The Man Who Destroyed Eelam- part 3:

Decline of Prabhakaran and Eelam dream

Continued from yesterday

The from-the-very-beginning futile exercise took its toll on three of the four LTTE delegates. Balasingham, the “chief negotiator” was gravely ill and had to remain in Europe along with Adele for his prolonged treatment. Karuna Amman (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan), Prabakaran’s commander in the East, was being wooed by peacemakers to part ways with his leader. Meanwhile, the global war on terrorism was increasingly being read as the global war on Islamic terror, which meant the international community was too preoccupied to bother about non- Islamic outfits like the LTTE.

How then did an insurgency, that seized legitimate political grievances as a foundation for terrorism and sustained martyrdom by quasi-religious zealotry, fail in its objective?

From being credited as the world’s most successful and ruthless terrorist to losing nearly all of 15,000 sq. kms of territory in two years requires some doing. Both Prabhakaran and the government of Sri Lanka have had their turns grabbing and then losing territory.

The Descent

In July 2001, marking the anniversary of Black July of 1983, Prabhakaran staged stunning attacks on the Sri Lankan Air Force base and the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo, wiping out half the country’s civil aviation fleet, in addition to a few military aircraft. With Sri Lanka’s army in a deadlock, the navy restrained and the air fleet neutralized, the success of this attack, once again, placed Prabhakaran at the upper end of the plank that Colombo and he had been see-sawing upon for two decades.

Barely two months later, the planes that brought the twin towers crashing down in New York on September 9, laid the ground for the emergence of a new world order where the world was divided into the good guys rooting for a global war on terrorism and the bad guys who attacked governments in pursuit of their evil goals. The seed was thus sown for Prabhakaran’s decline and the slow destruction of Eelam. He was beginning to get undone by an event thousands of miles away and over which he had no control.

It was not that Prabhakaran did not attempt to adapt to the new world order. To shift the spotlight away from himself, he declared a ceasefire, came out of hiding, without his moustache and his falling hair dyed brilliantly black, sued for peace under Norwegian facilitation and announced his first press conference in a dozen years. His many websites removed all material that would be deemed offensive (virtual training camps where one could learn to forge a passport or make a bomb, for example) in the new environment, and wore safari suits to mould himself in the image of Nelson Mandela, the statesman he was quoting profusely on his sites and in his conversations.

His first and only international press conference (April 2002) at his administrative headquarters in Killinochchi was a disaster. His experience with the media, confined to a few one-on-one interviews with select journalists, had not prepared him for this. He seemed bewildered and clearly out of his depth facing a mixed pack of journalists whose two-day uncomfortable wait was alleviated only by the non-stop screening of LTTE propaganda videos. His image makeover, as a clean-shaven, safari-suited statesman, failed to impress anyone. Announcing his idea of peace involving the Norwegians as peacemakers, he first fumbled and then chose the safer option of avoiding all questions - mostly related to the murder of Rajiv Gandhi and his own demand for a separate state - and passed on the microphone to his interpreter Balasingham. Balasingham declared that his leader was the President and Prime Minister of Tamil Eelam and that he and Mr Prabhakaran were the “same’’ and that he was the LTTE leader’s “voice.” This set the tone for what was to follow.

After six rounds of talks for peace between September 2002 to March 2003, across four countries, Prabhakaran was back to what he had perfected over the years since the Thimpu talks in 1985 - stonewall, provoke and renege on an agreement and fully lay the blame for the breakdown of talks on the other party.

The from-the-very-beginning futile exercise took its toll on three of the four LTTE delegates. Balasingham, the “chief negotiator” was gravely ill and had to remain in Europe along with Adele for his prolonged treatment. Karuna Amman (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan), Prabakaran’s commander in the East, was being wooed by peacemakers to part ways with his leader. Meanwhile, the global war on terrorism was increasingly being read as the global war on Islamic terror, which meant the international community was too preoccupied to bother about non- Islamic outfits like the LTTE.

The CFA (Ceasefire Agreement) went into cold limbo. Skirmishes broke out and violations of the agreement accumulated. The Scandinavian countries comprising the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission recorded 3,830 violations by the LTTE against 351 by the Government of Sri Lanka between 20 February 2002 and 30 April 2007.

In March 2004, Prabhakaran tried averting the crisis he saw coming his way by summoning Karuna to Jaffna on an official pretext. Karuna had learnt his lessons from the Mahathaya experience. He ignored the summons and split the seemingly monolithic outfit, taking with him a big chunk of the battle-hardened fighters he had trained. With the East in turmoil, Prabhakaran saw his Eelam beginning to shrink. Months later, the tsunami further breached the LTTE’s wall of impregnability, damaging its bases along the northeastern coast.

