The man who destroyed Eelam - Part 2:

Indoctrination of youth

Prabhakaran had everything: territory, international support and committed fighters. 

Senior journalist SHYAM TEKWANI, who has covered the LTTE and Sri Lanka for almost three decades tracks the alarming rise and astonishing fall of a man who sought to live to fight another day, but found only death at the hands of his nemesis

Continued from yesterday

(It is another story that while every instance of a cadre biting into the vial during the course of assorted battles captured headlines, there was barely any mention of the many more who threw the vial away for safety).

While Prabhakaran majestically posed for the camera with his 'cubs' (as he called the children he recruited), there were a few restrictions: He did not like being photographed while satiating his enormous appetite for food. No photographs of his female cadres and none of his dead and dying. These sanctions were lifted after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

Prabhakaran quickly developed a media unit - photographers and videographers - which documented every battle and assassination that the group conducted. This served two purposes - as a teaching aid, it came closest to the real thing next to classroom simulations. Besides, it provided archival material for the history books that would be written once Eelam became a reality. This obsession for a visual record proved disastrous for the LTTE - it led the investigators of Rajiv Gandhi's murder right to its doorstep.

Visiting the group's training camps in the peninsula after Rajiv Gandhi's murder, the first thing I noticed were the baby-faced boys, some not even in their teens. Their field training began with an oath on their leader: "To achieve Tamil Eelam, my life and soul, all this, I sacrifice. We'll be very faithful and trustworthy to our elder brother, Mr Prabhakaran, the leader of our revolutionary organisation. I now begin my training. The thirst of Tigers is Tamil Eelam." This was also repeated at the end of the day when their flag was lowered down the mast.

Their history lessons were an endless litany of hatred against the enemy - only comprising rapists, butchers and racists - and the glories of ancient Tamil kingdoms and kings. Classic indoctrination. The classroom instructions centred around battlefield strategies (on a blackboard with a piece of chalk and some war movies), case studies (reconstructed with videos and photographs) from their previous battles and assassinations and finally a film from an extraordinary video collection of B-grade Hollywood action movies. Rambo was the popular choice.

Adventure

In the prevailing environment of anxiety and hopelessness, Prabhakaran was crafty enough to whip up hatred and give a machine gun to his potential recruits among the boys and girls. The romance of the gun, for a teenager fed on a limitless diet of action movies, hatred for the identified enemy, a sense of purpose and an assurance of immortality, is an aphrodisiac far more potent than the promise of seventy-two virgins in paradise.

The thrill of adventure for a 12-year old Rambo-in-the-making is a mesmerising experience. It invests in him power he could never dream of. The only occasion when I accepted their offer of testing a Kalashnikov was instructive. I fired into the horizon across the sea. As we sauntered away feeling like real men after a few rounds, I suddenly froze in horror. I became aware of my posture and swagger, feeling invincible and indestructible - and realized that, despite the stiffness in my shoulder caused by the weapon's recoil - my arms and legs moved exactly like Rambo, like in the movie I had watched with them in their classroom. If I, a 30-something man of the world, could feel this magical glow of indestructibility shield me from death, it was not difficult to imagine the effect on a 12-year old who knows no other life than the one under Prabhakaran's incantations. The added incentive was that as a cadre, bed and board were provided for on a priority basis in any hamlet that one walked into, brandishing the gun.

If this was not motivation enough, there was then the promise of immortality. Poems and shrines were built in the memory of those who submitted their lives for the cause.

BEHIND LINES

One of the essential experiences of embedding yourself with the LTTE was the interaction with the wild-looking boys, bare-footed and ragged. They were your mates, guides and guardians during the tour of the frontlines and combat zones. When you lived alongside them, shared food and experiences under fire, you tended to bond with them. Survival often depended upon this sense of comradeship. Camaraderie, which relaxed their adherence to the strict code of discipline they were sworn to as they pulled out a deck of cards to kill time between attacks, could lead to bias - however much one guarded oneself against it - especially when in skirmishes in the jungle your camera kit and their Kalashnikovs got entangled.

