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LTTE supremo’s plaint

The proof, if any were required, of the complete isolation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam from the modern world came in bold letters in the 2007 ‘Hero’s Day Statement’ of its Pol Potist leader, Velupillai Prabakaran. It is an extraordinary confession of political frustration. The 2,700-word speech is a litany of grievances against everyone under the sun — except the talented military leader who has brought such cruelty, suffering, and uncer tainty to his own people and of course their compatriots belonging to other ethnic communities in the island. Thus Mr. Prabakaran blames the international community for the collapse of the Norwegian brokered 2002 Cease Fire Agreement and the plight of hundreds of thousands of people caught in the ongoing undeclared war between the armed forces and the much-weakened, down-but-not-yet-out LTTE. Mr. Prabakaran’s latest plaint is that the world has been infected by ‘Sinhala chauvinism’; that it has ganged up with the Sri Lankan government to “suppress the legitimate freedom struggle” of the Tamils; and indeed that the international community is committing the “same mistake” India did two decades ago. No reference of course to what really happened post-July 1987, such as the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the numerous acts of extremism and terrorism.

It is a telling commentary on the Pol Potist vision kept alive in a bunker in the Wanni jungles that Mr. Prabakaran does not ask himself how and why the world looks and acts towards his organisation the way it does. That he lacks the faculty of introspection is evident in the gulf between precept and practice. Less than 14 hours after morally beseeching the world to counsel Colombo not to pursue a “military solution” to Sri Lanka’s ethnic question, Mr. Prabakaran had no qualms in deploying a physically disabled woman suicide bomber in the nth attempt on the life of his mortal enemy and Social Welfare Minister, Douglas Devananda. Twenty-four hours after that, an LTTE squad set off a parcel bomb in a popular apparel shop on the outskirts of Colombo, taking 19 innocent lives. Sri Lanka’s unresolved ethnic problem, the Tamil question, cannot be resolved by military means. The just and sustainable solution waits to be negotiated along federal lines within the framework of Sri Lankan unity and integrity. But what most of the world understands today is not just that the terrorist LTTE is constitutionally incapable of accepting that kind of solution. The Tamil question cannot be resolved in any just and enduring way as long as the LTTE remains a politico-military force to reckon with — or at least as long as Mr. Prabakaran remains its supremo.

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