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Curtains on Prabhakaran’s struggle for Eelam |
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The Sri Lankan troops are posed to wrap up their operations against the LTTE with the capture of a small coastal strip where guerillas are still holding some 15,000 to 20,000 Tamils hostage. It is end-game for LTTE chief V. Prabhakaran, who at one time ran his fiefdom both in the North and East of the island State. The successive regimes failed to meet his military challenge and every operation against the outfit was met with a suicide attack and it was left to President Rajapaksa to achieve what his predecessors failed to do.
Prabhakaran is accused of heaping misery on the Tamils, abducting Tamil boys and girls from poor families for his army, keeping prisoners in bunkers, mowing down rivals without mercy and carrying out killings, assassinations, bombings and suicide attacks at will. The 52-year-old Tamil Tiger leader presided over a de facto State. In the three blood-soaked decades gone by, , he leapfrogged from being the head of a small militant group of the early 1980s to one presiding over the world’s deadliest insurgent outfit. He evoked both awe and admiration as well as fear and hatred. Wanted by both India and Interpol for the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, thousands still swear by him and are willing to die for him, some by blowing up themselves in the most horrific manner. Some 19,000 LTTE cadres have died fighting since 1982 when the first of Prabhakaran’s colleagues died on his lap in Tamil Nadu. Youngest of the four children in a middle class family and a school dropout, after quitting his home in 1973, Prabhakaran shot dead Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duriappah in 1975, formed the LTTE in 1976 which killed 13 soldiers in an ambush in 1983 and sparked anti-Tamil violence which truly gave birth to Tamil separatism that has so far claimed over 65,000 lives. When Indian troops landed in Sri Lanka in 1987, Prabhakaran took on them and waged a guerilla war until 1990 when the Tigers took over much of the island’s north-east. By the mid-90s, Prabhakaran had decimated all his rivals.
With the man refusing to give up, the LTTE came to control a large swathe of territory in the north-east. Sri Lanka was left with no option but to ask Norway to broker peace. The ceasefire agreements however, were never sincerely observed since the ultimate goal of Prabhakaran remained an independent Eelam for the Tamils of Sri Lanka. There was never a sign that Prabhakaran has changed although the challenges he faced multiplied and his eastern commander, Karuna, walked out of him and his right hand man and LTTE ideologue, Balasingham, died of renal failure in London. Prabhakaran always exhibited in no uncertain terms that he has the will to fight to get for the Tamils an honorable deal and equal rights in the fields of education and jobs.
The LTTE cadres who may have fled mingling with the refugees may now resort to guerilla warfare. Like the Taliban who fled Afghanistan to the border areas of Pakistan after the US drove them out of to wage another new war against them, the Sri Lankan Government may face a similar challenge unless, of course, it is honest and sincere in redressing the genuine grievances of Tamils. They need to be convinced that bothTamils and Sinhalas of Sri Lanka are equals, there can be no discrimination between the two in education and jobs. There is a need for holding provincial elections in Northern Province now, as was done in the Eastern Province, to give the Tamils a say in the administration of the region. There are a number of proposals with the Government on how to involve the Tamils in the decision-making process. So, unless the root cause of the grievances of the Tamils is removed, another Tamil militant leader may emerge from the embers of the LTTE to challenge the dispensation in Colombo again.
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