The Man Who Destroyed Eelam – The Rise

This an amazing article I found from Tehelka which gives in-site to one of the ruthless terrorist in the world.

Prabakaran had everything: territory, international support and committed fighters. Senior journalist SHYAM TEKWANI, who has covered the LTTE and Sri Lanka for almost three decades tracks the alarming rise and astonishing fall of a man who sought to live to fight another day, but found only death at the hands of his nemesis.

MORE VIVIDLY THAN anything that came afterwards in the Sri Lanka war, I remember his first handshake. The hand was soft, the grip delicate and limp. On that occasion in Madras, as he contentedly claimed credit for assassinating the Tamil Mayor of Jaffna and later, the slaughter of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers that ignited the conflict following the anti-Tamil riots of 1983, Velupillai Prabakaran’s dainty handshake seemed in harmony with his soft voice.
A few more meetings and a couple of years later in 1987 — after successfully evading a media ban to reach the frontlines in Jaffna — I found myself reporting in the company of Prabakaran’s ragtag troops in their war against the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). In the bougainvillea-lined mud tracks, while attempting to photograph his boys gunning down the Indian soldiers in an ambush, I was transfixed by the memory of that handshake as I watched the blood seep from an ill-fated jawan’s head and mingle with the Jaffna dirt.
The other memory is his startled expression when I congratulated him on his newborn towards the end of a long discourse on Eelam. Soon after his fleeting pause, it became clear that he had lost interest in going on and on with his vision of Eelam. He was less voluble, withdrawn and then abruptly left the room. It was left to the master’s voice, Anton Balasingham, to cautiously quiz me on how and what I knew of the addition to his leader’s family.
These two memories define, at any rate for me through all my experiences over the last 25 years in Sri Lanka, the man who has finally destroyed the dream he almost made true. Both the memories give a certain insight into the mind of the man. First, deceive all into believing the contrary about your capabilities — deception is the core of all his strategy. Second, never trust your own shadow — paranoia dictates his behaviour. These traits contributed to the amazing rise — and eventually the astonishing fall — of the leader of the most ruthless terrorist organisation in the world.
To suggest that Prabakaran worked to a master plan in building and shaping his image of invincibility and developing the organisation from a ragtag bunch of boys into the outfit that inspired awe and envy would be to bestow upon him the title of a genius — which he is not. From the beginning, he adopted a twofold strategy — consisting on the one hand of an ‘international political campaign’ by galvanising the diaspora and international opinion in his favour and on the other by bleeding the economy and weakening the state through acts of terror. His success in sustaining the conflict for over a quarter century came from a combination of his own cunning and the lack of purpose, unity and determination in his enemies.

PRABAKARAN ADOPTED A TWOFOLD STRATEGY – GALVANISING THE INTERNATIONAL TAMIL DIASPORA IN HIS FAVOUR AND WEAKENING THE STATE THROUGH ACTS OF TERROR

THE PROPAGANDA CARPET BOMB
“Today we’re engaged in the first war in history — unconventional and irregular as it may be — in an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras, a global internet with no inhibitions, cell phones, hand-held video cameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.” That was former US Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 referring, of course, to his woes stemming from the unnecessary war in Iraq.
If propaganda wins wars, then the IPKF, which saved Sri Lanka from becoming another Lebanon, fell victim to a weapon far more effective than the deadliest conventional weapon in Prabakaran’s jungle arsenal — his propaganda tool, the media.
Central to Prabakaran’s guerilla strategy — over two decades before Rumsfeld made his observation — was a powerful communications network and a sympathetic media. Hence, his exclusive interviews to handpicked influential publications while he was enjoying the hospitality of the Indian government in Madras during the mid-80s, when I first got to shake his hand. From the outset, it was not difficult to win the support of the media, particularly in the West. Prabakaran played his underdog cards adroitly with the help of his advisor Anton Balasingham and his Australianborn wife, Adele and the LTTE’s media headquarters in London.
In November 1986, on the eve of the SAARC summit in Bangalore, the police under instructions from the Chief Minister MG Ramachandran, raided and seized arms and sophisticated communications gear from the assorted Eelam groups operating out of Tamil Nadu. Prabakaran went on a much publicised fast-untodeath in Madras quoting Mahatma Gandhi, whom he said he was emulating in peaceful protest for the return of the equipment. He demanded the immediate return of – not his rocket launchers, SAM missiles and AK-47s — but his lifeline to the world, his wireless sets. By this time, he had the media eating out of his hands and the romanticisation of Prabakaran – already in motion — now entered the process of deification. Everything was returned to him in good order along with a glass of fruit juice that he sipped to declare his victory.

