STEPHANIE NOLEN AND ANTHONY REINHART
Globe and Mail Update
May 1, 2009
NEW DELHI and TORONTO - He called it, with no trace of irony,
thatkodai, the Tamil word for "the gift of life."
Velupillai Prabhakaran has asked it of so many of his followers in
the last 30 years, the hundreds of Tamils who carried out suicide
missions on his orders.
Will he give thatkodai himself, today, tomorrow, this
week, as the horrifically violent showdown in Sri Lanka drags on?
Today Mr. Prabhakaran is pinned into a five-kilometre sandy patch,
encircled and outnumbered about 10 to one, as the Sri Lankan
military pounds him from air and ground and sea. Friday the
government urged tens of thousands of trapped civilians to flee the
zone as it prepares for a final push to wipe out the rebels.
Mr. Prabhakaran has always said he will die fighting for Eelam,
the Tamil homeland, and if he cannot or will not fight longer, then
comrades have orders to shoot him, douse his body with gasoline and
set it alight, to deprive the Sri Lankan government of that
prize.
The grisly question of whether Mr. Prabhakaran, 54, the founder
and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), is about
to give his life in the fight for Tamil independence is of
relevance to more than his loyal fighters and supporters.
Rebel supporters by the hundreds of thousands have turned out in
cities around the world over the past weeks, including Toronto,
where they closed University Avenue for days.
Velupillai Prabhakaran, rebel leader, is shown in a 2006 photo
provided by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Mr. Prabhakaran leads a movement that has at times been
estimated to be the largest, non-state fighting force in the world,
one that has successfully destabilized Sri Lanka for 30 years, that
has assassinated two heads of state and murdered countless
civilians and embroiled a region in bloody conflict for
decades.
And more than in any other nationalist movement, Mr.
Prabhakaran's is built in his image. He is no showman; he has not
courted the media to project a larger-than-life personality. He has
given only one press conference in 30 years. In fact, he is so
soft-spoken that several people given a rare audience have failed
to realize they were in the presence of the infamous leader of the
Tigers until he stated his name with a gentle smile.
Rather, Mr. Prabhakaran's status stems from the loyalty of his
movement and his people — a potent mix of adulation and terror —
inspired by his total devotion to the cause and by his sheer
ruthlessness.
"The movement as a whole can be described in two words,
Velupillai Prabhakaran," said M.R. Narayan Swamy, an Indian writer
whose books on Sri Lanka's war include a rare Prabhakaran biography
called Inside an Elusive Mind.
"The LTTE was Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran was the LTTE. It had
only one leader, only one god — that was Prabhakaran and everything
that happened in the LTTE in terms of major policy decisions all
had Prabhakaran's stamp."
Mr. Prabhakaran, in his long struggle, came close to realizing
his dream of "Eelam," an independent homeland for the Tamil people
in the northern and eastern portion of Sri Lanka (Tamils make up
about 13 per cent of Sri Lanka's population). At one point, he
ruled over a sort of Potemkin police state in much of that
territory as the Tigers set up a parallel civil administration,
police force, banks and tax collection. He came even closer to
Eelam when the strength of the rebel insurgency forced the Sri
Lankan government into a Norwegian-brokered peace process,
beginning with a ceasefire in 2002, in which real autonomy for the
Tamils was on the table. It collapsed in violence four years
later.
But as a bloody endgame of sorts plays out on a tiny strip of
Sri Lankan beach, it is clear that Mr. Prabhakaran's Eelam empire
has slipped away: The Tigers are all but destroyed as a
conventional military force and most of the people who once lived
under their rule are starving in squalid refugee camps or
desperately trying to get into one.
Mr. Prabhakaran lost because he did nothing to convince Sri
Lankans or international brokers that he was serious about wanting
peace, and because the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka elected a
leader, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was not remotely interested in
making peace with him in any case. Two years ago, President
Rajapaksa launched an all-out military offensive against the
Tigers, pumping new soldiers and new funds into armed forces
demoralized by their losing battle against the insurgency.
Still, the person who may know Mr. Prabhakaran best, outside his
inner circle of fighting colleagues, doubts that he will be found
if soldiers overrun his last stronghold.
"The noose tightens, but I would think he has already left that
little sliver of land," Anita Pratap said. Ms. Pratap, one of
India's leading journalists, is the author of Island of
Blood, about Sri Lanka's civil war, and the sole journalist of
whom Mr. Prabhakaran made something of a regular confidante. "He is
an excellent military strategist, a good chess player who
anticipates his enemy's every move. I don't see him doodling his
thumbs and waiting for the army to advance and capture him."
