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Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

Now that the post-mortem examination of Mr. Velupillai Prabhakaran's press conference has been concluded and the forensic pundits of the mass media have delivered their magisterial verdicts what (as Lenin once asked shrewdly) is to be done. Of course some of these media pundits would have preferred to have the live Prabhakaran rather than his bloodless press conference on the table so that they could have administered their Judicial Medical Officer's knife to the Tiger leader's corpus but let that be for the moment.

S.W.R.D.

Amirthalingam

Prabhakaran

Duraiyappah

Kasi Anandan

C. Rajadurai

Ms. B

Whether one treats him with crass adulation or apoplectic indignation the fact is that VP will not go away. Not only will he not go away but he becomes magnified more and more until his giant shadow now covers all areas of our national life although the corporeal VP is still confined to a hide-out in the wilds.

As Rajpal Abeynaike observed in the 'Sunday Times' last week the outing with the media did serve to demystify Prabhakaran. He came out as jsut another bloke in a safari suit and not very articulate at that. But then VP has never pretended to be a charismatic orator. He is no Kasi Anandan or Chelliah Rajadurai. His chosen medium is not the spoken word. The man who watched Clint Eastwood's films and learnt to shoot speaks through a much more lethal medium than mere vocal chords.

Prabhakaran is also not a very compelling personality when deprived of his favourite firearms. Face to face he does not impress one as a charismatic personality. This is how Anita Pratap, one of the few journalists who has interviewed him puts it in her book 'Island of Blood', a viking publication.

When I saw Pirabhakaran in flesh-and-blood for the first time, I was speechless with disappointment. Hypnotized by the handsome, six-foot tall warrior in the video, I didn't recognise the man who walked in: he was short! Stocky and ordinary - indistinguishable from a million other Tamil men; he might have been just another businessman or government employee. I assumed he was a Tiger supporter and gave him a cursory nod, then gazed out of the window to pass time, while I waited for Pirabhakaran to turn up. Several moments later, a soft voice said in Tamil: 'Naan than Pirabhakaran.'

I directed my gaze disbelievingly from the sea to the source of the voice, saying to myself, 'Yeah, and naan thaan Cleopatra'.

The man was smiling, almost apologetically. I scrutinised his face and realised with astonishment that it was indeed Pirabhakaran.

He was dressed in grey trousers and a sky-blue bush shirt that couldn't quite hide the first signs of an expanding waistline. Had he walked down the street, no one would have throw in him a second glance. Any resemblance between the powerful, confident, camouflage-uniformed guerrilla leader in the video and this mild-looking, self-effacing civilian was purely coincidental.

Now I realised why Pirabhakaran was silent in the video Macho guerrilla had a soft voice that would have undermined the action-hero image. I struggled to camouflage my disbelief and disappointment, but I am a journalist, not an actress. I didn't succeed. Fortunately, it only amused Pirabhakaran. He smiled a boyish, lopsided smile.

The best way to cover up my gaffe was to get down briskly to business and begin the interview - which I did. It lasted two hours, and at the end of that first meeting I realised that he was one of the most remarkable persons I had ever met, and was ever likely to meet, in the course of my life. Certainly, I was not surprised when within a decade he became a legendary guerrilla leader.

So Prabhakaran is human just like any of us although some of the things he has done might make it difficult for some people to feel so. But rather than whip ourselves into a frenzy over his admitted blood-lust it would be more profitable to ponder on how an average Tamil youth from Velvettiturai became a ruthless guerilla leader and a moral monster in the eyes of a lot of people. Without in any way offering any apology for Prabhakaran we will have to concede if we are honest that it is we who created him.

Prabhakaran after all was only two years old when the Sinhala Only Bill was passed. This was no doubt done with the noble objective of drawing in the non-English educated masses into the mainstream of national life after centuries of colonial deprivation but as the late Gamini Dissanayake once observed the manner of its introduction ensured that the Sinhala and Tamil nationalism which should have run hand in hand would be for ever placed on a collision course.

