The mirage of Eelam
Malini PARTHASARATHY
The LTTE’s shortsighted and adventurist
positions have cost the Tamil ethnic cause dearly even as valuable time
has been lost in the failure to consolidate the gains achieved through
political negotiations.
With more than a 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils breaking free and escaping
the intense fighting in northern Sri Lanka between the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan Army, the myth that the
island’s Tamils regard the LTTE as their sole protector and Eelam as
their only hope is shattered.
It is becoming increasingly evident, as the catastrophic dimensions
of the human tragedy unfold, that the thousands of suffering civilians
trapped in the thin wedge of LTTE-held territory were being used as
human shields by the desperate terrorists now on the run.
Distraught
The pictures published daily, which show distraught and anxious Tamil
families walking through slushy fields and backwaters and jumping into
small boats to ferry them out of the nightmare, make clear that the
Tamil community is no longer willing to be held hostage by the
blood-soaked designs of the LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The world is understandably perturbed by the spectacle of hundreds of
thousands of civilians being forced to flee their homes and herded into
overflowing refugee camps in Vavuniya and Mannar with limited supplies
of water and food. Yet the U N and other international agencies appear
to have acknowledged that it is the LTTE which is primarily responsible
for this disastrous situation.
Conflict
While urging the Sri Lankan Government to give access to the conflict
zones to be able to provide help to the stranded Tamil civilians, the U
N has firmly placed the onus of defusing the current situation on the
LTTE. The Security Council has demanded that the LTTE immediately lay
down arms, renounce terrorism, and join the political process through
dialogue.
The historical influx of civilians from Tiger-controlled
areas. |
Of course it would be unrealistic to expect that the LTTE, which has
spent more than two decades in a ruthless militaristic quest for
hegemony in the Tamil political arena at the expense of all else, will
suddenly see the light and surrender. If anything, the LTTE’s ceaseless
self-aggrandizement has been the biggest impediment in the long struggle
for equal rights for Tamils in Sri Lanka.
This is indeed a moment of reckoning for the LTTE, which has had a
fascist stranglehold over the Tamils in northern Sri Lanka and has been
designated a terrorist organization and proscribed in more than 30
countries. For Tamil Nadu’s politicians to continue to portray the LTTE
as a brave liberation force and to lionize Prabhakaran, the man behind
the assassination of a former Prime Minister of India, represents a
betrayal not only of Indian national sentiment but also of the Sri
Lankan Tamil cause.
Viciousness
A lot of the LTTE’s viciousness and destructiveness was directed not
at the so-called Sinhala enemies but within the Tamil political movement
itself, targeting and eliminating courageous and visionary leaders such
as Appapillai Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam of the TULF, whose
lives were entirely devoted to the Tamil ethnic cause.
As those familiar with the twists and turns of the Sri Lankan Tamil
struggle know, the situation today is radically different from that
which existed in 1983 when the Sri Lankan Tamil tragedy burst into
international consciousness as a result of the ‘Black July’ pogrom
against the island’s Tamils by Sinhala chauvinists. In 1983, the Tamils
were a truly dispossessed people denied even basic democratic rights and
equal citizenship rights by an oppressive Sri Lankan state dominated by
the Sinhala majority.
For decades the Tamils did not have an effective political leadership
to articulate their just demands, with the mild-mannered leaders of the
Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) being seen as ineffective in
countering Sinhala majority chauvinism.
Thus the romantic aura that surrounded the young militants, or the
‘boys’ as they were affectionately called, who burst on the scene in the
early 1980s with their various groups, Prabhakaran himself, Sri
Sabaratnam of TELO, Uma Maheswaran of PLOTE, and K. Padmanabha of EPRLF,
reflected the hunger of Sri Lankan Tamils for strong heroes who would
lead them in the struggle against Sinhala majoritarian oppression.
One reason for the romanticization of these militant groups by the
Sri Lankan Tamil community was its perception that from 1948, the Sri
Lankan state had been impervious to the pleas of the Tamil community to
amend the discriminatory state policies favouring the Sinhala majority,
including making Sinhala the only official language, thereby rendering
Tamils outsiders in their own country.
It seemed to the Sri Lankan Tamil community that it was not until the
rise of Tamil militancy that Colombo felt the need to sit up and listen
to the angry voices of the alienated Tamils.
Dramatic moments that caught the international imagination such as
the Thimpu Declaration in 1985 by the five Tamil militant groups, which
asserted that Tamils were a nation with the right to self determination
and a homeland, perceptibly increased the pressure on the Sri Lankan
state to respond to the demand for power sharing with the Tamil
minority.
But very soon that goodwill for these groups evaporated as signs of
their proclivity for extreme violence emerged in their savage
internecine fighting. One by one, TELO, PLOTE and EPRLF were devoured by
the LTTE, which was determined to establish its hegemony as the ‘sole
representative’ of the Tamil people.
Devolution
Even as other groups, led by the TULF were using India’s good offices
to press Colombo for a framework that would devolve powers to the Tamils
and allow for a merger of the northern and eastern provinces that could
constitute a Tamil homeland, the LTTE was disdainful of these parleys.
Thus a pathbreaking achievement like the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement of
July 1987, which marked a paradigm shift in Sri Lanka and promised a
genuine transition to a federal type of power sharing structure, was
undermined not by Sinhala chauvinists but by the LTTE.
The Hindu |