New Delhi, Oct 26 (PTI) A new book looks at the violent period in Sri Lanka’s history from the early 1980s till late 2000s when LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran’s terror made international headlines and investigates how he played a major role in the plight of the Tamil minority that he had vowed to emancipate.
In what journalist-author M R Narayan Swamy calls “the insurgent leader’s autopsy”, “The Rout of Prabhakaran” explores Prabhakaran’s journey from starting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1976 to leading an armed campaign for an independent State called Tamil Eelam that ended on a bloody note in May 2009.
Since founding the LTTE, Prabhakaran remained a largely unknown figure for almost a decade, even though he robbed banks, attacked members of the security forces as well as Tamils who he deemed traitors for siding with the government.
"…when Prabhakaran got caught, for the first and last time by authorities anywhere, after a shootout with a compatriot in May 1982 in Madras, as the Tamil Nadu capital was then known, one Indian publication wrongly labelled him a bicycle thief!” Swamy writes in the book.
A year later, in July 1983, Prabhakaran led the massacre of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers who were all Sinhalese, the majority community in the country, triggering an “anti-Tamil orgy” that permanently altered the destiny of the country.
The book notes that for years literary and academic works both within and outside Sri Lanka made it known that “Colombo was majorly if not solely to blame for much of the suffering the Tamil community” underwent in the island nation.
However, Swamy argues that “much of the blame for dragging the community through three decades of a horrific war” lies with Prabhakaran.
“...for a pipedream that was Eelam, a war that yielded no solutions, and which ended with his own death alongside the carnage of Tamil civilians and the demise of the LTTE,” he notes.
The intensity of his violence increased multifold as Prabhakaran continued to violently massacre all and sundry who stood against him and his cause including those he doubted of betraying him.
“As years passed, he became a totalitarian, convinced that he was some kind of a demi-god who could do no wrong and who alone had the best interests of the Tamils at heart…Nothing else could have induced him to assassinate leaders like Rajiv Gandhi and Ranasinghe Premadasa,” the book reads.
Through the testimonies of former LTTE guerrillas and other associates of Prabhakaran, the author records a larger sentiment against their leader and his policies that did more harm than good to the Tamil community of Sri Lanka.
“What did a quarter century of brutal violence unleashed by the LTTE against all and sundry achieve for the Tamils?” asks the author, who earlier penned the 2010 book“The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story”.
“The answers, brutally frank, are a clear testimony against the kind of nihilistic politics Prabhakaran preached and practised until his dramatic demise.”
A Tamil nationalist, who was with Prabhakaran until early 2009, told Swamy that Prabhakaran’s reign “set the community back by decades in every sense of the term”.
“Apart from creating conditions for a mammoth number of Sri Lanka Tamils to find their feet in new homes in the West, the LTTE campaign led to nothing tangible for the Tamil community,” he said, as told to the author.
A woman LTTE guerrilla told Swamy soon after his death in 2009 that it was because of Prabhakaran’s campaign that Tamils were now forced to leave the country and seek shelter in the West.
“In 1983, we Tamils were at least standing on our own feet. After a quarter century of bloodshed, today we are on our bended knees. We had our self-respect intact then even if the Sinhalese did not respect us; today, nothing remains.
“We said we want liberation to the Tamil community; today, for our own liberation, we are running away from Sri Lanka and trying to see if someone in some Western country will give us a space to spend the rest of our lives,” the woman Tiger said, as written by Swamy.
In this “stark assessment of Prabhakaran and his politics”, Swamy presents the case that apart from “the short-sighted politicians in Colombo” it was Prabhakaran and the LTTE’s conduct that “inflicted unimaginable torment and torture on the Tamil community”.
The book, published by Konark Publishers, is available on online and offline stores for Rs 895.