The Sri Lankan state must have had a laugh when a section of pro-LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) Tamils finally accepted that their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, indeed perished in 2009. To Colombo, it would have been amusing that a section wedded to the Tigers’ ideology was still refusing to accept the bitter truth: that the LTTE founder-leader was killed 15 years ago by the Sri Lankan military, debilitating the once feared outfit and ending a long war that almost broke the island nation.
The choreographed event on August 2 at Basel in Switzerland, where hundreds gathered to commemorate Prabhakaran’s death, was itself a reflection of the self-defeating politics LTTE pursued. Prabhakaran was an insurgent leader who was kept fictionally alive by followers for reasons that are often obfuscated.
So, why did Prabhakaran’s fans behave thus? The main reason was perhaps a loss of face. The LTTE had portrayed Prabhakaran as a ‘sun god’ who would deliver a free Tamil Eelam and could not be vanquished. Thus, even when blames were being apportioned for the LTTE’s rout, it was conjured up that he had escaped from Sri Lanka and would return to fight another day. A few politicians in Sri Lanka and India contributed to keep the fantasy alive.
Meanwhile, unscrupulous former LTTE elements living in the West enriched themselves by duping gullible Tamils that money was needed for the upkeep of Prabhakaran, his wife and their only daughter living incognito. If this was not enough, a young lady surfaced on social media claiming to be Prabhakaran’s daughter.
This was the last straw. It created widespread revulsion in the Tamil diaspora, where support for the Tigers had been easing since 2009. Many considered it an insult to Prabhakaran that his dead daughter’s memory was being exploited to make money. Prabhakaran’s only brother publicly claimed in Europe that the rebel leader had died long ago and that he had been observing annual rituals for his departed brother. Many Tamils agreed enough was enough. This led to the event in Switzerland despite critics who argued that accepting Prabhakaran’s death would fuel the narrative that the Eelam campaign was buried for good.
It’s a moment for Sri Lankan Tamils, particularly those allied to the LTTE, to go beyond conceding Prabhakaran’s death—if they need to do a genuine post-mortem on why a militant movement that at one time held a moral high ground and appeared invincible ended with a bloody whimper, leaving over 1,00,000 Sri Lankans, mainly Tamils, dead and causing unimaginable destruction. As a former LTTE guerrilla told me, Tamils in Sri Lanka stood on their own feet in 1983 when the Eelam struggle started; a quarter century later, they were on bended knees.
It is easy to blame others for what happened to the LTTE, but a dispassionate analysis would show that the Tamil Tigers brought the mess upon themselves. An increasing number of former fighters are now speaking up. Some of them were close to both Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief, Pottu Amman.
The LTTE chieftain had more than one opportunity when he could have, having displayed military might, shaken hands with Colombo, with or without outside mediation, and obtained a political resolution. The first chance was when India and Sri Lanka signed a peace accord in 1987. The bigger opening came in 2002, when a Norway-sponsored ceasefire agreement came in. This was perhaps the best moment the LTTE, backed by much of the West, could have come to an honourable settlement with Sri Lanka and then built on the gains.
In neither case, an independent Tamil Eelam would have been achieved. But as a senior former LTTE functionary in Batticaloa asked, did the LTTE deliver an Eelam finally? A former LTTE member who knew Prabhakaran well advised him not to take on the Indian military, saying the Tigers would not go a long way without New Delhi’s backing. But Prabhakaran, putting gun over politics, was so overconfident after India withdrew its military that, instead, he ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, turning a sympathiser nation into a foe.
As assassinations and terror became two hallmarks of the LTTE besides its conventional military strength, the West slowly turned against it. It was also pride, despite the LTTE’s break-up in 2004 and setbacks in Sri Lanka’s east, that prevented Prabhakaran from realising that he could no longer win against an increasingly determined Colombo. The rest is history.
Before his own death and shortly before Prabhakaran died, Pottu Amman admitted to some aides that the LTTE committed three major blunders: the 1990 mass expulsion of Muslims from Jaffna, Rajiv Gandhi’s killing and the forced recruitment of poor Tamil children to fight a war financed by Tamil expatriates, whose own children lived safely in the West. Who was responsible for these catastrophic decisions? The LTTE leadership.
It is not enough to admit Prabhakaran’s demise. There is need to accept the numerous blunders committed by him, including the wanton killing of non-LTTE Tamils and his nihilism. Without this introspection, no amount of chest-beating will help. All Tamils, not just the LTTE, deserve a decent closure and a better future.
M R Narayan Swamy | Journalist and author of The Rout of Prabhakaran
(Views are personal)