Less than a year later, I walked into a scoop in the Jaffna peninsula. IPKF Mi-24 helicopter gunships were on the attack in Chavakachcheri, an LTTE stronghold. People around me were killed, most of them civilians. And my cameras were the only media instruments witnessing the deaths. A week later, when I surfaced in Colombo and rushed to the phone in my hotel room to break the exclusive story, I was dismayed to find that the attack was already the big story in the media. Prabakaran had already beaten me to it — even though there was no electricity to light up his bases in the jungles. Even as the body count in the damaged market area was in progress, his ‘boys’ had radioed their souped-up version of the ‘bombing’ from their jungle hideouts to their ‘media’ headquarters in London from where a telex was sent out to every major international publication. Photographs of death and destruction from an assault during Operation Liberation (or Vadamarachchi Operation) by Sri Lankan gunships six months earlier were circulated as evidence of the Chavakachcheri attack.
The LTTE’s powerful communications network transmitted daily situation reports (sitreps) from Jaffna to its media headquarters in a Western capital where the sitreps were distributed as press releases though telex machines (later with the introduction of fax machines and the internet, it was able to readjust its media budget) to media and governments in Western capitals. Printed material was was a prime means of LTTE propaganda till the early 1990s, when the group went to great expense to publish multilingual and expensively produced four-colour booklets and pamphlets with profuse illustrations. These publications were distributed to the local and international media and select government organisations.
The LTTE’s high degree of familiarity with modern telecommunications enabled it to occupy a very definitive niche in the international public eye, in spite of the fact that it is party to a conflict in a small south Asian nation, largely ignored by the West, and the fact that its acts of violence have impacted only Sri Lanka and occasionally India.
The reason counter-terrorism practitioners began to focus their attention, after 9/11, to Sri Lanka is Prabakaran’s global reach. His group is an integral part of the international terror network. Tactical and technical contagion is a fact of terrorist tactics. From hostage-taking, to hijacking to car-bombs, new methods have been quickly absorbed and copied among terrorist groups worldwide. Witness the Taliban’s use of civilians as human shields during the Pakistani-led assault in Buner district last week.
Years before the world heard of Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda, Prabakaran was pioneering a new method of guerrilla warfare — the suicide bomber. Innovations in the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and the rampant use of child soldiers and new media technologies — were quickly copied as regular methods of warfare following the invasion of Iraq in 2002.
Prabakaran has successfully operated in volatile environments where his ability to change has been the group’s linchpin not only of effectiveness, but also of survival. While Prabakaran has had ample motivations for change — technological developments, counterterrorism measures, and shifts in people’s reactions to terror attacks — the change has not occurred automatically.

CADRES WERE FED ON A DIET OF ACTION MOVIES. THE THRILL OF ADVENTURE FOR YOUNG RAMBOS- IN-THE-MAKING IS A MESMERISING EXPERIENCE. IT INVESTED POWER THEY COULD NEVER DREAM OF

AS ADAPTIVE AS A CHAMELEON
Prabakaran’s ambition to sever the island in two has been the only constant in his life. Sustaining that for 30 years required a continuous evolution and a firm hand. The practices he adopted were based on selectively chosen models appropriated from a range of religious and political traditions and rituals for a variety of political and publicity goals. The flavor of the 1980s, for him, was Marxist rhetoric. When his oft-repeated desire for a single party socialist government in his imagined Eelam drew gasps of horror, the Lenin portrait in his den was summarily removed and Marx was forsaken in all conversation. He then abandoned ideology to aggressively build the cult around his persona. An adoring media lent as zealous a hand as his followers to help build his cult to mythical proportions — tales of his marksmanship, valour and genius became commonplace. Soon, taking an oath in his name by his cadres, celebrating his birthday, and displaying his portrait everywhere became mandatory. Adele introduced the concept of feminism to recruit girls. In her words, “Nowhere in the world has male chauvinism been eradicated and it certainly has not disappeared from the Tamil society. However the male cadres show a great deal of respect, appreciation and pride in the women combatants’ achievements.” From Hinduism, he borrowed the practice of deifying his martyrs and erecting shrines where people were expected to make offerings and pray on a day designated as holy. Western military traditions provided him a model to build his army while Hollywood, apart from inspiring movies of bravery and heroism, taught him to produce slickly produced audio-visual presentations for profit and for goodwill.