But you never met the same lot ever again. They were either killed before your next trip or rotated to another location. It was rare to learn anything about them through querying the new batch - since each of them operated under a nom de guerre. One looked for a familiar face on the sea of posters and cutouts of martyrs scattered across the peninsula. Likewise, the innumerable shrines that kept multiplying between visits - shrines in honour of the valorous and where people went to pray with their incense sticks and flowers. There would be an odd sighting or two or a rare letter from some family member sharing their grief of their dead son.

Occasionally, a smartly dressed, well fed stranger would approach you on the street in New York, a wedding in London, a restaurant in Paris or in the shadows of a temple corridor in Thanjavur and identify himself as being a member of the party you accompanied on such and such a trip. Or you would recognise a face in the papers - making the wrong kind of news in a country which had granted him citizenship.

ADELE AND FREEDOM BIRDS

On guard LTTE cadre guarding the waterfront from the ramparts of the destroyed Dutch fort

Civil control Cadre at their checkpost controlling civilian movements in their territory in Kilinochchi

Killing time Cadre with a deck of cards- a rare anomaly in a group famed for its iron discipline

Taking stock Prabakaran in his safari-suit with the BalasinghamsThe Freedom Birds - as the girls were now called - were the ace up Prabhakaran's sleeve. With the IPKF steadily depleting his manpower among the rank and file, Prabhakaran had to turn even more to the girls and children to replenish his forces. The task of inducting the girls was assigned to "Auntie" Adele Balasingham. Girls, at this point, were banded together as the Students Organisation of Liberation Tigers (SOLT) and were used in peripheral roles as befitted their status in Jaffna society - in servitude, ushering in crowds at an event, distributing pamphlets, reciting poems extolling the greatness of their National Leader or singing paeans in honour of a recent suicide bomber. Adele's task was made easy by the prevailing oppressive caste and class system and the alleged atrocities of the IPKF. She offered the guarantee of emancipating the girls from the traditional role of Tamil women by fighting shoulder to shoulder with the boys in pursuit of their freedom. A few months after the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, during a conversation in Jaffna, she would proudly claim: "The most historic development for the Jaffna woman in recent years is her confidence."

Following the death, by cancer in 2007, of her husband Anton Balasingham, the self-described theoretician, chief negotiator and political advisor to Prabhakaran, Adele continues to actively work for her leader quietly and away from the media glare from her base in London.

THE DEPUTIES

Gopalaswamy Mahendraraja, better known by his nom de guerre Mahathaya, Prabhakaran's extremely popular deputy, could have easily been mistaken for Prabhakaran by anyone whose only awareness of the LTTE leaders was based on a perfunctory glance at media photographs. They were built alike and sprouted thick moustaches. In Prabhakaran's presence, Mahathaya was almost hunched in servility, respectful and barely uttering a word until spoken to. His transformation on the battlefield, however, was amazing.

Mahathaya's silence was compensated by Yogi's loud voice. It was with Yogi that Prabhakaran seemed to share an easy relationship. Laughing and joking over a Chinese lunch, the two seemed to be best buddies. Yogi strutted with his convent-educated English - much in the manner of a subordinate who wants to appear as an equal in the presence of people he seeks to impress; Mahathaya was diffident and respectful in the presence of authority, his leader. On the battlefield, as I joined the motley bunch Mahathaya led against the advancing army, I could barely associate him with the deputy who almost scraped in servility in the presence of his boss. Yogi was the well-scrubbed, smooth and oily politician, Mahathaya the dutiful and popular army commander.

