So many murders
by Ravi VELLOOR
Some day, perhaps soon, when it is the turn for Tamil Tiger chieftain
Velupillai Prabhakaran to journey to the spirit lands, a long line of
people he had sent there earlier will be waiting for him.
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The killings of Premadasa
and Gandhi by suicide bombers were classic Prabhakaran,
displaying his remorselessness and utter lack of human feeling. |
Many of those whose deaths he ordered would probably have a simple
question: Why?
The leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has sent
thousands of people to their deaths in a 33-year career of militancy.
His implacable demand for a separate Tamil nation in the North and
East of Sri Lanka has caused the island untold harm, left more than
60,000 people dead and held back prosperity for an island once
considered a potential rival to Singapore because of its strategic perch
along the sea route linking Asia with Europe and Africa.
And along the way, a movement that had its seeds in legitimate Tamil
grievances such as discrimination in jobs and university places lost its
way.
It descended into the horrifically lethal instrument of one man's
paranoia about peace, his inability to comprehend changes in the world
outside and a megalomania so vast that he sought to wipe out anyone he
considered an obstacle in his path - brother or enemy.
The list of LTTE victims spans not just soldiers from the Sri Lankan
and Indian armies but also fellow Tamil leaders, a long line of
intellectuals and politicians such as Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe
Premadasa, the Opposition star Gamini Dissanayake and India's former
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Indeed, the killings of Premadasa and Gandhi by suicide bombers were
classic Prabhakaran, displaying his remorselessness and utter lack of
human feeling.
Tiger supremo
Premadasa had befriended Prabhakaran in 1988 and 1989, making common
cause to evict the Indian army, which had been sent to Sri Lanka's North
to enforce a peace accord between the Tamils and Colombo.
Once the Indians left in March 1990, Premadasa quickly realised that
he had been manipulated by the Tiger supremo, who had no intention of
diluting his movement for a breakaway state.
On May Day in 1993, Mr Premadasa, wearing a cap with "Victory"
inscribed on it, was leading a party procession in Colombo when a Tamil
youth cycled up to him and blew himself up, killing the president and 24
others.
Two years before, that same month, Gandhi had suffered the same fate.
As he left a campaign rally in a small town outside Chennai, an LTTE
suicide bomber stood in his path with a garland. Gandhi accepted the
flowers. The woman then bent to touch his feet, detonating explosives
strapped to her back.
A warm-hearted man who was completely at ease with people, Gandhi, as
India's leader, had forced the peace accord on Prabhakaran in 1987. He
had also been fully aware of the guerilla chieftain's reluctance to
trust Colombo and been sympathetic to his predicament.
Seated in the drawing room of his official residence in New Delhi as
they wrapped up their discussions, Gandhi had called out to his teenage
son Rahul, asking him to fetch his bulletproof vest. "You will need
this," he told Prabhakaran, as he handed over his personal vest. Four
years later, the LTTE assassinated Gandhi, as revenge for ordering in
Indian troops to enforce the peace accord.
Wrath
The Tigers under Prabhakaran had not hesitated to wipe out even
prominent Tamils who stood up for their cause. One of them was barrister
Appapillai Amirthalingam, secretary-general of the Tamil United
Liberation Front (TULF).
Amirthalingam incurred Prabhakaran's wrath by standing for a
negotiated settlement on the ethnic tangle and asking for the Indian
peacekeepers to stay longer on the island.
His murder, in July 1989, was vintage LTTE, executed with deep
cunning. Two Tiger youths had befriended a senior TULF man, frequently
showing up at his door to seek "advice".
On a day when Amirthalingam was in the senior TULF man's house, the
two came visiting once more. They accepted tea from their host's wife,
then shot him dead along with their target, Amirthalingam.
While each of these murders undoubtedly had Prabhakaran's sanction,
his direct involvement has been traced to at least two killings. First
was the town mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duriappah, whom he shot at
point-blank range while the city father was leaving a Hindu temple. That
murder, in 1975, was the blooding event for the man who would found LTTE
and galvanise Tamil militancy.
Eight years later came the ambush of a Sri Lankan army patrol in
Jaffna, which Prabhakaran personally led. Prabhakaran and his gang
killed 15 soldiers of patrol Four Bravo on a dark night in 1983.
Many of the troops in the patrol were barely out of their teens when
they died. And they were all from the Sinhala-dominated south of the
island.
Two events
The assault, and the backlash it sparked against Tamils by the
majority Sinhalas, set the tone for the unbridgeable divide between the
majority Sinhalas and the Tamil minority for the next quarter-century.
When the LTTE's history is written, two events will stand out as
landmarks that shifted the ground under Asia's most lethal militant
group.
One, over which it had no control, was the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on
the United States. Suddenly, sympathy for militancy of all forms
vanished around the world and Colombo succeeded in getting several
nations to label the Tigers a terrorist group.
In its immediate neighbourhood, the LTTE's strategic blunder was to
kill Gandhi, whose family is deeply popular in Tamil Nadu. The group
lost tremendous goodwill in the southern Indian state, home to more than
55 million Tamils, after that outrage.
It also forever set the Indian government against it.
Last week, as the Sri Lankan Army pressed on against the Tigers, the
Indian Coast Guard was doing its bit by checking fishermen's vessels in
the Bay of Bengal and the Palk Straits.
They were making sure that the boats had no extra fuel tanks,
weapons, medicine or food, anything that could potentially help the LTTE.
Perhaps Prabhakaran's major failing, and the one that will perhaps
lead to the crushing of the Tigers, is his inability to have a
statesman's view of the world. His worldview is narrow, that of an
islander confined to a tiny part of his country and consumed with
grandiose visions. It is a failing that has frustrated even those
sympathetic to him, such as Norwegian peace broker Erik Solheim.
Violence, of course, isn't the LTTE's exclusive preserve.
The Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan state too has an awful record,
starting with the Colombo riots in 1983 when it stood by and watched as
Tamils were massacred and shops and homes owned by them in the capital
were attacked for several days running.
But even by the dismal standards of the teardrop-shaped island, the
Tigers under Prabhakaran stand out for their bloodlust. n
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