IN HIS OWN IMAGE
Acutely conscious of the power of propaganda and his image as the most lethal weapon in his arsenal, Prabakaran ensured that everybody in his group understood how to use it. Cadres were not to interact with anyone outside the fold. His photograph — and only his — would be the single image that hung on the walls of all denizens in his territory. Every street corner would have his speeches or Eelam national songs playing from the loudspeakers at all hours every day. Every offer of a ride in the Balasingham’s air-conditioned SUV, with Adele at the wheel, in the Jaffna peninsula perforce meant listening to Prabakaran blaring from the only cassette she would insert into the music player.

Calendars, posters, CDs, DVDs, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations — he had them all out years before the world had heard of the al Qaeda propaganda machinery. And while the word ‘web’, at any rate for most of us in south Asia in 1993, triggered images of the common house spider, the LTTE had its first website running on the server of a university in the United States. This conveniently coincided with an increasingly unfriendly media following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. A computer academy funded and run by professionals from among the diaspora in the Vanni region ensured that the ‘brains trust’ of the LTTE kept abreast with the latest know-how.
A wing of the group (Internet Black Tigers) is credited with the first ever cyber attack (1997) known to the world when it downed the networks of Sri Lankan embassies across the world for a fortnight. In the same year, it was able to hack into a university in the United Kingdom, steal legitimate email IDs and solicit funds for a fictitious hospital in Colombo. And as recently as last week, a group calling itself Kalai Amman Electronic Warfare Unit hacked into the Sri Lanka Army website and defaced its home page. Social network sites were quickly adopted and a search on YouTube yields several hundred videos of the group.
During one of our initial photo sessions (in the early 1980s), Prabakaran was awkward, uncertain of what was expected of him and very receptive to being directed. When it was suggested he change into combat fatigues, he went one further and emerged from the room with his pistol fully loaded. Within seconds, framed by his bodyguards and a huge cut out of a Tiger, with a huge portrait of Lenin in the background, he was in his elements and an hour later eagerly asked for copies of his performance. Several photo sessions later and in Jaffna while fighting for his supremacy against the IPKF, he reveled in playing the role of actor and director with consummate ease. He would tease a twinkle into his eyes with as much ease as a flash of fury. There was bluster in his voice, preparedness in dealing with questions and animation in his conversations but his grip had lost none of its daintiness.
He would play to the gallery with sardonic witticisms, refrain from any response in English, ponder a bit to deliver a quotable quote and strike the pose that struck him as just right for the occasion. In one of his hideouts during the IPKF operations, he called for his leopard cub and while bantering with his friend and deputy, Yogaratnam Yogi, posed gleefully for the camera stroking his pet — much like a prosperous zamindar back from a hunt.
It was essential to his strategy to get the message across that he had a committed following — and that this commitment came from man, woman and child. The cyanide pill was the emblem of commitment — which he generously arranged for me to photograph as his boys gamely posed with them around their necks. (It is another story that while every instance of a cadre biting into the vial during the course of assorted battles captured headlines, there was barely any mention of the many more who threw the vial away for safety).
While Prabakaran majestically posed for the camera with his ‘cubs’ (as he called the children he recruited), there were a few restrictions: He did not like being photographed while satiating his enormous appetite for food. No photographs of his female cadres and none of his dead and dying. These sanctions were lifted after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
Prabakaran quickly developed a media unit – photographers and videographers – which documented every battle and assassination that the group conducted. This served two purposes — as a teaching aid, it came closest to the real thing next to classroom simulations. Besides, it provided archival material for the history books that would be written once Eelam became a reality. This obsession for a visual record proved disastrous for the LTTE — it led the investigators of Rajiv Gandhi’s murder right to its doorstep.

