The Man Who Destroyed Eelam – The Fall

Posted by One Sri Lanka on May 30th, 2009 | 1 comment home title

PRABAKARAN IS SEEN AS A MEGALOMANIAC WHO HIJACKED THE GRIEVANCES OF THE TAMILS TO GRATIFY HIMSELF. THE SWITCH FROM GUERRILLA TO CONVENTIONAL WARFARE WAS DISASTROUS

THE TAMIL ‘STATE’
Prabakaran’s moment of triumph in ejecting the IPKF (March 1990) out of his domain, powered him with greater confidence. He felt vindicated in his belief that Eelam was a reality within his grasp. His surviving boys had gained invaluable experience during the thirty months of ‘vanquishing the fourth-largest army in the world’; the girls had proved their worth and were now battle-hardened; recruiting was never easier, his stock with his donors, the Tamil diaspora, was at its peak; and the media doted on him as their new darling.

It was at this point that he tightened the security around him and set about the task of constructing a state within a state. He reintroduced taxation on his population, decreed the LTTE flag as the Tamil national flag, set up courts, police stations and ‘ministries’ that oversaw agriculture, education, rehabilitation and economic development. But his main preoccupation was in developing a conventional armed force. Military traditions — a formal ranking system, uniforms, gun salutes, parades, ceremonial funerals of flagdraped cadres killed in action — became the norm. Sarongs and flip-flops gave way to smartly pressed uniforms and spit-andpolish boots. Twenty years before he acquired the half-a-dozen ZLIN-143 aircraft to boast of being the only terrorist group in the world to possess an air wing, I was led to the LTTE’s “ordnance factory” in Manipay in 1985 to witness and photograph the aircraft his “aeronautical engineers” were assembling. The fact that it had a 200cc motorcycle engine to power it did not mask his intent to attempt building a conventional Armed Force, with its land, air and sea wings. “Geographically”, he stressed at the very beginning, “the security of Tamil Eelam is interlinked with that of its seas.”
He then turned against his benefactor, the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe. Premadasa, who had colluded with him to evict the IPKF and kept him on his toes until Prabakaran had him killed by a suicide bomber three years later in1993.

THE DIASPORA
In his annual Heroes Day speech — that he delivers a day after his birthday — Prabakaran, in November 2006 made his first direct appeal to the diaspora in funding the ‘Final War’ he had launched in July after the European Union joined a growing list of countries that had proscribed the group. Funds were drying up. “We express our gratitude to the Tamil Diaspora, our displaced brethren living all around the world, for their contribution to our struggle and ask them to maintain their unwavering participation and support.” This was in marked contrast to rebuking them for being “quitters” and “losers” in the late 1980s. Donations, however, have not always been voluntary.

Female Black Tigers

Following the crackdown on the LTTE by Canada and The European Union in 2006, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a report on their 4-year investigation (Operation Osaluki) into the Canadian fundraising efforts of the Tamil Tigers. The report revealed that the LTTE subjects Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada and other Western countries to intimidation, extortion and even violence to ensure a steady flow of funds for its operations.
COSTLY MISTAKE
When Rajiv Gandhi was on the political comeback trail in May 1991, Prabakaran wasted no time in executing a pre-emptive strike. He dispatched his homegrown poet, Kasi Anandan — who had only a year ago thrilled the victorious LTTE cadres at a gathering in Trincomalee with his description of the IPKF as the Italian-Parsi Killing Force — to lull any apprehensions that anyone might have about the former Prime Minister’s security. The ruse, clearly, worked.
Except that Prabakaran’s fool-proof plan did not count on having his photographer killed with the evidence against him intact on his body. The murder of Rajiv Gandhi by the world’s first woman suicide bomber set in motion a process that has finally come to destroy his ambition. India proscribed the group and though it took the United States six years to follow the lead and the 9/11 attacks to give the proscription some teeth, the new security climate induced other passive supporters of the LTTE in Western capitals to ban the outfit in their countries.
With international opinion against him, Prabakaran retreated into his hideouts, eased himself out of the media spotlight, only granting even rarer access to international media to lamely deny any hand in his dastardly act. He now began wearing the black thread of his cyanide vial outside his shirt in an ostentatious display of his commitment to the cause. The holster with his pistol now found place outside his camouflage shirt signaling that he was no more ‘Thambi’ (younger brother) or ‘Anna’ (elder brother) to his followers nor merely the National Leader of Tamil Eelam but the Supreme Commander of the LTTE.
The recently released photographs from the treasure trove of albums that the Sri Lankan troops found in the fleeing Prabakaran’s house are very instructive. The black string holding the vial of cyanide has disappeared in a number of images where he is with his family. Neither is his son, equally portly, seen to be wearing one even with his combat fatigues.

