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On the Death of
Velupillai Prabhakaran
Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran, Tamil
Nationalist Leader
born 26 November 1954; died 18 May 2009
Tom Farrell,
UK Guardian, 19 May 2009
Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, who has been
killed aged 54 during fighting with the Sri Lankan army, the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were moulded, and refined,
into one of the world's deadliest insurgent groups, and rigid
discipline was instilled through his personal example. The LTTE of
Sri Lanka, the "Tamil Tigers", would become the progenitors of
modern suicide bombing. They also developed their own navy and
airforce as they masterminded the art of weapons procurement in a
globalised, post-cold-war world.
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
formally declared victory on Sunday. During this time, according to
UN estimates, more than 6,000 civilians have been killed as the LTTE
have been pushed from their northern territories into a "no fire
zone", consisting of a few kilometres of north-east coastline. The
government has accused the LTTE 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 said to have been a dutiful,
introverted child. The mainly Hindu Tamil minority, concentrated on
the northern and eastern fringes of the island, had done well before
independence, flourishing in business and the colonial bureaucracy.
The British had also imported thousands of low-caste Tamil labourers
from mainland India to work the hill country tea plantations,
although their lot was grimmer.
But within a few years of the British departure in February 1948,
Sinhalese politicians were banging the drum of ethnic chauvinism.
Sinhala became the island's official language and discriminatory
laws affecting entry to university and the civil service 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 then became integral to his modus operandi.
Within months, the TNT had 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. The Tiger had been the symbol of the Cholas, a Tamil
dynasty which had dominated medieval south Asia. 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 that it was seeking
to divide Sri Lanka, but it was alleged that Prabhakaran received
secret training from India's intelligence organisation, the Research
and Analysis Wing. Photographs that later emerged from the southern
Indian state of Tamil Nadu showed LTTE training camps. There were
other Tamil militant groups, but the LTTE would marginalise or
simply exterminate most of them.
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. He
watched action movies for inspiration, often using them as a
training tool in Tiger camps.
Fullscale 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 propeller-engined
trainers.
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 in Jaffna, 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 from Sinhalese extremism, were soon at war with
the LTTE. During this phase of the war Prabhakaran lived in a
massive fortified camp in the thick jungles of the northern Vanni
region. By this time, despite the LTTE's cardinal rule of celibacy,
Prabhakaran had taken a wife, Mathivathani Erambu. Accordingly, the
rules were amended for his cadres, Tigers were 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
male and female suicide bombers whose explosives-laden belts would
later be copied by Palestinian, Chechen and Iraqi groups. The
missions were preceded by months of intelligence gathering and
Prabhakaran held secret audiences with the bombers before they
departed for their targets. With the departure of the Indian army in
March 1990, having lost 1,200, Prabhakaran unleashed his vengeance
against all perceived enemies, internal and external. In May 1991,
the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and 16 others were kill- ed
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. The south was also hit by a spate of
savage Black Tiger strikes.
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 complex
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.
But in April 2002, with the Vanni territories reopened after a
decade, Prabhakaran called a press conference attended by dozens of
local and foreign journalists. With Balasingham translating, he
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.
But, 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 bile duct cancer at his
London home in December 2006.
Prabhakaran's autocratic rule over the LTTE was a factor in the
defection of Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, alias Colonel Karuna, and
several thousand eastern cadres. They were reorganised as a
pro-government paramilitary with a similarly dubious human rights
record. In the years since the Indian intervention, Prabhakaran had
very successfully transformed the Tigers from an archetypal
guerrilla outfit into a conventional army. But this may ultimately
have proved to be his downfall. When fighting again erupted in mid
2006, the Tigers were now 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 2 January 2008, Sri Lanka formally
withdrew from the Norwegian-brokered ceasefire and exactly one year
later, the de facto Tiger "capital" of Killinochchi was recaptured
by the government.
In the intervening months, the LTTE carried out numerous bomb
attacks across the island. This still prompts fears that even if
they are, as it now appears, defeated as a conventional force, they
will continue an underground war.
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 LTTE hardliners will revert
to guerrilla warfare. Prabhakaran was ruthless in eliminating any
rival Tamil politicians, while the emigration of educated Tamils
abroad leaves the long-suffering community in a precarious position.
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