COLOMBO: The military wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was not involved in terrorist bombings and massacres of civilians during the armed struggle carried out by the militant outfit, according to Karuna Amman, a former military commander of the LTTE, who is now a Deputy Minister in the Mahinda Rajapaksa government.
Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan alias Karuna Amman told the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) here on Monday that only Tiger chieftain Velupillai Prabhakaran and the intelligence wing head, Pottu Amman, were involved in such acts.
Karuna, who was once the LTTE’s military commander in the eastern Lankan districts of Batticaloa and Amparai, was asked by the LLRC about the massacre of over 600 Sri Lankan policemen who had surrendered to the militant group in the early 1990s. He flatly denied that the military wing of the LTTE was responsible for that. “That answer applies to the bombing of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy also. All such killings and bombings were planned and executed by Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman,” he added. Many Lankans think that Karuna was responsible for these acts because the massacre of the policemen occurred in Batticaloa, and the bombers who attached the Kandy temple came from Batticaloa. Karuna revealed that before the signing of the 2002 Oslo Accord, which stated that the LTTE and the Lankan government would pursue “federalism” as the basis of a political settlement of the ethnic question in the island nation, the LTTE’s chief negotiator, Anton Balasingham, had asked him if Prabhakaran should be consulted first. Karuna asked Balasingham not to tell Prabhakaran about it, as he would surely oppose it. Therefore, Balasingham did not tell Prabhakaran, and went ahead and signed the accord with G L Peiris, the head of the Lankan government delegation. When Prabhakaran heard about this, he was furious. Karuna and Balasingham tried to convince him that an agreement was necessary to put an end to suffering of Tamils, but to no avail.
He said it was Prabhakaran’s obduracy that made him think of leaving the LTTE. According to Karuna, if anybody was responsible for war crimes in the last armed conflict, it was Prabhakaran.