Tamil Tigers the real culprits behind Sri Lankan War

By Udara Soysa and Satchi Sithananthan

"We lie truly and genuinely in order to unravel a hue complication that we got into; we truly tell the lie as the truth and the truth as the lie. We do so and so does Ranil." So said V. Balakumar, former leader of EROS and later became a confidante of the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Eelamurasu Weekly 15-21 May 2003.

(May 20, Atlanta-Frankfurt, Sri Lanka Guardian) During the dawn hour of July 27, 1975, Velupillai Prabhakaran viciously desecrated the Jaffna city and its citizens by the horrendous killing of Mayor Alfred Duryappah, a kindly good man adored by the people of this city which also had a considerable population of Muslims as well.

Prabhakaran at that time was hardly twenty years old, a school drop out from Grade Eight and was meddling with revolvers and pistols. He made a habit of stealing bicycles and already at this age shown he lacked such human characteristics as conscience and compassion. He was certainly growing into a thug who would practice his violent domination of others from a distant spot or hideout.

Mayor Duryappah was in no way an enemy of his, he hardly knew him but he became a target of his violent ambition just because there were those people, Tamil politicians prominent at that time, who would have loved to eliminate him. Prabhakaran merely obliged them and with this hideous act, he saw a flash in his life a career of his own. He never looked back and there young people who admired the violence of the kind he began to generate to bring the entire community under their mercy.

Prabhakaran never had a political ideology of his own but simply parroted what the Tamil United Front had come to take up and to this, he added the weapon of terror not just anti-Sinhala but anti-everything that was critical of his pursuits.

What he did at the temple premises that July morning was unspeakable. Its consequence was evil. “This act of callous cowardice, devoid of any sense of responsibility, cast its dark shadow over the emerging youth militancy. ‘I killed Durayappah’ referring to a defenseless and pretty harmless and humble man became the qualification and rallying cry for aspirants to the Prabhakaran brand of nationalist vanguard. We are now living with its consequences.” (Quoted and observed from the reports of the University teachers of Human Rights - Jaffna)

What befell the Tamil community after the killing of Jaffna’s mayor is history now. For the next thirty years, Tamils in Northeast would undergo immense suffering while the next Tamil generation became sorely affected and ruined by the false adherence to Prabhakaran’s violent overtures to them. It was a gambit he played relentlessly and a tame community was incensed with anti-Sinhala and even anti-Muslim tirade that very soon the Tamils began to see and appreciate only the dream that he fantasized, Tamil Eelam over nearly one-third of entire Sri Lanka.

He was never amenable to any decent and acceptable solution to the ethic problem not even what Indian’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi managed to wrench out of the wily President Junius Jayawardene which recognized the north and east as traditional homelands of the Tamils. Prabhakaran wanted sole administration of the Tigers of these two provinces or nothing and it was nothing he chose because he had no political sense whatsoever.

In fact, this being his attitude, some people in the Tamil community began to suspect that he only wanted to set up a mafia smuggler state on Sri Lankan soil. Having followed from stealing bicycles in his teenage years and proceeded to bank robberies, Prabhakaran enjoying some political support or shall we say, people turning blind in their eyes and deaf in their ears, he embarked on a phase of terror against some liberation groups that had emerged to fight the cause of the Tamils. He toytally decimated them.

Terror took hold of the community like a plague that descended on it overnight and Prabhakaran made gold out of the straw of ethnic issues that were not being sorted out by successive governments. Colombo governments were bereft of visions and allowed racial and religious fanatics among the majority community to call the tune. Prabhakaran capitalized on it.

His next chapter of violence was to decimate police officers to secure control over the community and the consistent systematic killing of Tamil and Sinhala leaders and all the moderate political elements in the Tamil community whom he considered uncomfortable to his ideas and plans.

Unfortunately for the Tamils in particular Prabhakaran has secured for himself an aura of invincibility not because he was courageous and brave and had something positive to offer but because either a good majority of Tamils were tame and scared of him and some benefited from the kind of underworld he had begun to establish. Foremost among his underworld activities was alien smuggling that gave him the connection with the Diaspora and once this was established, there was no looking back for him.

Today, LTTE is completely wiped out of Sri Lanka. However, at the brink of its destruction last week Tiger leadership made the following enlightened observation. "I believe that over the 38 years we fight and only the civilian and human life are every day dying. The...in another 30 years will continue we don't believe that - we believe in peaceful way for solution for Tamil people. - KP "

Why did it take the Tigers 38 years to realize the destruction that they caused to Tamils by their terror struggle towards Eelam state? Tiger leadership was comfortable sending other people's children to war for the last 38 years. However, when the death god was knocking at the doors of Prabhakaran and his son, this strange enlightment came to the minds of Tiger leadership

Fortunately for Sri Lankans, Prabhakaran's terror regime of lies, death, destruction and suicide bombs came to an end, providentially yesterday with the entire LTTE literally wiped out and its dream dashed, and hopefully for ever.

Courtesy: The Telegraph

Udara Soysa and Satchi Sithananthan are associate editors of Sri Lanka Guardian. udara@srilankaguardian.org

-Sri Lanka Guardian