IN LISTS of Sri Lanka’s great cultural exports, suicide bombing rarely appears prominently. Yet long before the 1993 Oslo accords that marked the era of the Palestinian suicide campaign, the Tamil Tigers had perfected the human bomb. Their first such attack was a 1987 lorry bombing at an army camp, which killed 40 and helped to ensure that it would be another decade and a half before the country experienced a semblance of peace.

In the years that followed, 240 rebels blew themselves up, killing hundreds. A quarter of the world’s suicide attacks in the 25 years before the 2003 Iraq War have been attributed to the Tigers.

Perhaps more significant than the numbers involved are the targets hit. In May 1991, a 17-year-old girl suicide bomber killed Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian former Prime Minister. Two years later, another assassinated the former Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Then in 1998 a truck bomber hit the most sacred Buddhist site in Sri Lanka, the Temple of the Tooth. The Tamil Tigers had proved suicide bombers to be the guided missiles of the terrorist organisation.

They are not the first to use such tactics. That accolade goes to Hezbollah, with its 1983 strikes on US and French forces in Lebanon. What the Tamils did do, however, was to ritualise the attacks in a way not seen since Japanese kamikaze pilots in the Second World War.

Tamil suicide bombers belong to an elite unit, the Black Tigers. They are trained for death and celebrated in popular culture. Their pictures appear on walls, their glories commemorated every year on Black Tigers Day. Their families are provided for.

A similar formula is now found in the Palestinian territories and Iraq, in Chechnya and Afghanistan. The Tamil Tigers defined the modern suicide bomber.

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