Many others, starting with the Sri Lankan military, disagree
with Ms. Pratap. The army says that senior Tigers who were captured
in the past few days report that Mr. Prabhakaran is hunkered down
with the last rebel forces.
A Tamil journalist based in Colombo who has covered the Tigers
for 20 years — and who like so many others refuses to be quoted by
name talking about the rebel chief — said he doubts the vastly
outnumbered rebels would still be fighting if Mr. Prabhakaran were
not in the middle of them.
Mr. Narayan agreed. "I have no doubts he is there. I'm sure
they'd like to take him alive, but that will depend on Prabhakaran
and, if the past is any guide, he will not let them take him
alive."
There was little in Mr. Prabhakaran's early life to suggest that
he was headed for such ferocity. He was the youngest of four
children, born Nov. 26, 1954, into a Hindu family of the low
fisherman's caste in a small town in northern Sri Lanka. His father
was a mid-level civil servant. He was a mediocre student, whose
affectionate but stern father despaired a bit of his prospects. But
he was also an avid reader, who devoured biographies, and in
particular became fascinated with two Indians, Subhash Chandra Bose
and Bhagat Singh, who were leaders in the armed struggle for
independence from Britain. He embraced Mr. Bose's mantra, "I shall
fight for the freedom of my land until I shed the last drop of
blood."
Mr. Prabhakaran entered his teens at a time of rising Tamil
nationalism, after the Sinhalese-dominated government implemented a
series of measures — making Sinhala the official language;
Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese, the national religion;
demanding higher grades of Tamil students to let them into
universities; and giving Sinhalese priority access to government
jobs — whose brutal chauvinism the government remains unwilling to
acknowledge today.
Many Tamils, especially young people, were frustrated with the
lack of a radical response from their leaders, and small militant
groups began to form. After joining several political youth groups,
Mr. Prabhakaran founded the organization that would become the LTTE
in 1972. Three years later, using a rusty, old revolver and bullets
he made from matches, Mr. Prabhakaran walked up to the mayor of
Jaffna, Alfred Duraiyappah, a Tamil considered complicit with the
government in Colombo, and shot him as he entered a Hindu temple.
Mr. Prabhakaran, as would become the Tiger signature, simply melted
away in the melee. When police came to his family home days later,
he was long gone, and had taken the precaution of burning any
family photos in which he appeared, Mr. Swamy writes.
Mr. Prabhakaran began life on the run in earnest; he was never
caught in Sri Lanka, no matter how wide a net the government cast.
He was only jailed once, in one of his periods of operating from
the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, just a short boat trip from Sri
Lanka, when a squabble with another Tiger leader led to a shootout
in the street. But sympathy for the rebels in the Tamil state was
strong; India would not extradite him and soon enough he slipped
away from house arrest and was smuggled in a fishing boat back to
Sri Lanka.
Over the following years he cemented his hold on the Tiger
leadership and began to fund the organization with meticulously
planned but dramatic bank robberies. Mr. Prabhakaran vetted
would-be rebels for loyalty and stability, then put them through
intense training in jungle camps in India and in Sri Lanka. There
was gruelling physical training, military-strategy classes, target
practice and lessons in the use of the heavier weapons, which the
Tigers began to acquire with stolen cash and donations from
sympathetic Tamils abroad. Recurring episodes of anti-Tamil
violence, and a lack of intervention by a hard-line Sinhalese
government, provided him with no shortage of recruits.
In the midst of this, Mr. Prabhakaran got married. His
relationship with his wife, Mathivathani Erambu, began awkwardly
when he had her abducted — she was among a group of students on a
political hunger strike that the Tigers disrupted. She and the
others were spirited off to a Tiger base, where the others quailed
but she, it's said, was undaunted by the rebel chief and openly
joked with him.
The Tiger movement forbade relations between cadres at the time,
so Mr. Prabhakaran rewrote the rules to allow senior LTTE officers
to wed. He also had to conquer her family; she is from a much
higher caste. They had two sons and a daughter. Today his wife,
younger son and daughter are believed to be outside Sri Lanka —
variously reported to be in India, Ireland or South Africa — while
his eldest son, Charles Anthony, is reported to fight alongside
him.