The Federal Party Parliamentarians, who emulating Gandhi chose to protest peacefully at Galle Face Green were attacked by thugs while the Police looked the other way, the first organised show of thuggery and the first show of Police indifference to mob violence which have since become recurrent features in our national life. When the young firebrand Federalist Appapillai Amirthalingam entered Parliament with a bloody bandage crowning his head prime Minister Bandaranaike cracked, 'The honourable wounds of war'. Given the circumstances (it was certainly not the sedate Oxford University debating society) it was a singularly unfortunate bon mot.

Prabhakaran was four years old when the first attacks on the Tamils erupted in 1958. Contrary to popular myth it was not Prabhakaran's grandfather who was burnt to death in Panadura (He was a 'Poosari' which ruled out that possibility) but this tale heard later no doubt had a powerful impact on the youthful Prabhakaran. So he grew to young adulthood, no great student he but abundantly possessed of athletic ability and daring until in the fullness of time his group shot and killed Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiyappah, their first victim.

If Prabhakaran believed solely in the gun there were other Tamil young men who believed in other things, idealism for a change. Again history was to play a cruel trick. If the Sinhala Only Bill was designed to benefit the masses the scheme of standardisation for entrance to universities introduced in the mid-1970's by Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike's Government was meant to benefit the rural areas at some expense to the educationally better-endowed towns. Jaffna was a town and very well endowed at that. So the axe fell on Jaffna.

If Prabhakaran was not academically inclined there were other young men who were in a town where education was at a premium. (Incidentally when so many of the LTTE's leaders sport the nom-de-guerre of 'Master' that only points to Jaffna's obeisance to education and should not invite sniggers.) One such young man was Sivakumaran and what happened to him is an instructive tale.

Shut out from the university due to standardisation (implemented mind you by a Muslim Minister of Education Badud-din Mahmud) Sivakumaran became something of an anarchist. In Marxist folklore he would be described as a Narodnik. They had no clear vision, these Narodniks, but yet they felt in their bones that a change was necessary.

We do not know what impelled him, whether it was Tamil nationalism or more radical socialist impulse but Sivakumaran threw a home-made bomb at the jeep of the then Jaffna Police Chief Chandrasekera (who had incidentally previously been Chief Security Officer to Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike). The attempt was abortive and arrested by the Police Sivakumaran committed suicide in his cell. He was then the first martyr.

The rest is recent history. The 1983 attacks against the Tamils in which objective observers have seen the hand of the then Jayewardene Government served to stupendously inflate the ranks of the LTTE. The MP Ven. Baddegama Samitha for example recalls that on a visit to Jaffna in 1995 he had been asked by young LTTE cadres about conditions in Sinhala areas such as Kandy and Ratnaprua. When he enquired how they knew about these areas the answer was that that they had lived there till 1983 when they were driven out.

So the wheel comes full circle until we are confronted by the monster of our own creation. Ruthless and blood-thirsty he might be but Prabhakaran is our creation just as Rohana Wijeweera was our own creation and just as the campaigns of both the LTTE and the JVP in its second phase were marked by singularly violent excesses demonstrating that blood-lust is not the monopoly of a single racial group. UNP and SLFP, uncompromising Sinhala nationalists and a liberalism guilty of giving too little too late, intellectuals and clerics and media wise-acres, all of us collectively, have created Prabhakaran.

But now that he has come out into the open how do we treat him? Of course he will make the mandatory noises but can he be trusted? To begin with I would suggest that we stop demonising him. Why have headlines such as the 'Tiger's purr?' Why take the LTTE's imagery into the world of real life and real politik. May be if we cease to treat him as a blood-thirsty Tiger he will cease to be one. Of course it is up to him. No one need have any illusions of immediately taming the Tiger (that trite phraseology again) but if he is ready to play ball with us it is our job to handle him with care and sensitivity.

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