COLOMBO: The site of the ancestral house of Tamil Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran in Valvettithurai, North Sri Lanka, is now a mini army camp.
The house was demolished by the Lankan army after Eelam War IV last year, but the place was not cleared of the rubble. “We have now removed the rubble, and placed a small detachment at the site,” said Maj Gen Mahinda Hathurusinghe, the security forces commander of Jaffna Peninsula. He told Express over phone on Wednesday, that this step followed government’s policy of taking over properties associated with the terrorists (namely, the LTTE).
Hathurusinghe was reacting to a charge by Prabhakaran’s cousin and former MP, M K Sivajilingam, that the army had collected the rubble on the night of August 22 and dumped them in a nearby army camp, as part of its campaign to obliterate “historical sites” in the Tamil areas. In March this year, the army had demolished an LTTE graveyard (known as the Resting Place of Great Heroes) in Jaffna, and built on it, the headquarters of the 51st Army Division.
Prabhakaran had spent his childhood and early youth in the house, which was built by his father Thiruvengadam Velupillai, a Lankan government servant. Subsequently, he gave it to one of his daughters, Jagadeeswari, as a dowry, when she got married to Mathiaparanam. Jagadeeswari and Mathiaparanam are presently living in Chennai.
Sivajilingam pointed out that while the army had demolished Prabhakaran’s house in Jaffna district, it had kept in tact the house he had occupied in Puthukudiyiruppu in the Wanni, during the last stages of the Eelam War IV. “This is perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of Sinhalese tourists from South Lanka who flock to the Wanni to see sites associated with the war,” he said.