WHILE PRABAKARAN MAJESTICALLY POSED FOR THE CAMERA, THERE WERE A   FEW RESTRICTIONS. HE DID NOT LIKE BEING PHOTOGRAPHED WHILE SATIATING HIS ENORMOUS APPETITE FOR FOOD

Visiting the group’s training camps in the peninsula after Rajiv Gandhi’s murder, the first thing I noticed were the baby-faced boys, some not even in their teens. Their field training began with an oath on their leader: “To achieve Tamil Eelam, my life and soul, all this, I sacrifice. We’ll be very faithful and trustworthy to our elder brother, Mr Prabakaran, the leader of our revolutionary organisation. I now begin my training. The thirst of Tigers is Tamil Eelam.” This was also repeated at the end of the day when their flag was lowered down the mast.
Their history lessons were an endless litany of hatred against the enemy — only comprising rapists, butchers and racists — and the glories of ancient Tamil kingdoms and kings. Classic indoctrination. The classroom instructions centred around battlefield strategies (on a blackboard with a piece of chalk and some war movies), case studies (reconstructed with videos and photographs) from their previous battles and assassinations and finally a film from an extraordinary video collection of B-grade Hollywood action movies. Rambo was the popular choice.
In the prevailing environment of anxiety and hopelessness, Prabakaran was crafty enough to whip up hatred and give a machine gun to his potential recruits among the boys and girls. The romance of the gun, for a teenager fed on a limitless diet of action movies, hatred for the identified enemy, a sense of purpose and an assurance of immortality, is an aphrodisiac far more potent than the promise of seventy-two virgins in paradise.

THE IPKF DEPLETED HIS MANPOWER AND PRABAKARAN HAD TO TURN TO THE GIRLS TO REPLENISH HIS FORCES. THE TASK OF INDUCTING THEM WAS ASSIGNED TO ADELE BALASINGHAM

The thrill of adventure for a 12-year old Rambo-in-the-making is a mesmerising experience. It invests in him power he could never dream of. The only occasion when I accepted their offer of testing a Kalashnikov was instructive. I fired into the horizon across the sea. As we sauntered away feeling like real men after a few rounds, I suddenly froze in horror. I became aware of my posture and swagger, feeling invincible and indestructible — and realized that, despite the stiffness in my shoulder caused by the weapon’s recoil — my arms and legs moved exactly like Rambo, like in the movie I had watched with them in their classroom. If I, a 30-something man of the world, could feel this magical glow of indestructibility shield me from death, it was not difficult to imagine the effect on a 12-year old who knows no other life than the one under Prabakaran’s incantations. The added incentive was that as a cadre, bed and board were provided for on a priority basis in any hamlet that one walked into, brandishing the gun.
If this was not motivation enough, there was then the promise of immortality. Poems and shrines were built in the memory of those who submitted their lives for the cause.

BEHIND THE LINES
One of the essential experiences of embedding yourself with the LTTE was the interaction with the wild-looking boys, bare-footed and ragged. They were your mates, guides and guardians during the tour of the frontlines and combat zones. When you lived alongside them, shared food and experiences under fire, you tended to bond with them. Survival often depended upon this sense of comradeship. Camaraderie, which relaxed their adherence to the strict code of discipline they were sworn to as they pulled out a deck of cards to kill time between attacks, could lead to bias — however much one guarded oneself against it – especially when in skirmishes in the jungle your camera kit and their Kalashnikovs got entangled.
But you never met the same lot ever again. They were either killed before your next trip or rotated to another location. It was rare to learn anything about them through querying the new batch — since each of them operated under a nom de guerre. One looked for a familiar face on the sea of posters and cutouts of martyrs scattered across the peninsula. Likewise, the innumerable shrines that kept multiplying between visits — shrines in honour of the valorous and where people went to pray with their incense sticks and flowers. There would be an odd sighting or two or a rare letter from some family member sharing their grief of their dead son.
Occasionally, a smartly dressed, wellfed stranger would approach you on the street in New York, a wedding in London, a restaurant in Paris or in the shadows of a temple corridor in Thanjavur and identify himself as being a member of the party you accompanied on such and such a trip. Or you would recognise a face in the papers — making the wrong kind of news in a country which had granted him citizenship.

ADELE BALASINGHAM AND THE FREEDOM BIRDS
The Freedom Birds — as the girls were now called — were the ace up Prabakaran’s sleeve. With the IPKF steadily depleting his manpower among the rank and file, Prabakaran had to turn even more to the girls and children to replenish his forces. The task of inducting the girls was assigned to “Auntie” Adele Balasingham. Girls, at this point, were banded together as the Students Organisation of Liberation Tigers (SOLT) and were used in peripheral roles as befitted their status in Jaffna society – in servitude, ushering in crowds at an event, distributing pamphlets, reciting poems extolling the greatness of their National Leader or singing paeans in honour of a recent suicide bomber. Adele’s task was made easy by the prevailing oppressive caste and class system and the alleged atrocities of the IPKF. She offered the guarantee of emancipating the girls from the traditional role of Tamil women by fighting shoulder to shoulder with the boys in pursuit of their freedom. A few months after the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, during a conversation in Jaffna, she would proudly claim: “The most historic development for the Jaffna woman in recent years is her confidence.”
Following the death, by cancer in 2007, of her husband Anton Balasingham, the self-described theoretician, chief negotiator and political advisor to Prabakaran, Adele continues to actively work for her leader quietly and away from the media glare from her base in London.

