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On the Death of
Velupillai Prabhakaran
Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran
BBC. 18 May 2009
Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead, the Sri Lankan
military says. State television made the announcement shortly after
the military said it had surrounded him in the north-east.
Prabhakaran was a secretive figure who was rarely seen in public, To
his followers, Vellupillai Prabhakaran was a freedom fighter
struggling for Tamil emancipation. To his adversaries he was a
secretive megalomaniac with a complete disregard for human life.
Under his leadership, the Tamil Tigers became one of the world's
most highly-disciplined and highly-motivated guerrilla forces.
But in recent months they fought a desperate rearguard action as the
Sri Lankan military inflicted defeat after defeat on them, ending
their dream of a separate homeland in the north and east.
The youngest of four children, Vellupillai Prabhakaran was born on
26 Nov 1954, in the northern coastal town of Velvettithurai on the
Jaffna peninsula.
Described as a shy and bookish student, he became involved in the
Tamil protest movement after being angered by what he saw as
discrimination against Tamils by Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese
population.
He claimed he was influenced by the lives of two Indian leaders,
Subhash Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, both of whom were involved in
the armed struggle for independence from Britain.
In one of his rare interviews he also said that he was fascinated by
the lives of Alexander the Great and Napoleon and had studied many
books on the two commanders.
It is believed that Prabhakaran founded the Tamil New Tigers in 1973
or 1974, although the exact date is unknown.
It was just another in a series of pressure groups and organisations
protesting against what they saw as the marginalisation of the Tamil
people in the post-colonial Sri Lanka.
In 1975 he was accused of the murder of the mayor of Jaffna, who was
shot at point blank range while he was about to enter a Hindu
temple.
The killing was said to be in response to an incident in Jaffna the
previous year when a police attack on a crowd led to the deaths of
about seven people.
A year later Prabhakaran's group was renamed the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.
The Tigers became a formidable force numbering upwards of 10,000
soldiers, including women and children.
They were also well-equipped with weaponry funded by Tamil
expatriates and, according to some reports, by sympathisers in
India.
Always outnumbered by the Sri Lankan army, Prabhakaran led his
forces in a series of guerrilla actions against a range of targets.
He encouraged a cult of martyrdom among his followers which led to
the first use of suicide bombings as a common form of attack, often
against civilian targets.
He was also reputed to carry a cyanide capsule around his neck to be
swallowed in case of capture, a practice soon emulated by many of
his soldiers.
In 1991 he was accused of involvement in the assassination of former
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed in a suicide bomb
attack near Madras (Chennai).
It was alleged Prabhakaran had personally ordered the attack in
revenge for Gandhi's posting of Indian peacekeeping troops to Sri
Lanka in the mid-1980s.
An Indian court signed a death warrant in his name and Interpol
issued a wanted notice on the grounds of terrorism, murder and
organised crime.
Under his leadership the LTTE was branded a terrorist organisation
by many countries and he was wanted by Interpol, the global police
network for murder, terrorism, organised crime and conspiracy.
He was a shadowy figure, constantly under threat of arrest or
assassination.
At one of Prabhakaran's very rare press conferences, in 2002, he
refused to answer any questions about Gandhi's murder, referring to
it as a "tragic accident".
Instead he repeated his demand for self-determination for Tamils and
said he was prepared to die in the fight to achieve it.
In 1996 more than 90 people were killed and a further 1,400 were
injured when a suicide bomber crashed a lorry through the gates of
the Central Bank of Colombo and detonated its cargo of explosives.
Most of the casualties were civilians in what was then the Tigers'
deadliest attack, with a number of foreign nationals among those
killed and injured.
In 2002 a Sri Lankan court issued a warrant for Prabhakaran's arrest
in connection with the attack and, in his absence, sentenced him to
200 years in prison.
When the latest attempt at peace talks broke down in 2006, the Sri
Lankan army launched a huge offensive against Tiger strongholds,
eventually capturing large areas of what had been Tiger-held
territory.
In early 2009 Prabhakaran suffered a major reverse when the Sri
Lankan government captured the Tigers' administrative capital of
Killinochchi and there were rumours he had fled the country.
Vellupillai Prabhakaran remained a secretive figure throughout his
life, his movements between his various jungle hideouts carefully
planned to avoid capture or assassination.
At the height of its powers at the end of the 1990s and the early
years of this decade, the LTTE controlled nearly one-third of Sri
Lanka.
But Prabhakaran was unable to translate this authority into his
dream: an autonomous Tamil homeland in the north of the country.
His single-minded determination in pursuit of his goal never
wavered: he once claimed he had ordered his own men to shoot him if
he ever gave up his demands for a Tamil state.
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