When Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakasa announced the military defeat of LTTE, saying the troops have “freed the nation from three decades of terror”, his words meant only one thing: Velupillai Prabhakaran was dead. For his ardent followers, this 54-year-old was a freedom fighter who waged an unrelenting struggle for Eelam the Tamil homeland free from the Sinhalese-majority island-nation.
For his adversaries, he was a blood-thirsty terrorist and a megalomaniac who detested even an iota of disagreement with his idea of Tamil homeland and undisputed leadership.
With Prabhakaran’s death, Sri Lanka has now got a rare chance to silence the Tigers after half-a-dozen unsuccessful military campaigns. Why did Prabhakaran occupy the centrestage of this ethnic conflict and why is his death seen as a chance to negotiate a settlement for this protracted conflict? A look at the circumstances Prabhakaran was born in, his elusive ways, his effective terror strategies in the battlefield and his revengeful, arrogant behaviour which finally proved self-defeating explains the story.
Soon after British left the island-country and the Sinhalese majority took over, there was a series of discriminatory decisions taken by Colombo towards its Tamil minority. The first voice of protest from the Tamils who were accused of have received favourable treatment from the British colonial administration was, however, peaceful. From making Sinhala the only official language to disregarding the merit of the Tamils in higher education and government service, to anti-Tamil riots, Colombo in fact pushed its minority to the wall. Finally Tamil leader and a follower of Gandhian non-violence, Chelvanayakam, was forced to give up on using democratic means to achieve rights for his community and declare that a free Tamil Eelam was the only way.
In the same year 1975 a young man walked up to the pro-Colombo Mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duriappah, in the wee hours of July 27, and shot him dead. After that shot, he rose swiftly to occupy the centrestage in Lanka’s ethnic conflict with a single philosophy: terror.
Born in a small coastal town, Velvettiturai, on November 26, 1954, there was nothing in Prabhakaran’s early life that suggested he would one day become one of the most feared terror heads in the world. Youngest son of a government official, Prabhakaran spent his childhood learning about the discrimination against Tamils. He was four when a Hindu priest was burnt to death by a Sinhalese mob during anti-Tamil riots.
A shy and quiet teenager, Prabhakaran’s first act of terror was to blow up a government bus near his hometown in 1970. At the age of 18, he left home to set up a terror organisation, which he finally launched as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 1976. According to his only credible biography, Inside An Elusive Mind, by M R Narayan Swamy, Prabhakaran was inspired by two heroes of India’s freedom struggle: Subash Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh. The man, however, seemed to have seriously contemplated his violent future as he had burnt and destroyed his every picture before setting out for an underground guerrilla life. For years, the Sri Lankan security establishment had just one clue for identifying Prabhakaran. A bomb had exploded during an exercise, burning Prabhakaran’s leg and leaving a black mark and the nickname Karikalan (man with black legs).
In June 1974, Tamil militant Sivakumaran swallowed cyanide to avoid arrest by the police an act emulated by the Tigers later as an “honourable way to die and avoid surrender”. The Tigers commemorate ‘Great Hero’s Day’ every year on November 27 to remember the death of a close confidante of Prabhakaran, Shanker, who was injured in a Tiger attack on a police station in Jaffna and was later shifted by boat to Tamil Nadu, where he died.
July 24, 1983, became a day that altered the story of the Tamil-Sinhala chasm in Sri Lanka with disastrous consequences. Prabhakaran and his men ambushed a Sri Lankan army patrol and killed 13 soldiers. This killing triggered a massive anti-Tamil riot in Colombo, where government-sponsored gangs killed more than 2,000 Tamil civilians in revenge.
The biggest boost to the Tamil militancy, however, was the support extended by India, which is even said to have arranged arms training for Lankan Tamil groups. Tigers were initially reluctant but later joined to strengthen their military prowess. Prabhakaran who was on the most-wanted list of Lanka took refuge in Tamil Nadu, where the political ideologue of the Tigers, Balasingham, set up an office. Prabhakaran, however, didn’t remain dependent on India’s help alone and secretly started procuring sophisticated weaponry from the illegal arms markets. Among the earliest Tigers trained were Kittu, Ponnamman, Soosai, Jeyam, Mahattaya, Kumarappa and Bhanu most of them now dead.
Known for his strict discipline and a puritan system of ban over romantic relations, smoking and drinking for cadres, Prabhakaran’s biggest feat, as many see it, was his Machiavellian strategy to keep New Delhi in the dark about his plans when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi sought his support for the India-Sri Lanka accord of 1987. Prabhakaran agreed that Tigers would surrender arms in lieu of a greater share in administration in north and east besides financial support from New Delhi, and he was flown back to Jaffna. But once the time for laying down arms came, he declined and instead took on the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Prabhakaran entered into a clandestine deal with President Premadasa against India and finally forced New Delhi to call off its Lanka operations and withdraw the Indian Army from the island in March 1990.
To ensure his complete grip over the Tamil cause, Prabhakaran killed off opposition within his own community. The Tigers neutralised every other para-military group and then took on any non-Tiger political face of the Tamils too. In 1990, they assassinated one of the tallest Tamil leaders of Sri Lanka, Amirthalingam, in Colombo.
On June 10, 1990, the Tigers launched Eelam War 2, when they summarily executed 600 policemen who had surrendered before them. In March 1991, the Tigers conducted a suicide attack on Sri Lanka’s defence minister Ranjan Wijerantne. Later, Prabhakaran ordered Muslims to leave Jaffna and Manar within 24 hours and conducted mosque massacres in the east, thus organising an ethnic cleansing of Tamil-speaking Muslims.
Experts believe that after the retreat of Indian Army from Lanka, Prabhakaran became so arrogant that he began to consider himself invincible. This led to his decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi an act that haunted the Tigers and their leader Prabhakaran till their violent end. On May, 21, 1991, the Tigers assassinated Rajiv Gandhi during an election rally in Tamil Nadu.
Two years later, Prabhakaran sent his assassins to Colombo again and this time his target was President Premadasa, who was killed when a Tiger suicide bomber exploded after getting close to him. The Tigers launched Eelam War 3 in 1995 after a brief ceasefire and engagement with Colombo. Prabhakaran again sent his suicide bombers to target Sri Lankan leader Chandrika Kumaratunga, who escaped but was blinded in one eye.
Prabhakaran’s total intolerance of any dissent was again exhibited when the Tigers killed Neelan Thiruchelvan, a respected lawyer who had relentlessly worked towards a constitutional arrangement to end Tamil discrimination in the country.
Prabhakaran’s unrealistic belief in terror alone as a means to achieve his goal, however, led to his final mistake when he walked out of the recent peace process brokered by Norway. He made things difficult for himself and unknowingly helped Rajapakasa defeat peacenik Ranil Wickramasinghe in the presidential election in 2005. The 2002 peace accord between the Tigers and the Wickramasinghe government had perhaps been the one rare opportunity for Prabhakaran to avoid a violent end for himself and his group.
-Agencies