Prabhakaran picks a new Hollywood hero

H. L. D. Mahindapala

Velupillai Prabhakaran has dumped his old celluloid hero, Clint Eastwood, and embraced Harrison Ford, according to a media report which went on to add that the Vanni leader has donated 200 CDs to an Indian film director, Mahenthiran. This may sound like trivia but it has a wider meaning that goes beyond revealing his predilections in actors. It goes deeper into the darkest recesses of his hidden personality.

His vast collection of videos, running into thousands according to inside sources, indicates his addiction to movies. He is not a Rohana Wijeweera, a semi-university product, reading Marx's Communist Manifesto. He is a school drop out whose meager collection of books kept under his bed, according to a close Tamil source, consisted mainly of Ambili Mama stories - folk tales for children found both in Tamil and Sinhalese. That has been his intellectual level. And this could be one explanation for his hostility to intellectuals like Prof. Ratnajeevan Hoole who was threatened with death if stepped into the Jaffna campus.

Primarily, his role models are copied from the cinema. Even in this medium he tends to romanticize the roles of Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood not because of their talents in acting. If he was aesthetically inclined to appreciate the artistic skills of an actor interpreting a character he would have gone for Sir Laurence Olivier or Alec Guinness, for instance. But his two chosen Hollywoodian idols represent his blood-thirsty instincts for killing - and killing with a vengeance without failing to get their victims.

That is what he means when he says that Eastwood and Ford are men of action.

Action for what? Neither Eastwood nor Ford has been cast in roles of non-violent negotiators sitting at a table to talk peace. Their screen roles confirm plainly that their action is directed only to kill anyone who crosses their path. Undoubtedly, this role brings immense satisfaction to Prabhakaran. So it is not surprising that Prabhakaran should find a close affinity with these Hollywood killers glorified on the silver screen.

It is said that you are what you eat. In the case of Prabhakaran he is what he sees. He has an obsession with the visual media. LTTE apparatchiks roam the globe armed with video cameras, mainly to satisfy the insatiable appetite of this recluse in the Vanni to view the violence he has set in motion. Tamils in the diaspora feed this appetite like the way a zoo-keeper feeds his caged animals.

There isn't a thing that they don't shoot (the pun is intended!) to please the Tiger in the Vanni cage. The video camera has become one of the lethal weapons of the Pottu Amman and Prabhakaran. It is not only a medium used for spying but also a very satisfying bit of technology that quenches their thirst for the gory details of their massacres.

Of course, sometimes this weapon boomerangs as in the case of Rajiv Gandhi.

It was the evidence found in the cameras of the hired Indian photographers that nailed both Pottu Amman and Prabhakaran. But that has not fazed either of them. It is a common practice for LTTErs abroad to hire white photographers to video anti-LTTE demonstrations in Western capitals for the delectation of their master, in case he wants to view it after dinner.

Analysts and film critics are not quite sure whether Prabhakaran switched his preference from Eastwood to Ford because the latter starred in the film, Clear and Present Danger - a title that describes Prabhakaran to the last syllable. But it is highly unlikely that either Harrison Ford or Eastwood would return the compliment to him - the ruthless abductor of other Tamils parents' children to beef up his killing machine.

His obsession with the visual media is also confirmed in the fact that he gifted 200 CDs to Mahenthiran. That is a helluva lot of CDs by anyone's calculations, especially for a recluse in the Vanni who is twiddling his thumbs waiting for the next video of some innocent person being blown to smithereens by one of his assassins. This raises a serious issue: how is it that Prabhakaran has 200 CDs just to give away when no one has yet seen him giving away 200 aspirins to his Tamil people who suffer from a permanent headache caused by the unbearable agonies of his war-mongering?

Of course, such remedies have to be supplied to the Tamil people by the Sinhala-dominated government of Sri Lanka! The news report also mentioned that he had taken the moral high ground and ticked off the Mahenthiran for not treating women with respect in S. Indian films. Not treating women respectfully in the cinema is a subject that deserves to be corrected and Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, Ms. Kumari Jayawardena, Ms. Sunila Abeysekera - all middle class women who have been rearing to jump into men's pants - would heartily cheer Prabhakaran on this issue. But no one has yet seen these feminists taking to the streets and demonstrating against the helpless Tamil women being dehumanized in the oppressive, repressive and one-man regime of Prabhakaran.