Mr. Prabhakaran is described as a loving father, a warm host, a
man with a weakness for boiled crabs and chocolate who once gave
his rebels orders never to kill anyone while they were eating. But
under his leadership, the Tigers had no soft side. The LTTE quickly
moved from attacks on police and soldiers to bombing busloads of
civilians and Buddhist places of worship.
One former LTTE fighter, who joined as an 18-year-old and rose
to the rank of military trainer, remembers a fierce, if warped,
sense of justice. "He grew up with the dharma thing [the Hindu idea
of "a righteous duty"], you know, fair or not," said the man, who
spoke on condition of anonymity. If Sinhalese killed Tamils, Mr.
Prabhakaran would take some Sinhalese lives in response "to show
that you don't do that. … Every country has a policy … to show that
'if you do that, I will do this,' so that [their enemies]
understand the language."
And all tactics were fair, he told his supporters, given the
"asymmetrical" nature of the conflict that pitted a small
insurgency against a well-armed state force. The Tigers had a great
many teenagers in their ranks, leading to criticism of "child
soldiers," although Mr. Prabhakaran, who began fighting at 16,
likely fails to see a problem with that. When the recruits did not
come voluntarily, the LTTE began to conscript, forcing each
household in the region it controlled to send a fighter. Many Tamil
families supported the Tigers, but whether they did or not, they
began to face regular pressure to supply funds. Families that did
not supply either fighters or cash might see their children
disappear in the night, their house burn, or one member return
shell-shocked from brutal Tiger interrogation or "political
retraining."
Mr. Prabhakaran, a few of whose cadres had been trained by the
Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon, drew on the tactic
of suicide bombing then in early use by Hezbollah, and he pioneered
the use of the explosive vest. He called his bombers, those from
whom he demanded thatkodai, the Black Tigers, and nearly
half of them were women.
It was a young woman who carried out the mission that Mr. Swamy
and many others view as Mr. Prabhakaran's great mistake: She
approached Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi as he left a
political rally in 1991 and offered him a flower garland, and then
bent to touch his feet in apparent respect, setting off her
explosive vest as she did so. She killed him, herself, and 18
others. The attack was intended to keep India — which had sent a
peacekeeping force, that wound up fighting the rebels, to Sri Lanka
in the late 1980s — from further meddling, but it had the effect of
permanently souring Indian sympathy for the Tigers.
In 1993, Mr. Prabhakaran sent Black Tigers to kill Ranasinghe
Premadasa, the Sri Lankan president with whom he had been allied
against the Indian forces; he ordered the killing of the opposition
leader, Gamini Dissanayake, and he was equally ruthless in hunting
down Tamil politicians he considered insufficiently loyal. In 1996,
several squads of intended suicide attackers blew up the Central
Bank in Colombo, killing more than 100 people. He sent bombers in
1999 to kill president Chandrika Kumaratunga, with whom he had been
engaged in peace negotiations, but the attempt failed, leaving her
partially blind. Thirty-five others were killed in the attempt.
Why were so many willing to don the vest of the Black Tigers?
And why did so many in the Tamil diaspora willingly pour money into
LTTE coffers?
Mr. Prabhakaran had no real ideology. He read about Che Guevera
but had little interest in socialism, even when the revolutionary
ideology was sweeping rebel movements in Latin America and
elsewhere in Asia. Mr. Swamy quoted him as once saying he had
little interest in "isms" but for one: "I want all these caste
differences to go." (Mr. Prabhakaran has been an unusual champion
of gender equality, promoting women through the highest ranks of
the Tigers and not differentiating between tasks given to male and
female cadres.) Nor has Mr. Prabhakaran relied on charisma or great
skill as an orator. Ms. Pratap said that when she first met him,
her disappointment — the legendary guerrilla leader was short, a
bit dumpy and looked like a middle-aged merchant — was so visible
on her face that Mr. Prabhakaran laughed. But, she added this week,
within moments, she knew he was extraordinary.
"There was no pretence or mendacity, hyperbole or chest-beating
patriotism. … There was no spin in Prabhakaran. His sincerity was
simple, direct, plain, transparent. That gave him a clarity of
thinking and purpose that I knew was unusual and exceptional," she
said.
"I realized during that first interview that no way this man
could be bought or bullied. … Prabhakaran was too tough to be
browbeaten by sticks and too detached from the trappings of power
to be enticed by the usual carrots that politicians salivate over
—money, position, titles, etc. … I also saw that he had the
determination and the intelligence, the courage and the
ruthlessness to pursue his cause."