HUMAN SHIELDS
From the very beginning it was apparent that he would make ‘people’ his buzz word. First, declare he was on the path he had chosen for their sake, to liberate them. Second, attack the enemy over the shoulders of civilians to provoke an enraged counterattack that would kill innocents and garner him publicity at low cost. Finally, shield himself from attacks by closing all their exits at the point of his guns.
The bulk of LTTE’s attacks against the IPKF were initiated around the core strategy of using civilians as shields. The IPKF helicopter gunship attack in Chavakachcheri was one such classic example. The LTTE positioned its gunmen in the most crowded part of the town — the market — to fire provocatively in the directions of the choppers that were flying at a safe distance from ground fire. At the Chavakachcheri morgue where families of victims were hurling anti-Indian abuses at me, a middle-aged woman took me aside. Apologising for the hostility of the mourners, she muttered, “Hitler killed not his own people, but Jews. But Prabakaran is killing Tamil people.” Civilians as human shields clearly appears to be a central part of Prabakaran’s strategy to escape from his present entrapment.

FOR SOMEONE WHO PIONEERED THE USE – AND MASTERMINDED REMARKABLE INNOVATIONS – OF SUICIDE BOMBERS, PRABAKARAN’S BLACK TIGERS SEEM TO HAVE REACHED A DEAD-END

THE DESCENT
How then did an insurgency, that seized legitimate political grievances as a foundation for terrorism and sustained martyrdom by quasi-religious zealotry, fail in its objective?
From being credited as the world’s most successful and ruthless terrorist to losing nearly all of 15,000 sq.kms of territory in two years requires some doing. Both Prabakaran and the government of Sri Lanka have had their turns grabbing and then losing territory.
In July 2001, marking the anniversary of Black July of 1983, Prabakaran staged stunning attacks on the Sri Lankan Air Force base and the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo, wiping out half the country’s civil aviation fleet, in addition to a few military aircraft. With Sri Lanka’s army in a deadlock, the navy restrained and the air fleet neutralized, the success of this attack, once again, placed Prabakaran at the upper end of the plank that Colombo and he had been see-sawing upon for two decades.
Barely two months later, the planes that brought the twin towers crashing down in New York on September 9, laid the ground for the emergence of a new world order where the world was divided into the good guys rooting for a global war on terrorism and the bad guys who attacked governments in pursuit of their evil goals. The seed was thus sown for Prabakaran’s decline and the slow destruction of Eelam. He was beginning to get undone by an event thousands of miles away and over which he had no control.
It was not that Prabakaran did not attempt to adapt to the new world order. To shift the spotlight away from himself, he declared a ceasefire, came out of hiding, without his moustache and his falling hair dyed brilliantly black, sued for peace under Norwegian facilitation and announced his first press conference in a dozen years. His many websites removed all material that would be deemed offensive (virtual training camps where one could learn to forge a passport or make a bomb, for example) in the new environment, and wore safari suits to mould himself in the image of Nelson Mandela, the statesman he was quoting profusely on his sites and in his conversations.
His first and only international press conference (April 2002) at his administrative headquarters in Killinochchi was a disaster. His experience with the media, confined to a few one-on-one interviews with select journalists, had not prepared him for this. He seemed bewildered and clearly out of his depth facing a mixed pack of journalists whose two-day uncomfortable wait was alleviated only by the non-stop screening of LTTE propaganda videos. His image makeover, as a clean-shaven, safari-suited statesman, failed to impress anyone. Announcing his idea of peace involving the Norwegians as peacemakers, he first fumbled and then chose the safer option of avoiding all questions — mostly related to the murder of Rajiv Gandhi and his own demand for a separate state – and passed on the microphone to his interpreter Balasingham. Balasingham declared that his leader was the President and Prime Minister of Tamil Eelam and that he and Mr Prabakaran were the “same” and that he was the LTTE leader’s “voice.” This set the tone for what was to follow.
After six rounds of talks for peace between September 2002 to March 2003 across four countries, Prabakaran was back to what he had perfected over the years since the Thimpu talks in 1985 — stonewall, provoke and renege on an agreement and fully lay the blame for the breakdown of talks on the other party.

