Last days of Prabhakaran - a humiliated Tiger on the run II

Continued from yesterday


The last and the unbearable thrust that eroded the power of Prabhakaran was when the Tamil people fled through every nook and cranny, running, crawling on their bellies, dodging Tiger bullets sniping at them, to escape his Pol Potist grip straight into the arms of the Sri Lankan forces waiting to receive them. The world gazed in disbelief at 300,000 Tamils running away from the man who claimed to be their protector and saviour. The historical fact is that before the Security Forces could get him the Tamil people kicked him out of their lives contemptuously and unceremoniously. The Tamils had no compunction in kicking out the Tamil "thalivar" who had deceived them and misled them into the depths of misery and despair.

The fleeing Tamils dug the grave of the man who was digging the graves of their children and their future. There could not have been a more humiliating end for the man who claimed to be the "sole representative of the Tamils". No Tamil leader has gone down, despised and rejected by his people and the world at large, as Prabhakaran.

With no one to prop him up Prabhakaran had to pin his last hopes on the Tamil diaspora reeling under the shock and awe of the irreversible forces, advancing speedily and crushing "the invincible might" of their hollow man with his head full of straw, mostly those coming from Tamil political myths. He has been riding high on concocted Tamil myths which made him believe that he was in reality a messianic giant with extraordinary powers to take on the whole world with his band of gung-ho terrorists. They were psyched to believe that his crimes against humanity and war crimes were necessary evils to win the unwinnable Eelam.

The Tamils who were heaping curses on the Sinhalese after the lunatic fringe of Sinhala mobs killed 300 – 400 in 1983 did not react with similar anger or concern when Prabhakaran went on his outrageous murderous campaign liquidating more Tamils than all the other forces put together, as stated by S. Chandrahasan, son of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of Tamil separatism, and UN peace award winning TULF leader, V. Anandasangaree. They were brain-washed to overlook the crime of throwing under aged children into a war they did not want on the excuse that the Sri Lankan government had to be defeated at any cost. More than the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Tamils in the diaspora were the most vociferous and indefatigable in polishing the image of Prabhakaran as the "saviour" of the Tamils. They were falling over each other to create anti-Sri Lankan headlines abroad which, in the end, had no impact on their separatist cause or the fate of Prabhakaran.

Tied to this melodrama enacted in Western capitals was the humanitarian issue of saving the Tamil civilians caught in the cross-fire. As usual the Tamil propaganda machine was manufacturing myths to cover up the sins of Prabhakaran – a Pol Potist who climbed to power on mountains of Tamil corpses. Prabhakaran was unscrupulously exploiting the hatred of the Tamil diaspora for the Sinhalese. They were financing Prabhakaran to kill the Sinhalese but to Prabhakaran his first priority was to kill the Tamils before he turned his guns on the Sinhalese.

His first act was to kill Alfred Duraiyappah, the mild-mannered mayor of Jaffna. His last act was to kill the Tamils running away from him. The tragedy is that the hero-worshipping of the Tamils in the diaspora grew in proportion to the number of Tamils he killed. The generosity of the diasporic contributors to Prabhakaran’s war chest too increased in direct proportion to the Tamils laid to rest. Prabhakaran was a merchant of death who thrived and survived by selling Tamil corpses to the affluent Tamils in the diaspora.

Perpetuating the unwanted war was the only means of gathering support, internally and externally, for his survival. As the record shows, there was nothing to crow about his politics except the ruthless power he acquired to kill. His reputation rested mainly on the methodologies, and tactics he developed to eliminate his rivals. Compromise, negotiations, talks were anathema to his brand of negative politics. He came alive only when his victims were liquidated. He got a kick out of watching videos and photos of his victims dying. It was this kink that provided the vital evidence for his involvement in killing Rajiv Gandhi. The negatives found in the camera of the agent appointed to cover the assassination of the electioneering Gandhi spotted "Dhanu" (Themazi Rajaratnam),— a female suicide bomber of the Tigers blowing herself up as she garlanded Gandhi, in Sriperimbudur in Chennai on May 21, 1991. The negatives provided incontrovertible evidence to nail Prabhakaran for good. He never recovered from this colossal blunder.

This was not identity politics as imagined by some pundits. This was sheer brutal and vindictive politics of a beastly terrorist taking revenge on his perceived enemies. Gandhi was the first to underwrite a political space within Sri Lanka for Prabhakaran. In characteristic style Prabhakaran bit the hand that fed him. His insatiable blood thirstiness and the efficacy of his killing machine did empower him to some extent but not to the extent that he and his followers dreamed of. He was bent on hijacking Jaffna jingoism to serve his personal glorification. This was also a part of his myopic politics which was strategized basically to eliminate his real and imagined rivals. Eliminating those who were perceived to be a threat to his maniacal ego had no right to live according to Prabhakaranism. This is what Erik Solheim and the pro-Prabhakaranist propagandist called his "military genius".

In their eyes, Prabhakaran’s capacity to fine tune a ruthless killing machine that targeted mainly the Tamils was a sign of "military genius". An officer who was with the soldiers who found his corpse told me: "The bullet that hit his head and sliced a part of it went through easily because there was nothing inside it, except perhaps hatred!" His greatest achievement was in creating the Black Tigers – the killer squad fed with bitter hatred. His heroism was in sending the children of other parents to die while keeping his children under his protective wing and holding lavish birthday parties. He came out of the hatred bred in the womb of Jaffna and died as a victim of his own hatred. To his dying day there wasn’t a smidgen of mercy in his ruthless politics to redeem him either in the eyes of his fellow-man or God.