THE DEPUTIES
Gopalaswamy Mahendraraja, better known by his nom de guerre Mahathaya, Prabakaran’s extremely popular deputy, could have easily been mistaken for Prabakaran by anyone whose only awareness of the LTTE leaders was based on a perfunctory glance at media photographs. They were built alike and sprouted thick moustaches. In Prabakaran’s presence, Mahathaya was almost hunched in servility, respectful and barely uttering a word until spoken to. His transformation on the battlefield, however, was amazing.

YEARS BEFORE THE WORLD HEARD OF OSAMA BIN LADEN OR AL-QAEDA, PRABAKARAN WAS PIONEERING A NEW METHOD OF GUERRILLA WARFARE – THE SUICIDE BOMBER

Mahathaya’s silence was compensated by Yogi‘s loud voice. It was with Yogi that Prabakaran seemed to share an easy relationship. Laughing and joking over a Chinese lunch, the two seemed to be best buddies. Yogi strutted with his convent-educated English — much in the manner of a subordinate who wants to appear as an equal in the presence of people he seeks to impress; Mahathaya was diffident and respectful in the presence of authority, his leader. On the battlefield, as I joined the motley bunch Mahathaya led against the advancing army, I could barely associate him with the deputy who almost scraped in servility in the presence of his boss. Yogi was the well-scrubbed, smooth and oily politician, Mahathaya the dutiful and popular army commander.
When Mahathaya marched into Trincomalee at the head of a big army of freshly uniformed cadres along with Yogi to watch the back of the last IPKF soldier disappear from view in March 1990, they took to the podium to thank the big crowds the LTTE had corralled at the town’s stadium. Yogi included the media in his thanksgiving and singled out a couple of us by name as those who had fought as much as they for their struggle. Barely over a year later, with Rajiv murdered and the investigation clearly pointing to the LTTE as his killers, Yogi’s first reaction upon greeting me in Jaffna was a bitter utterance of “yellow journalist” accompanied by a ferocious mouthful of spit at me, while Balasingham and Adele watched in grim silence. World opinion was beginning to weigh heavily against them. Their nerves were clearly on edge.
Prabakaran denied any role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and instead set into motion an elaborate exercise to disprove Dhanu’s (Rajiv Gandhi’s killer) link with the LTTE. Meetings were set up with her ‘parents’, neighbours, and ‘friends’ all over the peninsula. At the end of the long day, after a snack of hot vadas at their thatched roof headquarters near Jaffna town, when my increasing skepticism of their charade began to get the better of their gentle persuasiveness, Balasingham and Yogi pushed back their chairs and declared the meeting over. The parting shot was as astounding as it was petty — pay for the vadas you just ate. When I awoke the next morning, the bicycle I depended on to traverse the peninsula was gone. Their fabled public relations machinery was beginning to crack and yet unknown to the world, trouble was brewing within.
A year later, in a move that stunned his followers, Prabakaran struck against Mahathaya who he had anointed as his deputy during the war against the IPKF in 1987. Accusing him of treachery and collaborating with the Indians against him, Prabakaran placed Mahathaya in custody, liquidated most of Mahathaya’s troops and decisively crushed a potential rival to his supremacy as leader. Mahathaya was executed after a prolonged period of torture in December 1994. Yogi, whose loyalty too came under suspicion, was consigned to the doghouse to expect a similar fate. After years in anxious oblivion, he reappeared as head of the LTTE’s History Division on Black Tigers Day, the commemoration of suicide bombers, in July 2006. He spoke on the occasion and asked, “Weren’t bombs made to blow up and kill men? So why is there such a cry when only a man becomes a human bomb?” He was subsequently rehabilitated to his current position as military advisor in the Vanni. Balasingham and his wife Adele rose even more higher in their leader’s estimate. The Balasinghams — who posed no threat of any sort to their master — became the face of the organisation across Western capitals and were an essential part of all negotiating teams at various times.

Continued…….