SHOULD PRABAKARAN BE FORCED TO FEED ON CYANIDE, IT WOULD MEAN THE DESTRUCTION OF HIS FANTASY AND THE ORGANISATION HE HAS SO BRUTALLY CULTIVATED AROUND HIMSELF

The from-the-very-beginning futile exercise took its toll on three of the four LTTE delegates. Balasingham, the “chief negotiator” was gravely ill and had to remain in Europe along with Adele for his prolonged treatment. Karuna Amman (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan), Prabakaran’s commander in the East, was being wooed by peacemakers to part ways with his leader. Meanwhile, the global war on terrorism was increasingly being read as the global war on Islamic terror, which meant the international community was too preoccupied to bother about non- Islamic outfits like the LTTE.
The CFA (Ceasefire Agreement) went into cold limbo. Skirmishes broke out and violations of the agreement accumulated. The Scandinavian countries comprising the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission recorded 3,830 violations by the LTTE against 351 by the Government of Sri Lanka between 20 February 2002 and 30 April 2007.
In March 2004, Prabakaran tried averting the crisis he saw coming his way by summoning Karuna to Jaffna on an official pretext. Karuna had learnt his lessons from the Mahathaya experience. He ignored the summons and split the seemingly monolithic outfit, taking with him a big chunk of the battle-hardened fighters he had trained. With the East in turmoil, Prabakaran saw his Eelam beginning to shrink. Months later, the tsunami further breached the LTTE’s wall of impregnability, damaging its bases along the northeastern coast.
Chandrika Kumaratunga, then heading the government after having survived a suicide bomber attack, quickly learnt from Prabakaran’s successful diplomatic offensives. She dispatched her Tamil Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, to world capitals on a mission to get the international community to act against the LTTE’s interests in their respective countries. Kadirgamar was beginning to notch up diplomatic successes, having got the United Kingdom to proscribe the group in 2001. He was killed by a LTTE sniper in August 2005 just when he seemed on the verge of getting some more countries to proscribe the group.
And when the elections came the following year (2005), Prabakaran compounded his earlier mistakes. He ensured — by forbidding Tamils to cast their vote — the victory of somebody who, he believed, was yet another politician even more infirm of purpose than his predecessors and therefore of immense value to his plans, little realising that he would finally be meeting his nemesis in the Rajapakse administration. Peace is inimical to Prabakaran’s existence. The new government started office, as all new governments in Colombo were wont to do, with a call for peace. After one round of ceasefire talks in 2006, Prabakaran was back to business. His woes of the three previous years in his new avatar of ‘statesmanpolitician’ were proving to him that he just was not cut out to be a man of peace.
In his 2006 November annual speech, after his attempts to assassinate the Chief of the Army and the Secretary of Defence in Colombo, he rued, “We postponed our plan to advance our freedom struggle twice to give even more chances to the peace efforts, once when the tsunami disaster struck and again when President Rajapakse was elected.”
He set out to reassert his authority over the East — and faced an army that was well-armed and well-trained and motivated as never before and one that was working with unprecedented intelligence provided by his breakaway commander, Karuna. Prabakaran lost the East — and from there on, he lorded over an unending series of military defeats.
From among the many reasons being attributed to his incredulously rapid downfall, the one that would without any trouble resonate with those who have dealt with Prabakaran would be his sense of supreme self-importance. He is seen as a megalomaniac who hijacked the legitimate grievances of the Tamils to gratify his vision of himself and failed to see that the switch from guerilla band to conventional army would be disastrous.
For the sanguinary among us — the chief reason for his downfall was the failure of his legendary Black Tiger suicide bombers and his celebrated Intelligence chief, Pottu Amman.
For someone who pioneered the use — and masterminded remarkable innovations — of suicide bombers, Prabakaran’s Black Tigers seemed to have reached a dead-end. President Chandrika Kumaratunga was the first miracle of the Eelam war — as the first ever survivor of a Black Tiger attack, at an election rally in December 1999.
Then came the failures in 2006 that cost him everything — General Sarath Fonseka, Commander of the Sri Lanka Army became the second survivor of a suicide attack in April. Prabakaran’s trusted tool of political persuasion, the Black Tiger, was beginning to let him down. And when Gotabaya Rajapkse, the Secretary of the Defence and the brother of the President escaped a suicide attack in December, it was curtains for Prabakaran. The last two failures led to his destruction. Clearly, Prabakaran was facing a short supply of efficient Black Tigers. He was desperate enough to use recruits whose mental aptitude didn’t match their ferocious commitment. A woman bomber sent to kill the Tamil Cabinet Minister, Douglas Devananda, in his Colombo office in November 2007, triggered her bra bomb when she discovered her target was not available for the day, killing herself and the Minister’s secretary.

