I'd like to reply to the letter entitled 'Terrorists in the guise of tigers' (May 7) by A concerned Malaysian.

Tigers were born out of state terrorism against the Tamil people. They are not born violent. Tigers are a new generation of Tamils who are sensitised to the endless sufferings of their people, and who are ready to give up their lives so that succeeding generations of Tamils could live in peace in what was once their homeland.

They have watched their past leaders make brave speeches in parliament, seen them cry themselves hoarse about the Tamil plight, they have even seen their democratically-elected leaders led by that gentle Christian Chelvanayakam sitting in silent Gandhian protest against the Sinhala Only Bill at Galle Face Green on June 5, 1956, only to be mauled by a violent mob in the presence of the country's guardians of the law, the police.

They have heard of their kith and kin slaughtered by the hundreds in the anti-Tamil riots of 1958, even poured petrol on and burnt alive! The Tiger leader Prabhakaran was a three-year-old child when all that happened.

One cannot start reading history from a halfway point. If one wants to read American history, or what little of it is there, one has to begin with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and come down the line. One does not start the story by talking of the American chemical assault on the Vietnamese people. Nor does one start writing American history with that best known act of international terrorism - the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima which killed well over one hundred thousand human beings.

The armed struggle of the Tamil Tigers is a late arrival in Sri Lankan history, a logical consequence of a quarter century of Sinhala violence and the sorry failure of peaceful non-violent Tamil protest over the same period.

Today, if you were to go to the north of Sri Lanka, you will notice that the Tamil people in Jaffna, (although there is one Sinhalese soldier there today to every 10 Tamil, man, woman and child) had gone through violence from mobs and terrorism from the state for 45 years.

Now the world is asking these wretched Tigers to give up terrorism and violence. What they are asking is not exactly that. What they are really asking them is to stop overrunning Sri Lankan army camps! Let us be honest about it. This talk of terrorism is only a neat cover to hide the endless failures on the war front.

Have you ever been to northeast Sri Lanka? Have you ever seen on CNN or for that matter our local TV news, the war that the Sri Lankan government has been waging in the northeast of the island? You have witnessed - and CNN and the international press have shown - the bombing of the Central Bank in Colombo, yes, but have you seen on your TV the bombing of the Navaly Church in Jaffna? Or the bombing of the Nagerkoil School in Jaffna?

One of the unfortunate facts in life, is that peacemakers generally give good advice to the victims, not to the villains.

The late US President John F Kennedy said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." That is where our Sinhalese brothers who have been ruling the country for 53 years made their mistake.