The Hindu : KARUNA'S CONFESSIONS

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 15, 2004

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KARUNA'S CONFESSIONS

THE LIBERATION TIGERS of Tamil Eelam have always publicly denied responsibility for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. In his April 2002 press conference in a jungle clearance, the LTTE Supremo, Velupillai Prabakaran, came up with the mother of all evasions: he described the killing as an "unfortunate event that happened many years ago" and advised India not to live in the past. The man in effective military command of thousands of Tiger troops in eastern Sri Lanka, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, better known as Karuna, was a top Tiger until he seceded from Prabakaran's set-up recently. In characterising the Rajiv assassination as the "gravest mistake of the intelligence wing" of the LTTE, he has ripped off the pall of evasion the organisation has placed over the horrendous crime. Karuna's confession, in an interview to The Hindu, is the first public acknowledgement by a leading Tiger of the LTTE's authorship of the assassination and its consequences. For India, the hand behind the assassination has been established investigatively and judicially: Accused No. 1, Prabakaran, and No. 2, Pottu Amman, the organisation's intelligence chief (whom Karuna characterises as "a terrorist" pure and simple), are nothing but criminal fugitives from justice. Karuna's statement should reinforce India's resolve not to grant the LTTE any legitimacy.

The rebel LTTE military leader has made another explosive admission: Eelam is a pipe-dream; even Prabakaran has forsaken this, preferring instead to negotiate for "a federal system and internal self-determination"; given the international circumstances and India's stand, the armed struggle for a separate Tamil Eelam is unwinnable and its prolongation will only bring "destruction on both sides." Karuna has also done a service to the cause of keeping Sri Lanka one by speaking up on an issue that has simmered among generations of Sri Lankan Tamils but until now has not been acknowledged by the partisans of Eelam — the resentment that Tamils in the East feel at being hegemonised by a Northern leadership that claims to speak for all Sri Lankan Tamils. It may well be that Karuna's slogan of autonomy for the East from the North is a product of expediency. After all, as one of the top commanders of the LTTE, he was in the forefront of the group's battlefield manoeuvres for control of a unified North-East. Even so, his stand should open debate on one of the toughest issues that must be resolved in forging a political solution to Sri Lanka's Tamil question. The issue does not, of course, concern Tamils alone. The East is also home to Muslims and Sinhalese, who together constitute today an overwhelming majority of the region's population and are wary of the demand for a unified North-East because Tigerism has meant ethnic cleansing, terrorism and instability.

In throwing the gauntlet before the LTTE, Karuna challenges the political leadership of Sri Lankan Tamils to think boldly and break away from the military tyranny of the island's Pol Pot. For sure, this rebel is no saint. He was, after all, the mastermind behind many of the LTTE's horrific actions against civilians in the East — Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese. A question that cannot be answered at this juncture is whether by fixing the responsibility for his rebellion on second-rungers who "influence" the LTTE leader, Karuna is keeping his door open for an unlikely but remotely possible reconciliation. Still, his revolt, the questions it raises and the possibilities it offers, should provoke all Sri Lankans to think differently, to reflect on the calamitous course the twenty-year civil war has taken, and to ensure success for the process of crafting an enduring political settlement along federal lines within a united Sri Lanka.

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