When Mahathaya marched into Trincomalee at the head of a big army of freshly uniformed cadres along with Yogi to watch the back of the last IPKF soldier disappear from view in March 1990, they took to the podium to thank the big crowds the LTTE had corralled at the town's stadium. Yogi included the media in his thanksgiving and singled out a couple of us by name as those who had fought as much as they for their struggle. Barely over a year later, with Rajiv murdered and the investigation clearly pointing to the LTTE as his killers, Yogi's first reaction upon greeting me in Jaffna was a bitter utterance of "yellow journalist" accompanied by a ferocious mouthful of spit at me, while Balasingham and Adele watched in grim silence. World opinion was beginning to weigh heavily against them. Their nerves were clearly on edge.

Prabhakaran denied any role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and instead set into motion an elaborate exercise to disprove Dhanu's (Rajiv Gandhi's killer) link with the LTTE. Meetings were set up with her 'parents', neighbours, and 'friends' all over the peninsula. At the end of the long day, after a snack of hot vadas at their thatched roof headquarters near Jaffna town, when my increasing skepticism of their charade began to get the better of their gentle persuasiveness, Balasingham and Yogi pushed back their chairs and declared the meeting over. The parting shot was as astounding as it was petty - pay for the vadas you just ate. When I awoke the next morning, the bicycle I depended on to traverse the peninsula was gone. Their fabled public relations machinery was beginning to crack and yet unknown to the world, trouble was brewing within.

A year later, in a move that stunned his followers, Prabhakaran struck against Mahathaya who he had anointed as his deputy during the war against the IPKF in 1987. Accusing him of treachery and collaborating with the Indians against him, Prabhakaran placed Mahathaya in custody, liquidated most of Mahathaya's troops and decisively crushed a potential rival to his supremacy as leader. Mahathaya was executed after a prolonged period of torture in December 1994. Yogi, whose loyalty too came under suspicion, was consigned to the doghouse to expect a similar fate. After years in anxious oblivion, he reappeared as head of the LTTE's History Division on Black Tigers Day, the commemoration of suicide bombers, in July 2006. He spoke on the occasion and asked, "Weren't bombs made to blow up and kill men? So why is there such a cry when only a man becomes a human bomb?" He was subsequently rehabilitated to his current position as military advisor in the Vanni. Balasingham and his wife Adele rose even more higher in their leader's estimate. The Balasinghams - who posed no threat of any sort to their master - became the face of the organisation across Western capitals and were an essential part of all negotiating teams at various times.

THE TAMIL 'STATE'

Prabakaran's moment of triumph in ejecting the IPKF (March 1990) out of his domain, powered him with greater confidence. He felt vindicated in his belief that Eelam was a reality within his grasp. His surviving boys had gained invaluable experience during the thirty months of 'vanquishing the fourth-largest army in the world'; the girls had proved their worth and were now battle-hardened; recruiting was never easier, his stock with his donors, the Tamil diaspora, was at its peak; and the media doted on him as their new darling.

It was at this point that he tightened the security around him and set about the task of constructing a state within a state. He reintroduced taxation on his population, decreed the LTTE flag as the Tamil national flag, set up courts, police stations and 'ministries' that oversaw agriculture, education, rehabilitation and economic development.

But his main preoccupation was in developing a conventional armed force. Military traditions - a formal ranking system, uniforms, gun salutes, parades, ceremonial funerals of flag draped cadres killed in action - became the norm. Sarongs and flip-flops gave way to smartly pressed uniforms and spit-and-polish boots. Twenty years before he acquired the half-a-dozen ZLIN-143 aircraft to boast of being the only terrorist group in the world to possess an air wing, I was led to the LTTE's "ordnance factory" in Manipay in 1985 to witness and photograph the aircraft his "aeronautical engineers" were assembling. The fact that it had a 200cc motorcycle engine to power it did not mask his intent to attempt building a conventional Armed Force, with its land, air and sea wings. "Geographically", he stressed at the very beginning, "the security of Tamil Eelam is interlinked with that of its seas."

