Tamil chief who waged war for over 30 years
UNDER THE leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, who has been killed aged 54 in fighting with the Sri Lankan army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were moulded into one of the world’s deadliest insurgent groups. The “Tamil Tigers”, as they came to be known, would become the progenitors of modern suicide bombing.
For Prabhakaran, no sacrifice was too great for the objective of “Eelam” (precious land), a Tamil state in an island of mainly Sinhalese Buddhists. This has been particularly evident during the last four months, before Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa declared victory on Sunday. During this time, according to UN estimates, more than 6,000 civilians have been killed as the Tigers were pushed from their northern territories into a “no fire zone”, consisting of a few kilometres of northeast coastline. The government has accused the leadership of using tens of thousands of civilians trapped there as human shields.
Prabhakaran was born in Valvettiturai, a fishing town almost on Sri Lanka’s northern tip. The son of a minor civil servant father and a religious mother, Prabhakaran was a dutiful and introverted child. The mainly Hindu Tamil minority, concentrated on the northern and eastern fringes, had done well before independence, flourishing in business and the bureaucracy. The British had also imported thousands of low-caste Tamil labourers from mainland India to work the tea plantations, although their lot was grimmer.
But within a few years of the British departure in 1948, Sinhalese politicians were banging the ethnic drum. Sinhala became the official language and discriminatory laws alienated moderate Tamils. The teenage Prabhakaran formed the Tamil New Tigers (TNT) in 1972. By then demands for reform by Tamil parliamentarians were being sidelined by youthful, militant separatists.
Already known to the Jaffna police, Prabhakaran became a wanted man in July 1975 when he gunned down Alfred Duryappa, mayor of Jaffna, en route to a Hindu temple. The killing of Tamils belonging to rival organisations became integral to his modus operandi. Within months, the TNT morphed into the LTTE. Prabhakaran, now a fugitive in the Indian city of Madras (now Chennai), drew up its charter and helped design the LTTE crest, a roaring Tiger atop two crossed rifles and a halo of bullets set against a blood-red background. Inspired by a young militant who had taken cyanide while in police custody, Prabhakaran compelled each LTTE member to wear a necklace with a cyanide capsule to be consumed in the event of capture.
By the late 1970s Junius Jayawardene’s centre-right United National Party (UNP) government in Colombo was adopting a more pro-US foreign policy. From the early 1980s the Indian government of Indira Gandhi, which was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, began to tolerate sanctuary and training for Tamil rebels, some of whom opened political offices in Chennai. New Delhi denied it was seeking to divide Sri Lanka, but it was alleged that Prabhakaran received secret training from Indian intelligence.
Prabhakaran developed the obsessive traits that stayed with him the rest of his life, refusing to drink bottled water not his own and sleeping with a pistol under his pillow. A lifelong devotee of Hollywood, he once cited Clint Eastwood as his role model.
Full-scale war erupted in the wake of Sri Lanka-wide pogroms against Tamils in July 1983. These sent thousands of young Tamils to Indian training camps. Many wealthy Tamils fled to the West and their contributions, not always voluntary, played a large part in funding the Tigers’ arsenal. The LTTE maintained a fleet known as “Sea Tigers” and carried out air raids using Czechoslovak-built aircraft.
In July 1987 India’s prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Jayawardene signed the Indo-Lanka accord in an attempt to staunch Tamil nationalism. But Prabhakaran, addressing more than 100,000 people that August in a rare public appearance, vowed that only a separate state could offer a permanent solution.
The 100,000 Indian peacekeeping troops, mostly fellow Hindus come to protect the Tamils, were soon at war with the LTTE. During this phase of the war Prabhakaran lived in a massive camp in the jungles of the northern Vanni region. Despite the LTTE’s cardinal rule of celibacy, Prabhakaran had taken a wife, Mathivathani Erambu. Accordingly, the rules were amended for his cadres, Tigers being allowed to marry with Prabhakaran’s sanction.
But the Tigers’ code remained austere. Tobacco and alcohol were forbidden and the vial of cyanide remained.
The first LTTE suicide bombing came in the northern town of Nelliady in July 1987. Prabhakaran had formed the “Black Tigers”, a group of men and women suicide bombers whose explosives-laden belts would later be copied by Palestinian, Chechen and Iraqi groups. With the departure of the Indian army in March 1990, having lost 1,200, Prabhakaran unleashed his vengeance against all perceived enemies. In May 1991, the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and 16 others were killed by a female suicide bomber at an Indian election rally.
Between 1990 and 1995, the Tigers ran the northern Jaffna peninsula as a mini-state with Prabhakaran as its absolute ruler. Suspicious that his once-powerful deputy Mahattaya had been suborned by Indian intelligence, Prabhakaran had Mahattaya, his cousin, demoted, then arrested and tortured to death along with dozens of his associates. In late 1995, Sri Lankan forces launched a massive campaign to retake the rebel-held north. The LTTE were expelled from Jaffna but 60,000 government troops found themselves hemmed in over the next few years as the Tigers captured large areas of the Vanni and the eastern province.
But by late 2001, with a new UNP administration in power, both sides called a ceasefire with Norwegian mediation. It was speculated that Prabhakaran had come to realise that, post 9/11, the LTTE’s overseas network of weapons procurement was likely to come under severe pressure if the war dragged on.
The Tiger leader, fanatical about his personal security, seldom gave interviews. His mouthpiece was usually Anton Balasingham, a former journalist with dual British-Sri Lankan citizenship. At a press conference in April 2002 Prabhakaran called the killing of Gandhi “a tragic incident” but did not apologise outright. The image he presented had changed. Middle age and a reputed fondness for Chinese cuisine had swelled his girth; a safari suit had replaced his striped combat fatigues. However, after nearly four years of brittle peace, fighting again erupted between the government and the LTTE. Balasingham’s possible moderating influence ended when he died of cancer at his London home in December 2006.
In the years since the Indian intervention, Prabhakaran had transformed the Tigers from an archetypal guerrilla outfit into a conventional army. This may ultimately have proved to be his downfall. When fighting again erupted in mid-2006, the Tigers were compelled to fight the Sri Lankan forces on their own terms.
By the summer of 2007, the government had recaptured all of the LTTE’s eastern territory, forcing them back into their Vanni heartland. On January 2nd, 2008, Sri Lanka formally withdrew from the ceasefire and, exactly one year later, the de facto Tiger “capital” of Killinochchi was recaptured by the government.
Prabhakaran was not an ideologue. Although some of the LTTE’s founding members, such as Balasingham, described themselves as socialists, the Tamil Tigers have always essentially been a secular nationalist organisation. Ironically enough, before the Iraq war, their tally of suicide attacks surpassed that of any Islamist group.
Prabkakaran would address the population of the LTTE’s territory on Maveerar Naal (Great Heroes Day) and his rotund features were ubiquitous on LTTE posters and literature. He had two sons and a daughter and was said to have been grooming his elder son, Charles Anthony, as his heir, but he has apparently also been killed.
Prabhakaran’s death leaves Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority facing an uncertain future. It is unclear whether hardliners will revert to guerrilla warfare. Prabhakaran was ruthless in eliminating any rivals, while the emigration of educated Tamils abroad leaves the long-suffering community in a precarious position.
Velupillai Prabhakaran: born November 26th, 1954; died May 18th, 2009