Prabhakaran's victims:

From Alfred Duraiappah to babes at Visuamadu

by Wijitha NAKKAWITA

Among the stories of the Tamil people held prisoners of the LTTE's open prison within the shrinking terrain in the Mullaitivu district is this harrowing tale of a young couple who were trying to flee with their child to the government administered area of the North.

The couple with their infant were shot at by the LTTE to stop them finding their freedom. The shot had broken a part of the man's arm but it had also blown out the brains of the little child. Yet he did not want to show the mother that the child had died. He took a piece of mat and wrapped the corpse in it, and in anguish and desperation took a jungle route to freedom. By the time he had met the Army after many days fleeing, hiding from the terrorists there were maggots in his hand but he was still clinging on to the remains of his child when he met the Army men.

The horror of war has no comparison to human tragedy either in the past or the present. Anyone who started a war - there were thousands of examples over thousands of years since the human beings came of out of the palaeolithic or neolithic ages - had only to witness the horrendous suffering of others getting injured, suffering and dying. In this country we had witnessed one individual with a warped mind and megalomaniacal ego who thrust war on the nation recruiting innocent but clueless young men and women more often dragged out of their homes or schools to fight in the senseless war that killed over 70,000 people, our people, to appease the mind of the egocentric murderer Velupillai Prabhakaran. Though we condemn him, there were others who were equally responsible for the national tragedy.

Still the people of the North are conservative, hardworking, and law-abiding. Our good friend, Mayor of Jaffna and lawyer the late Alfred Duraiappah, was the first victim of the killer Prabhakaran. He had to die because he did not want war but peace and development for his people especially the poor. Duraiappah, the suave and ebullient Mayor of Jaffna who was Alfie to us was murdered when he was coming out of the Ponnalai Varadaraja Perumal Hindu temple after worship with his little daughter Eesha.

Alfie was loved by all the people of Jaffna, in fact even by the people of the south among whom he had a large number of friends and he had gone to worship at the temple in the car the white Peugeot 404 that the fisherfolk of Jaffna had bought for him. He was above bribe taking but he could not put off the poor folks who wished to donate something to that great son of Jaffna. When he came out of the temple after worship around 2.30 p.m. the killers were waiting for him.

Alfie was convinced that none would kill him. What was the `crime' he had committed to be murdered? Joining the SLFP and using his influence to work for his people.

It had been told that the notorious and heartless killer Prabhakaran's fingers had shivered when he pulled the trigger but the worst crime was that idiotic killers like Prabhakaran were egged on by the then TULF leader late Appapillai Amirthalingam to take up arms. Amirthalingam was quoted in the Sansoni Commission report as having urged the misled youth to take up arms and fight for an Eelam.

All that the youth would get in return would be arrests, jail and even torture or even `heroic deaths' at the hands of the police or the security forces but when all that was past they will be able to get the Tamil Eelam. That was what the Godfather of the terrorist groups promised. Yet there were thousands of other unnamed Alfies of the North whose tombs may not be marked, and may go unsung for ever. Yet they did not want to kill anyone but worked hard as enterprising and thrifty people.

They valued education more than anything else, lived frugal lives, but all that had to be torn asunder by the Appapillais and Velupillais and like Muralitharan a.k.a. Karuna Amman said recently these self-appointed leaders of the Tamil people only left a legacy of over 30,000 graves for the Tamil people of the North and East. All of them had suffered silently like the father who brought the corpse of his child wrapped in a piece of mat, embracing it even when his hand was rotting, all that Prabhakaran and his cronies bequeathed to the Tamil people was something rotten.

Though there is the tradition of not condemning the dead one could not forget or forgive Amirthalingam and his wife who were not at all sorry that Alfie who was the pride of Jaffna and a person who had built bridges of friendship among all the groups of people of his times was murdered.

When the Jaffna lawyers met after Alfie was killed - both Amirthalingam and Duraiappah were lawyers of the Jaffna bar - and when they told Amirthalingam who was also a colleague of Alfie that the so-called 'boys' should not have killed Alfie, Amirthalingam had attempted to say that he was killed as he betrayed the Tamil people!

All that is gone now. Among the good people of the North there were heroes most of them had gone unsung. Yet shattering the brains of innocent infants can only bring hell on earth for people, not liberation.