Those who followed him too are guilty of his war crimes and crimes against humanity. The worst are the Tamils in the diaspora who financed Prabhakaran – "a serial, pathological killer", according to Prof. James Jupp of Australian National University – knowing that he was using their blood money to kill their own people. They had no compunction in deifying him and forcing their children to worship his portrait in the Neanderthal shrines of Eelam politics. They were falling over each other to go on pilgrimages to Killinochci, where he was presiding over chunks of territory administered by his oppressive bureaucracy. They revered and worshipped the power of their "sole representative" who had turned into a tyrannical war lord defending his survival and not that of the Tamil people.

He dragged the Tamils from Jaffna to Vanni and from Vanni to Mullativu not to save the Tamils – the majority of the Tamils did not rush to flood his Terroristan like the way the Tamils flooded the Army camps — but to use them as human shields and as a reserve body from which he could forcibly recruit other people’s children to fill the gaps in his depleted ranks. Of course, the pro-Prabhakaranists argued that saving Prabhakaran was the only way to save Eelam. One was equated with the other. But as his grip on the Tamil people became oppressive he like, all deified figures of authority, lost touch with reality and believed in the myth that he could save the Tamils only by saving himself. When the Tamil people rejected this myth he had to force them to believe in him.

The more he gained territory and power the more ruthless he became. Though the diasporic Tamils were elated with his territorial gains the people under him were turning against him because they were forced to make sacrifices to defend not themselves but an oppressive regime. In the end, it is the expansion of his territorial gains and power which undermined his power. He was in stalemate unable to deliver his Eelam or to remain in a limbo of pseudo-state which was fast losing its rationale internationally and even among his own people. Nor could he hold the people forever under his oppressive regime. The mass exodus of Tamils running away from him indicates how much trust the Tamils had in him and his politics. His gains, in short, paved the way for his demise. The regime he built was imploding from within. The Security Forces marched in to finish off what was left of it. .

Besides, he was thinly stretched to defend a territory threatened by a superior military force that had outwitted, outnumbered and outdated his strategies from Mavil Aru to Mullativu. Though Prabhakaran was desperately in need of the war to survive Eelam War IV turned out to be a war which could not sustain morally or physically. He could have saved many Tamil lives if he grasped the ground realities more intelligently, without his ingrained arrogance and intransigence.

In the external front of the LTTE, the diaspora had no counter to save Prabhakaran except to denigrate the Sri Lankan government to weaken its military offensive by raking up humanitarian issues. They mobilized their numbers to influence the Western media, the MPs in their pocket boroughs in London, Toronto and Sydney and some lame-duck leaders like George Brown who believe fancifully that they can continue to legislate to their ex-colonies as in the bad old days of gun boat imperialism.

The misguided Tamil diaspora was erecting barricades in London, Toronto and Sydney when the desperate need of the hour was to rush reinforcements and build human barricades in Mullativu, Pudukuduirrupu and Nanthi Kadal. Their heroism was in funding a war fought by children of poor Tamils while the Tamil expats kept their kids safely in the comfortable suburbs of affluent West, feeding them Kentucky Fried chicken, McDonald’s and pizzas. They funded not only his killing machine but also his luxury life style of dipping in swimming pools, hiding in air-conditioned bunkers and celebrating in grand style birthdays of his children while he forcibly plucked the children of other Tamils and sent them to fight in four futile Eelam wars which ended with no glory to either himself or the Tamil people.

They subscribed nearly $300 million annually to keep Prabhakaran alive and kicking — kicking mainly their fellow-Tamils who were kept alive only because they were needed to wage a war that boosted their inflated egos. In the end what did they gain? How far did their shouting, parading and financing go to save the Tamils and their hero, Prabhakaran? When the dust began to settle down they discovered that their investments in Prabhakaran yielded the identical results of the billions deposited in Lalith Kotelawela’s Golden Key that was supposed to open the doors to his akasa kaday (castle in the air).

Suddenly and unexpectedly the pseudo-state of Eelam was collapsing before their stunned eyes like the sand banks built hastily to protect Prabhakaran. The emotionally disturbed Tamils in the diaspora, who were nonplussed not knowing what had hit them, failed to realize that there was no force on earth to stop the advance of the Sri Lankan forces sitting defiantly and confidently on the cusp of final victory. The Forces were not going to throw away the best opportunity they had gained in the longest-running Asian war under noisy pressures – mostly hot air — mounted abroad.

At the ground level in Mullativu the morale of the forces too was running high. It was so high that soldiers refused to take home leave fearing that they would not be there to witness the finale to the war they had waged so valiantly and brilliantly, astounding the world which had written them off as no match to Prabhakaran’s deadly cadres.

In his last days Prabhakaran was caught between the heat of the bullets whizzing past his confused head and the cold waters of Nanthi Kadal. Though he must have had an inkling about his days being numbered he was still hoping against hope to escape through any means – an option he refused to give the desperate Tamils, sometimes crawling on their bellies in the jungles without food or water, to get away from his heartless cadres and his ruthless grip.

by H. L. D. Mahindapala

(To be continued)