MEETING HIS MATCH
The other factor that led to his precipitous defeat is that Prabakaran did not count on the troika (the President, the Army Chief and the Defence Secretary) calling his bluff. His elaborate deceptions of invincibility had begun cracking — first, with the exit of Karuna and then by the steady inroads that the specially trained units of the Sri Lankan Army’s commandos were making. The chronic political oneupmanship in Colombo over the Eelam war between the two national parties — the UNP and the SLFP — which had contributed largely to the growth of the LTTE and the prolongation of the war, was contained by the Rajapakse administration. The Rajapakse brothers pulled out a page from the Bush counter-terrorism doctrine — niceties be damned.
With international assistance — material and moral — for the war on terror pouring in from China, Pakistan and the US, the defence budget was increased dramatically; state of the art equipment procured, and counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency training enhanced. By mid-2006, Canada and the European Union joined the growing list of countries proscribing the LTTE. This clogged Prabakaran’s supply lines and fund collection and contributed to diminishing his ability to fight back the surge of a newly professionalised force. In the Rajapakse brothers, Prabakaran finally met with an enemy as ruthless and unswervingly committed in their goal as he.
As he presides over the destruction of his dream, Prabakaran must already be plotting his next move even as he plans his escape from the ever-shrinking space he is left with to hide in. Staying alive, going back to the basics and brushing up on Sun Tzu. His financially formidable supporters among the diaspora will be told that it is only territory that has been lost and as long as they are behind him he will deliver unto them the dream he has been promising them. Until then, Eelam will, like Khalistan, continue to live on in the virtual world.
His long-term objective, however, will be to foil every effort made by Colombo to redress Tamil grievances and also ensure that he, and only he, remains the sole leader of the Tamils. No moderate Tamil leader or group will be allowed to take his place. Any attempt to nurture a new leadership will be foiled by assassinations and acts of terror — just as he had, in the mid-80s, done the biggest disservice to the Tamil cause by systematically wiping out the leaders of the other militant Tamil groups that existed and decimating their organisations in a move to emerge as the sole representative of the Tamil cause. Elections will be prevented by violence. Prabakaran will patiently wait for complacency on Colombo’s part and any ensuing security lapses to stage devastating acts of terror. In essence, he will start all over again and could potentially claw his way back if allowed to.
The key to ensuring that Prabakaran goes down the same road and fades away as Idi Amin did lies in the sincerity, determination and tenacity of the Rajapakse government (and every other that follows it). Rolling back every discriminatory law and practice against the Tamils and guaranteeing them equal rights and opportunities would need to be its first priority. Ignoring the Tamil diaspora, however much it may rankle, would not be beneficial for Colombo. Colombo only has to remember that the rise and dominance of Prabakaran was largely dependent on Colombo’s policies and attitudes.

PRABAKARAN WILL PATIENTLY WAIT FOR A SLIP ON COLOMBO’S PART AND ANY ENSUING SECURITY LAPSES TO STAGE COUNTER-ATTACKS. HE COULD POTENTIALLY CLAW HIS WAY BACK

IF ALLOWED
As an immediate goal, Prabakaran will be counting on the few Black Tigers lurking in Colombo to blow up at least one of the troika. This would give him a respite, however brief, and save him from biting into the vial he sometimes carries around his neck.
And should he be forced to feed on the cyanide, it would mean the absolute destruction of his fantasy and the organisation he has so brutally cultivated around himself. His death would splinter the group, leaving his surviving lieutenants scrambling for the throne and the vast financial empire Prabakaran has industriously built across three score countries. His son and heir apparent, Charles Anthony, is not considered a serious contender for the top job.
In this hour of unprecedented defeat, the bluster and the belief in his personal immortality will not have dimmed. I wonder if Prabakaran’s hand shake has changed. For an answer to that, over to the friendly Arakan rebel in Myanmar or the sympathetic politician in Europe, whose extended hand welcomes Prabakaranashore as he searches for a sanctuary. In all likelihood, Prabakaran — with all his chips down—would impress his saviour with a firm, masculine shake of the hand.

The author is a former photo-journalist, currently teaching media and international relations at NTU, Singapore

Source – www.tehelka.com