26/04/2020 The unending violence among Paris’s Tamil gangs

THE LEDE / CRIME

Blood Feuds

PAUL GASNIER

01 April 2020

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP / GETTY IMAGES

“He was standing in front of the Ganesh temple in Paris. I went up to him, pulled
out my katana and sliced his arm.” At a shabby café in southern Paris, last
September, a former member of the Viluthus, one of the oldest gangs among the
Sri Lankan Tamil community in the French capital, recalled his time with the gang.
The man whose arm he had sliced o in 2006, he said, had “disrespected” the
Viluthus. He could not remember how.

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Such acts of violence have become commonplace over the past few years in “Little
Ja na,” a neighbourhood near the Gare du Nord railway station where a large
number of Tamil migrants have set up shops and restaurants. Brawls frequently
break out among groups of young men from the community. Mutilated teenagers
are found in pools of blood. Many attacks take place in broad daylight. On 5 March
2018, a man having lunch with his girlfriend at a Tamil restaurant was attacked by
a group wielding machetes. He survived, but was scalped during the assault.

Dozens of Facebook pro le photos show Tamil teenagers posing with blades and
swords. They taunt each other in the comments, with online bickering often
spilling over into real-life bloodshed. Violence among the ten or so Tamil gangs
active in northern Paris—besides the Viluthus, the gangs include the Eelam Boys,
Cyber, Mukkalas, Red Kosty and Sathanai—reached an all-time high in 2018, a
police o cer who has investigated several gang-related crimes in the area told me,
on condition of anonymity since he is not allowed to speak to the media. “This
community remains largely impenetrable for us, quite like the Chinese
community,” the police o cer said. “But we have a lot of o cers of Chinese origin,
whereas we barely have any Tamils on the force.”

Part of the reason why the Tamil underworld remains hard to decipher is that the
violence is not linked to any tra cking or classic turf wars. The roots, instead, lie
in politics, in the inferno of the Sri Lankan civil war. Tamil refugees started
arriving in Europe during the 1980s. Young members of the community,
traumatised by the killings back home, began organising into small groups to
protect themselves from violence and organised crime by other communities in
their neighbourhoods. “These groups helped the community organise itself, like
one big family,” a sports instructor in the suburb of Sevran—who arrived in France
with his parents at the age of three, in 1983, and did not want to be named—told
me. “They organised theatre shows and also made sure the community remained
safe.”

But, as the war raged on, politics soon followed the refugees. Before the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam gained prominence in Sri Lanka, the country’s Tamil
minority was scattered among di erent political parties. The rivalries between
them, and among the various LTTE factions, were exported to the diaspora. Each

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faction had its own gang in the growing community in exile. “I always refused to
join one of these gangs,” the sports instructor told me.

As the LTTE became the dominant Tamil force in the Eelam Wars, the Parisian
gangs joined forces and became crucial for its fundraising operations. They began
levying a tax on Tamil-owned businesses to fund the cause. Once the LTTE was
virtually annihilated in 2009, the gangs dispersed. Some followed dissident leaders
—such as Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, also known as Colonel Karuna, who
joined the Sri Lankan government as minister of national integration—while
others became apolitical and got into the racketeering business for themselves.
Smaller groups soon emerged to compete with them for protection money.

Today, a new generation has taken over. “These kids don’t even know why they’re
ghting,” the sports instructor told me. He said he tries to keep his students o the
streets and away from gang violence. The gang members are young men, usually in
their early twenties, who come from destitute backgrounds and live in the
banlieues—Paris’s notorious suburbs, where working-class families, mostly
immigrants and minorities, live in an atmosphere of neglect. Largely uninterested
in politics, they follow the rivalries of their elder brothers. The brawls are
motivated by personal vendettas, often ignited by petty online provocation and
fuelled by an unending spiral of vengeance.

The Tamil community in Paris bears the brunt of the violence. Shopkeepers are
often forced to call one gang to protect them against another. Some gangs are also
used to carry out attacks over unpaid debts, within a community that is often
reluctant to le o cial complaints for fear of attracting unwanted police attention.
Most shopkeepers I spoke to in Little Ja na claimed they did not know anything

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about the gangs. Others con ded to me that they could not talk for fear of
retaliation.

The gangs are known for their ruthless tactics, including scalping and chopping o
limbs. The use of swords, axes and machetes has become their trademark in the
Parisian underworld. In September 2019, the police arrested three teenagers
suspected of having attacked a Sri Lankan man in the Swiss city of Lausanne, over
ve hundred kilometres away. The man was found in a pool of blood, with two
ngers severed and his right hand dangling from his arm. According to the
prosecutor in the resulting case, the accused had been sent by the victim’s ex-
girlfriend.

“They just want to ght like in the movies,” Lawrence Valin, a young lmmaker of
Tamil origin, told me. “These guys just re-enact the violence they see in Tamil
cinema.” Most of the gang names reference Tamil lms. The Mukkalas were named
after a song in the 1994 classic Kadhalan, while Red Kosty comes from the 2002
lm RED. Valin, whose parents ed the war and immigrated to France in 1988—his
uncle was part of a gang, he said—began making movies about his community
after graduating from lm school two years ago. When we met, he was directing
his rst feature lm, in which he plays an undercover cop who in ltrates a
ctitious Tamil gang. “I’m trying to do the same thing that Martin Scorsese did
with the Italian community in New York,” he said.

But pointing a camera at this community can be a risky endeavour. “When I was
location-scouting with my crew in Little Ja na, some guys started threatening us,”
Valin told me. “They wanted to know what we were up to. I don’t use the real
names of the gangs. These guys are super dangerous. They can kill you for
nothing.”

The former member of the Viluthus I met at the café told me that he had started
afresh as a rap artist. His body still bore the stigma of his years in the gang. He
showed me a large scar on the back of his head. “This is from an axe attack,” he
said. His arms had other wounds and bruises. As we concluded our conversation,
he said, “You know, as Tamils, we were perceived as weak, and we used to get
beaten up by the blacks and the Arabs. Now everybody respects us.”

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