Sexual Violence against Tamil Women (2000), www.tamilnation .org/indictmeni/rape/001222dbs.htm, While this article is distinctly pro- Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), its list includes cases documented in other sources as well.
99. Sexual harassment of female cadre by mid-ranking members of the LTTE command structure does occur, according to interviewees, but the extent is impossible to estimate (interviews, May 2007).
100. Interviews, May 2007.
101. The exception was a former military officer who claimed that he saw clear signs of rape of women civilians who had been massacred by the LTTE in 1990 at two sites in the east. I found no confirmation of this in my interviews with human rights experts and my review of documents.
102. Founded, in 1988 by faculty of the University of Jaffna, one leader of the organization was killed by the LTTE in 1989. Other faculty members known to be affiliated with the organization were gradually forced to leave northern Sri Lanka. Drawing on a network of supporters, the group continues to publish a variety of documents. Both parties to the conflict attack the group as supporters of the other side. According to a former high-level Tamil militant, the group's reports are "fairly accurate, I would say about 80 percent accurate. They've a lot of sources. The inaccuracy is not systematic, there are no deliberate mistakes. Perhaps misinformation comes up, but it's not purposeful." Interview, May 2007.
103. UTHR(J), Special Report No. 14 (July 20, 2002).
104. UTHR(J), Special Repon No. 13 (May 10,2002); Special Report 14 (July 20, 2002).
105. UTHR(J), Bulletin No. 35 (March 9, 2004).
106. UTHR(J), Special Report No. 15, section 6.1 (October 4, 2002).
107. UTHR(J), Bulletin No. 10 (February 1996).
108. UTHR(J), Bulletin No. 44 (March 13, 2007).
109. UTHR(J), Special Report 7 (August 29, 1996).
110. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 164.
111. Margaret Trawick, Enemy Lines: Warfare, Childhood and Play in Batticaloa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 188.
112. Shahul Hasbullah, Muslim Refugees, the Forgotten People of Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis (Nuraicholai, Sri Lanka: Research and Action Forum for Social Development, 2001).
113. Interviews, May 2007.
114. International Crisis Group (ICG), Sri Lanka's Muslims: Caught in the Crossfire, Asia Report No. 134 (Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Brussels, Belgium: ICG, 2007), 7-8.
115. UTHR(J), "The Politics of Destruction"; Hasbullah, Muslim Refugees; Malathi de Alwis, "The Purity of Displacement and the Reterritorialization of Longing," in Feminist Analyses of International Organizations and Asylum (no further details), 213-31;
116. F. Zackariya and N. Shanmugaratnam, "Stepping Out: Women Surviving Amidst Displacement and Deprivation" (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Muslim Women's Research and Action Forum, 2002);
117. N. Shanmugaratnam, Forced Migration and Changing Local Political Economies: A Study from North Western Sri Lanka (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Social Science Association, 2001);
118. Faizun Zackariya et al, "Early Marriage and the Cycle of Violence in a Displaced Situation," in Confronting Complexities: Gender Perceptions and Value (Columbo, Sri Lanka: Zulfika Centre for Women's Research, 1998);
119. and ICG, Sri Lanka's Muslims. While I could only review English-language press archives, UTHR(J) draws on Tamillanguage sources. The only reference I found, reported in several sources and brought up in some interviews, concerned the killing of a pregnant woman by the LTTE in the east; rape was not alleged in any of the sources.
120. On the history of LTTE human rights violations, see the many reports by UTHR(J), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the ICG, and the U.S. State Department. Stephen Hopgood argues that civilians are neither the sole nor intended target of LTTE attacks, such as that on the Central Bank in 1996 that left eighty dead; rather, civilian deaths are understood as "collateral damage" of assassinations. While his assessment may be true for political assassinations, it does not account for the other patterns of violence against civilians discussed here (Stephen Hopgood, "Tamil Tigers, 1987-2002," in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 43-76.
121. Interview, May 2007.
122. M. R. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerrillas (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Vijitha Yapa, 2004), 148.
123. ICG, Sri Lanka's Human Rights Crisis, Asia Report No. 135 (Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Brussels, Belgium.: ICG, 2007), 8.
124. Ramani Muttetuwegama, "Integrity of the Person," in Sri Lanka: State of Human Rights (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Law and Society Trust, 2001).
125. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka, 194-98.
126. Indeed, one former Tamil militant commented, "The Sri Lankan army should take lessons in. torture from the LTTE" (interview, May 2007). Interviewees noted one pattern of restraint in the intra-Tamil violence: The various militant groups did not target one another's families, an implicit understanding to avoid a disastrous tit for tat (interviews, May 2007).
127. Amnesty International, "Sri Lanka: Torture in Custody," 11.
128. Interviews, May 2007.
129. Neloufer de Mel, "Agent or Victim? The Sri Lankan Woman Militant in the Interregnum," in Sri Lanka. Collective Identities Revisited, ed. Michael Roberts (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Marga Institute, 1998), 199-220.
130. Adele Balasingham, The Will to Freedom (Mitcham, UK: Fairmax, 2001);
131. M. R. Narayan Swamy, Inside an Elusive Mind Prabhakaran: The First Profile of the World's Most Ruthless Guerrilla Leader (Delhi, India: Konark, 2003);
132. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka; and Alisa Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers, and Freedom Birds: How and Why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Employs Women," Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2007): 43-63.
133. Narayan Swamy, Elusive Mind; Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka; Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers"; Trawick, "Enemy Lines."
134. Sophia Elek, Choosing Rice over Risk: Rights, Resettlement and Displaced Women (Colombo, Sri Lanka: University of Colombo, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, 2003);
135. and Gomez, Gender Based Violence.
136. de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka.
137. Trawick, "Enemy Lines." Women cadre appear to join as a means toward empowerment, redemption, and revenge (Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers," 56). Some girls and women joined the LTTE after the rape of themselves or family members by state forces or Indian, troops. This exploiting of the occurrence of sexual abuse by state forces as a means to recruit female cadre is well documented. See de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka;
138. and Ann Adele (Adele Balasingham), Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers (London: LTTE Secretariat, 1993).
139. This paragraph draws extensively on Zachariah Cherian Mampilly, "Stationary Bandits: Understanding Rebel Governance" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007).
140. See also Sarah Wayland, "Ethnonationalist Networks and Transnational Opportunities: The Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora," Review of International Studies 30 (2004): 405-26;
141. Kristian Stokke, "Building the Tamil Eelam State: Emerging State Institutions and Forms of Governance in LTTE-controlled Areas in Sri Lanka," Third World Quarterly 27, no. 6 (2006): 1021-40;
142. and Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoffman, William Rosenau, David Brannan, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2001).
143. The internal practices of the organization are known only to a certain extent. Those who leave the organization, are forbidden from disclosing its secrets, a prohibition apparently enforced even in. the diaspora (Narayan Swamy, Elusive Mind). This paragraph draws on Adele, Women Fighters. Balasingham, Will to Freedom; de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka; Narayan Swamy, Elusive Mind; Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka; and Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers," as well as interviews.
144. de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka.
145. Interview, May 2007.
146. de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka; Narayan Swamy, Elusive Mind; Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka; Stack-O'Connor, "Lions, Tigers."
147. A particular exception to this overall pattern occurred on the slopes of the San Vicente volcano when a local commander apparently became obsessed with finding government collaborators and tortured many cadre and local residents, who under extreme torture named, each other. It took the central command some time to respond but they eventually did; the commander was relieved of duty and executed (Tom Gibb, "Salvador: Under the Shadow of Dreams" (unpublished book manuscript, 2000).
148. Truth Commission for El Salvador, "From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in El Salvador. Report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador," reprinted in The United Nations and El Salvador, 1990-1995, United Nations Blue Books Series, vol. 4 (New York: United Nations, 1993), 8-10, 15, 24, 30.
149. Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage, 1994).
150. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action.
151. A. J. Bacevich, J. D. Hallums, R. H. White, and T. F. Young, American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1988);
152. and Benjamin C. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1991).
153. Debby Bonnin, "Claiming Spaces, Changing Places: Political Violence and Women's Protests in Kwa-Zulu-Natal," Journal of Southern African Studies 26, no. 2 (2000): 301-16.
154. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe Final (Lima, Peru: Comisión De La Verdad Y Reconciliación, 2003), tomo V, capítulo 2.