Inside the LTTE

Book review of In The Shadow of a Sword: The memoir of a woman leader in the LTTE

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was responsible for the assassination of two prime ministers, around nine ministers, more than a dozen MPs, at least six journalists (a majority of them Tamil), and the attempted assassination of two prime ministers during the war for Tamil Eelam (homeland) in Sri Lanka that began in the 1970s, saw tens of thousands of civilians dead and ended (kind of) with the killing of supreme leader Prabhakaran in 2009.

In this unpretentious, simply-written account of her life as a member of the Movement (as the LTTE is referred to, through the book) Thamizhini, who