Another Tamil Toronto resident who knew Mr. Prabhakaran well —
and who also refused to be quoted by name for fear his old
association would bring unwanted attention from Canadian security
agencies — described his own seduction by the Tiger leader. They
grew up near each other. When the man was young, Mr. Prabhakaran
approached him to ask for some help for the new rebel movement.
"The first time I met him, I could see he is a different person,
that was my feeling throughout," the man recalled in a recent
interview. "Even when you look at him, his eyes are so powerful,
you know. He can just capture you. … I'm not exaggerating. These
are my feelings. From that time onward, I know he's the person who
is going to lead the Tamils from the slavery, from the injustice of
the Sinhala majority."
The man soon found himself working closely with the Tigers from
a base in India.
And even his detractors have to acknowledge Mr. Prabhakaran's
extraordinary force of will, Mr. Swamy said. "Apart from all he has
done — negative or positive, depending on which side of the fence
you're on — there must be something," he said. "When you ask people
to die for you, there must be something in you that causes people
to do it. The fact that he could sit in the jungle and set up air
strips and make planes take off and bomb Colombo, that's
something."
Mr. Prabhakaran always had the ability to speak powerfully to
Tamil alienation; he offered angry people the promise of revenge,
he tapped skillfully into their frustration and he seemed always
devoted to the cause, with none of the tendency to pander that
earlier leaders had, the Toronto resident said. "They feel, 'This
is right — we don't mind supporting this man.' He had certain
traits that made people follow him, and quite blindly at that."
And yet the most critical blindness, in the end, appears to be
Mr. Prabhakaran's own. He completely failed, for example, to gauge
the sea change after 9/11, when organizations using terrorist
tactics lost all support. Canada listed the Tigers as a terrorist
group in 2006, and barred any fundraising in Canada. By refusing to
stop his attacks, Mr. Prabhakaran eroded his support in
international quarters — deeply frustrating the once-sympathetic
Norwegian negotiators, for example — and moderate Tamils.
"Prabhakaran didn't understand what he was in," said the
one-time Tiger activist who now lives in Toronto. "The Tigers
didn't understand how to build bridges."
Mr. Prabhakaran repeatedly failed to rally world opinion behind
the Tamil cause; instead, he did the opposite through use of
tactics such as suicide bombings and conscripting children. He
lacked the political savvy of the African National Congress or the
Irish Republican Army to transition to a legitimate political
entity, he said.
That, he concluded, reflects several things. First, Mr.
Prabhakaran's own lack of education and his distrust of
better-educated people. His disdain for debate means that Mr.
Prabhakaran has routinely failed to anticipate the negative results
of his just-do-it approach, he said. "He is a very practical man.
That is his strength … and a limitation, too."
Second, he survived as long as he has only by intense paranoia,
and, for the past several decades, by isolation. He has lived for
decades in a series of underground bunkers ringed by elite
bodyguards drawn from his extended family, emerging only once a
year to speak to the faithful on what he calls Heroes' Day.
Mr. Prabhakaran's fighters are infamous for the cyanide
necklaces they wear: several crystals of poison suspended in a tiny
glass vial, hung on a cord. Faced with unavoidable capture, the
wearer is to bite down on the vial; cuts from the glass on the
tongue and mouth will send the cyanide quickly into the
bloodstream. Mr. Prabhakaran once said that he wears two capsules,
just to be sure.
If it comes to that, will the Tigers outlive him?
He has groomed no successor, nor allowed anyone to rise to a
position in the organization where they might earn that role,
except possibly, Ms. Pratap noted, his son Charles Anthony. "But
it's easy to inherit the title, but very hard to inherit the
mandate," she added.
If she is wrong, and he is not now outside Sri Lanka plotting
his next move but rather trapped on the beach, then the Tigers as
an organization — the cult of suicide bombing, the Eelam-or-nothing
ideology, the determination to militarize the Tami struggle — may
die with him. But not, she noted, their cause.
"Prabhakaran did not rise from nothing. There is a historical
context in which he grew and rose to what he became. If the Sri
Lankan establishment settles the grievances of the Tamils in a fair
and just manner, then even the diehard Tamil resistance will wither
away. But if there is no genuine political settlement, then it's a
matter of time when the Tamil resistance will renew."
His one-time neighbour who later became a Tiger propagandist
feels much the same. "My intuition says you'll never be able to
catch him and you'll never be able to kill him," he said. But if
they do? "They'll never be able to eradicate this movement from the
minds of the Tamils."
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