Prabhakaran’s speech confession of frustration - The Hindu
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, The Hindu said in an editorial on Saturday.
The editorial: “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 uncertainty to his own people and
of course their compatriots belonging to other ethnic communities in the
island.
Thus 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.
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 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, 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 Prabakaran remains its supremo. |