Women are traditionally seen as life-givers and not life-destroyers. But under Prabhakaran's administration they are turned into human bombs. Women with unborn babies are sacrificed with neither the mother nor the baby seeing each other. This is the Prabhakaran's glory which he celebrated on Black Tiger Day last Monday. It is this cult of death woven round his image that makes him the "liberator" in the eyes of the Tamils.

In a sense he is right: death is the ultimate liberator of all beings. But what is there in his political mythology for the living? His political philosophy boils down to a very simple formula: the Tamils have no right to live until he is crowned as their king without any challengers to the Tamil throne. Hiding deep inside the fastnesses of the Vanni he is exploiting the gullibility of the craven Tamil diaspora - not to mention the misguided Tamils - with the unattainable promise of a mono-ethnic utopia. There is no way he can achieve this is except by destroying the Jaffna culture, imprisoning their minds, blowing up their bodies and building the largest gulag in which the Tamils have to bend down in two, acknowledging his presence whenever he surfaces from his underground dungeon. Those who have eyes to see will recognize that the promised Tamil utopia, like all other imagined utopias, has turned into an evil dystopia.

In short, he has turned Jaffna into a warped society where individuals have to look over their shoulder before they dare to whisper a word. He has given the word "Tamil" a new meaning that is equivalent to a pariah in the international community. That is the dignity he has conferred on the Tamil people. Did the generations of proud Jaffna Tamil slave to produce this monstrosity? Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, leader of the Janatha Party, in condemning "the incredible stupidity" of Anton Balasingham's apology to India, said that Prabhakaran had issued a fatwah to get S. C. Chandrahasan, the son of the father of Tamil separatism, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam.

Mercifully, Chelvanayakam escaped the indignity of ending his life and career at the hands of the insufferable and inhuman political children he bred in the womb of Jaffna. While the denigrated Sinhala-Buddhist culture gave space for Muralitharan and Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy to climb to the highest pinnacles of civilized achievements the Jaffna Tamil culture produced the venom of hate that has destroyed the traditional values enshrined in any human society.

Where would Murali and Radhika be today if they were embedded in Prabhakaran's political culture? Is the denial of the Tamils to emerge as good human specimens contributing to the global community the pinnacle of Jaffna-centric politics? Is producing monsters to kill their own children, fathers and mothers the ultimate glory of the Jaffna culture? Can the illusions of imported political theories cover up for ever and ever the barbarities of a sub-human Prabhakaranist culture? Unable to face the shame and the misery imposed on the Tamils by Prabhakaran the agents of Tamil Tiger propagandists go around touting the myth that he was created by the Sinhalese. This is also the gist of the theories spouted by the NGO agents groveling at his feet. Examples: Pakiasothy Saravanamuttu, Kumar Rupesinghe and the henchmen of NGOs like Jayadeva Uyangoda. If they are right then Prabhakaran should be liquidating only the Sinhalese - the most hated symbol of the Tamil Tigers. But why is he killing the innocent and dissident Tamils? What did the Sinhalese do to him to make him kill Amirthalingam, Neelan Tiruchelvam and Alfred Duriayappah - his first Tamil scalp? Are the Sinhalese the cause of his killing Muslims, Rajiv Gandhi and even Mahattaya, his political mate who turned against him? On what principles of decency - let alone theology - can Bishop Kenneth Fernando (along with Uyangoda) proclaim this wanted criminal to be a "humane" agent when he is destroying his own people? Has Bishop Rayappah written to the Pope about Prabhakaran throwing Tamil dissidents into the crocodile infested Iranamadu Tank, or scraping the bleeding backs of Tamil political prisoners with a raw husk of a fibrous coconut? Where are the tears of the Churches for the Tamil victims of Prabhakaran suffering in silence in the Vanni gulag? Is the Christ who suffered all the way from the Garden of Gethsemane to Golgotha only for the Tamils supporting Prabhakaran, as Rev. S. J. Emmanuel and Rev. S. Jebanesan would like to claim, or is he for all humanity? Prabhakaran's capacity to make undertakers the biggest growth industry is unquestionable. While, on the one hand, there is an exponential expansion of graveyards there is, on the other hand, the demonstrable decline in demographic of the Tamils. It is estimated that roughly a million Tamils have left their putative "homeland" - another political myth manufactured in the early fifties. The Tamil people are voting with their feet to get out of their promised land. In the Bible it was the other way around. They came from all corners into their holy land. The only "hole-y-ness" left in Jaffna today are those that have punctured the walls of buildings by flying explosives detonated in a futile war to satisfy the ego of only one Tamil man.