He then turned against his benefactor, the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe. Premadasa, who had colluded with him to evict the IPKF and kept him on his toes until Prabhakaran had him killed by a suicide bomber three years later in1993.

DIASPORA

Martyrs gallery Civilians paying homage to suicide bombers on Black Tigers' Day

Female squad Black Tigers at a parade in MullaitivuIn his annual Heroes Day speech - that he delivers a day after his birthday - Prabhakaran, in November 2006 made his first direct appeal to the diaspora in funding the 'Final War' he had launched in July after the European Union joined a growing list of countries that had proscribed the group. Funds were drying up. "We express our gratitude to the Tamil Diaspora, our displaced brethren living all around the world, for their contribution to our struggle and ask them to maintain their unwavering participation and support."

This was in marked contrast to rebuking them for being "quitters" and "losers" in the late 1980s. Donations, however, have not always been voluntary.

Following the crackdown on the LTTE by Canada and The European Union in 2006, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a report on their 4-year investigation (Operation Osaluki) into the Canadian fundraising efforts of the Tamil Tigers. The report revealed that the LTTE subjects Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada and other Western countries to intimidation, extortion and even violence to ensure a steady flow of funds for its operations.

COSTLY MISTAKE

When Rajiv Gandhi was on the political comeback trail in May 1991, Prabhakaran wasted no time in executing a pre-emptive strike. He dispatched his homegrown poet, Kasi Anandan - who had only a year ago thrilled the victorious LTTE cadres at a gathering in Trincomalee with his description of the IPKF as the Italian-Parsi Killing Force - to lull any apprehensions that anyone might have about the former Prime Minister's security. The ruse, clearly, worked.

Except that Prabakaran's fool-proof plan did not count on having his photographer killed with the evidence against him intact on his body. The murder of Rajiv Gandhi by the world's first woman suicide bomber set in motion a process that has finally come to destroy his ambition. India proscribed the group and though it took the United States six years to follow the lead and the 9/11 attacks to give the proscription some teeth, the new security climate induced other passive supporters of the LTTE in Western capitals to ban the outfit in their countries.

With international opinion against him, Prabhakaran retreated into his hideouts, eased himself out of the media spotlight, only granting even rarer access to international media to lamely deny any hand in his dastardly act. He now began wearing the black thread of his cyanide vial outside his shirt in an ostentatious display of his commitment to the cause. The holster with his pistol now found place outside his camouflage shirt signaling that he was no more 'Thambi' (younger brother) or 'Anna' (elder brother) to his followers nor merely the National Leader of Tamil Eelam but the Supreme Commander of the LTTE.

The recently released photographs from the treasure trove of albums that the Sri Lankan troops found in the fleeing Prabhakaran's house are very instructive. The black string holding the vial of cyanide has disappeared in a number of images where he is with his family. Neither is his son, equally portly, seen to be wearing one even with his combat fatigues.

HUMAN SHIELDS

From the very beginning it was apparent that he would make 'people' his buzz word. First, declare he was on the path he had chosen for their sake, to liberate them. Second, attack the enemy over the shoulders of civilians to provoke an enraged counterattack that would kill innocents and garner him publicity at low cost. Finally, shield himself from attacks by closing all their exits at the point of his guns.

The bulk of LTTE's attacks against the IPKF were initiated around the core strategy of using civilians as shields. The IPKF helicopter gunship attack in Chavakachcheri was one such classic example. The LTTE positioned its gunmen in the most crowded part of the town - the market - to fire provocatively in the directions of the choppers that were flying at a safe distance from ground fire.

At the Chavakachcheri morgue where families of victims were hurling anti-Indian abuses at me, a middle-aged woman took me aside. Apologising for the hostility of the mourners, she muttered, "Hitler killed not his own people, but Jews. But Prabhakaran is killing Tamil people." Civilians as human shields clearly appears to be a central part of Prabhakaran's strategy to escape from his present entrapment.