End of a Pol Pot-ist dream
N. Ram
The bloody end came in a sliver of nondescript coastline near the
fallen garrison town of Mullaitivu in Sri Lanka’s North-East. Velupillai
Prabhakaran the founder and supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam - one of the world’s most feared extremist organisations - had
made a last stand that had pointlessness writ all over it. The
charismatic 54-year-old perished along with his senior commanders and
hundreds of fighters - including his elder son - with hardly anyone able
to figure out what the final strategy was.
Tamil Eelam
Prabhakaran’s war of ‘national liberation’ for a separate, Pol Pot-ist
state of Tamil Eelam was over. Belying conventional wisdom, the Sri
Lankan State had found a military solution to what used to be regarded
as an intractable secessionist and terrorist challenge.
Security Forces personnel’s sacrifices are not in vain. ANCL
file photo |
There has been justifiable international concern over the
humanitarian crisis that came to the fore during the endgame. The
civilian toll has by no means been light, and the challenge of dealing
humanely and justly with nearly 300,000 displaced Tamils, including
those who supported the LTTE - willingly or under duress - faces Sri
Lanka. The task of relief, de-mining, rehabilitation and reconciliation
is daunting. The situation cries out for massive external assistance to
Sri Lanka - but also for an approach that looks sympathetically ahead
instead of obsessively going over what went wrong.
Human shield
In my opinion, the international - and especially west European -
response has got it wrong on two counts. There has been a tendency to
mechanically balance responsibility for the crisis, and therefore to
equate the desperate, last-ditch actions of an extremist organisation -
banned or designated as terrorist by some 30 countries including India -
with the responses of a legitimate government. Second, justice has not
been done to Mahinda Rajapaksa Government for its astonishing feat of
rescuing by military means close to 275,000 civilians who were, in the
view of the whole world, confined by the Tigers for use as a human
shield.
But as I watched the images of terrified men, women and children
fleeing their ‘protectors’ across the lagoon, I reflected on how it
might have all been so different. If only the organisation that started
out in the 1970s with some kind of emancipatory political vision, and
even idealism, had not turned Pol Pot-ist in its horrific disregard for
human life and welfare. If only its leader, a military and
organisational genius - whom I interviewed in Chennai in the mid-1980s
and met one last time, at his request, in Jaffna in August 1987 - had
not turned into a tyrannical practitioner of the end justifying the
means. The circumstances in which I got to know Prabhakaran in the
mid-80s seem a world apart from last month’s poignant scenes.
Military groups
The July 1983 pogrom against Sri Lankan Tamils generated in India,
and especially in the Southern State of Tamil Nadu, a tremendous amount
of emotional sympathy, practical solidarity - and clouded judgement.
Re-reading my interviews I am struck by how clouded the assumptions
behind India’s post-1983 policy were, and how tragic the effects on the
ground.
On the one hand, the basic political objective of India’s activist
policy was moderate and constructive. It was to help win security,
justice and a decent measure of self-administering opportunities for the
Tamils living in the North-East, within the framework of Sri Lanka’s
unity and territorial integrity.
On the other hand, the policy worked on the assumption that in order
to put pressure on the Sri Lankan Government, it was necessary to build
up the armed militant groups, and above all the LTTE, in various
controlled ways.
Official policy
Among other things, it involved the old-fashioned dilemma of ends
versus means. But it was not just a case of official policy gone wrong.
Along with many journalists and intellectuals in South India, I shared
these assumptions. We believed that Prabhakaran, despite
contra-indications, would work with India to shape a future for his
people based on equality, democratic and human rights, and devolution or
autonomy along Federal lines within a united Sri Lanka. Subsequent
events demonstrated that for this man there would be no alternative.
As the years went by and several opportunities for a negotiated
political solution fell by the wayside, the one thing that remained
constant was the LTTE’s uncompromising secessionism and militarism.
Along with this came a rising graph of terrorist crimes.
Ceasefire agreement
Most insurgent leaders, you would think, would have seized the
opportunity offered by the ceasefire agreement of February 2002, which
was criticised for being overly generous to the LTTE.
Tragically, Prabhakaran - seeing it mainly as an opportunity to
re-arm his organisation and strengthen its parallel state structure in
the territory it controlled - did everything conceivable to make the
peace process falter and fail.
“It was worse than a crime, a blunder”, is a saying of the Napoleonic
era, attributed to Talleyrand. If the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
by an LTTE squad dispatched by Prabhakaran made a permanent enemy of
India; if his paranoiac suspiciousness and intolerance of dissent
triggered a revolt in 2004 by his powerful military commander,
Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan aka Colonel Karuna - and fractured the
organisation; if all this was the case, then the boycott enforced in the
LTTE-controlled areas during the 2005 Presidential election which
facilitated Rajapaksa’s victory over the ceasefire architect, Ranil
Wickremasinghe - was an akratic act that defied all rational
explanation. It proved to be the blunder of a lifetime.
Courtesy: The
Guardian, Tuesday June 2 |