At the end of the day, how many Tamils in the diaspora who are financing him will want to return with their families and spend the rest of their lives serving Prabhakaran and his regime? Children are being plucked from weeping mothers arms and denied their right to grow up as normal kids to develop their natural talents. Muralitharan has the opportunity to throw a cricket ball and gain fame and live in the annals of history for as long as cricket dominates the sporting world because he is in the mainstream of the open and free culture of the south - the culture that opened up avenues for the growth and glory of Sri Lankan cricket. What opportunities would he have had in Prabhakaran's culture? It is, indeed, tragic that the alternative available for budding Muralithirans in Prabhakaran's political culture is to be brain-washed with hate to throw hand grenades that take them and their innocent victims into total oblivion.

Right now, what is left of the proud Tamil culture is only a bit of holy ash rubbed on their foreheads? They could hardly get out of their daily baths, wearing the white verti, without being hit by the blood splattered by their Sun God. Buried in their political myths, particularly the myth of victimology, they have hardly cared to stop and question their inhuman means or their elusive end in Eelam. They cry and appeal to the whole world to sympathise with them while they commit the most heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity. Shouldn't those who cry for mercy give some to the others? Or is mercy only a commodity to be distributed exclusively among the Jaffna Tamils?

Aren't they now facing the grim reality of having lost the sympathy of the world because of their misguided commitment to prop up the essence of pure evil personified in the image of Prabhakaran? When, in the midst of all this evil, Prabhakaran expresses his concern for women the babies in their wombs can hardly stop laughing. What respect did he give to Dhanu when he sent her on a suicide mission to kill Rajiv Gandhi? It must be admitted that he certainly has respect for Madivathani, one of the LTTE cadres whom he married violating his own law that prohibited LTTE cadres from having affairs with one another. But why isn't this respect shared with other Tamil women? With what kind of respect did he treat the pregnant woman who was sent to kill Maj-Gen. Sarath Fonseka treated? Well, his physique expanding horizontally does not indicate that Prabhakaran had any qualms about devouring his next diabetic meal after viewing with satisfaction the crimes against humanity committed in his name.

Kumar (won't-declare-my-fat-NGO salary) Rupesinghe, Pakisaothy (musn't-topple- Prabhakaran's-apple cart ) Saravanamuttu, Rohan (sacred-duty-of-Churches/NGOs-is-to-install-Prabhakaran-as-the-head-of-a-new constitution) Edirisinghe and the whole caboodle know that Prabhakaran should be facing a criminal court and not presiding over an evil regime in the Vanni. As self-proclaimed human rights activists they are duty bound to bring Prabhakaran to book based on their own principles of accountability.

They know that imposing travel bans is not going to work as long as Prabhakaran is allowed to get away with impunity.

But in their book impunity is a charge that is there to be thrown only at the Sri Lankan government. With their calculated silence on the crimes of Prabhakaran, or by "pussyfooting" around his crimes, they have become an effective part of Prabhakaran's evil brigade. Their political morality is as vacuous as Prabhakaran's pronouncements on respect for women. It is this brigade that gives Prabhakaran the oxygen to survive. But then who cares about morality as long as the pockets are lined with fat salaries from the foreign masters abroad?