Chandrika Kumaratunga, then heading the government after having survived a suicide bomber attack, quickly learnt from Prabhakaran’s successful diplomatic offensives. She dispatched her Tamil Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, to world capitals on a mission to get the international community to act against the LTTE’s interests in their respective countries. Kadirgamar was beginning to notch up diplomatic successes, having got the United Kingdom to proscribe the group in 2001. He was killed by a LTTE sniper in August 2005 just when he seemed on the verge of getting some more countries to proscribe the group.

And when the elections came the following year (2005), Prabhakaran compounded his earlier mistakes. He ensured - by forbidding Tamils to cast their vote - the victory of somebody who, he believed, was yet another politician even more infirm of purpose than his predecessors and therefore of immense value to his plans, little realising that he would finally be meeting his nemesis in the Rajapaksa administration. Peace is inimical to Prabhakaran’s existence. The new government started office, as all new governments in Colombo were wont to do, with a call for peace. After one round of ceasefire talks in 2006, Prabhakaran was back to business. His woes of the three previous years in his new avatar of ‘statesman politician’ were proving to him that he just was not cut out to be a man of peace.

In his 2006 November annual speech, after his attempts to assassinate the Chief of the Army and the Secretary of Defence in Colombo, he rued, “We postponed our plan to advance our freedom struggle twice to give even more chances to the peace efforts, once when the tsunami disaster struck and again when President Rajapaksa was elected.”

He set out to reassert his authority over the East - and faced an army that was well-armed and well-trained and motivated as never before and one that was working with unprecedented intelligence provided by his breakaway commander, Karuna. Prabhakaran lost the East - and from there on, he lorded over an unending series of military defeats.

From among the many reasons being attributed to his incredulously rapid downfall, the one that would without any trouble resonate with those who have dealt with Prabhakaran would be his sense of supreme self-importance. He is seen as a megalomaniac who hijacked the legitimate grievances of the Tamils to gratify his vision of himself and failed to see that the switch from guerilla band to conventional army would be disastrous.

For the sanguinary among us - the chief reason for his downfall was the failure of his legendary Black Tiger suicide bombers and his celebrated Intelligence chief, Pottu Amman.

For someone who pioneered the use - and masterminded remarkable innovations - of suicide bombers, Prabhakaran’s Black Tigers seemed to have reached a dead-end. President Chandrika Kumaratunga was the first miracle of the Eelam war - as the first ever survivor of a Black Tiger attack, at an election rally in December 1999.

Then came the failures in 2006 that cost him everything - General Sarath Fonseka, Commander of the Sri Lanka Army became the second survivor of a suicide attack in April. Prabhakaran’s trusted tool of political persuasion, the Black Tiger, was beginning to let him down. And when Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Secretary of the Defence and the brother of the President escaped a suicide attack in December, it was curtains for Prabhakaran. The last two failures led to his destruction. Clearly, Prabhakaran was facing a short supply of efficient Black Tigers. He was desperate enough to use recruits whose mental aptitude didn’t match their ferocious commitment. A woman bomber sent to kill the Tamil Cabinet Minister, Douglas Devananda, in his Colombo office in November 2007, triggered her bra bomb when she discovered her target was not available for the day, killing herself and the Minister’s secretary.

Meeting his match

The other factor that led to his precipitous defeat is that Prabhakaran did not count on the troika (the President, the Army Chief and the Defence Secretary) calling his bluff. His elaborate deceptions of invincibility had begun cracking - first, with the exit of Karuna and then by the steady inroads that the specially trained units of the Sri Lankan Army’s commandos were making. The chronic political one-upmanship in Colombo over the Eelam war between the two national parties - the UNP and the SLFP - which had contributed largely to the growth of the LTTE and the prolongation of the war, was contained by the Rajapaksa administration. The Rajapaksa brothers pulled out a page from the Bush counter-terrorism doctrine - niceties be damned.

With international assistance - material and moral - for the war on terror pouring in from China, Pakistan and the US, the defence budget was increased dramatically; state of the art equipment procured, and counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency training enhanced. By mid-2006, Canada and the European Union joined the growing list of countries proscribing the LTTE. This clogged Prabhakaran’s supply lines and fund collection and contributed to diminishing his ability to fight back the surge of a newly professionalised force. In the Rajapaksa brothers, Prabhakaran finally met with an enemy as ruthless and unswervingly committed in their goal as he.

As he presides over the destruction of his dream, Prabhakaran must already be plotting his next move even as he plans his escape from the ever-shrinking space he is left with to hide in. Staying alive, going back to the basics and brushing up on Sun Tzu. His financially formidable supporters among the Diaspora will be told that it is only territory that has been lost and as long as they are behind him he will deliver unto them the dream he has been promising them. Until then, Eelam will, like Khalistan, continue to live on in the virtual world.

His long-term objective, however, will be to foil every effort made by Colombo to redress Tamil grievances and also ensure that he, and only he, remains the sole leader of the Tamils. No moderate Tamil leader or group will be allowed to take his place. Any attempt to nurture a new leadership will be foiled by assassinations and acts of terror - just as he had, in the mid-80s, done the biggest disservice to the Tamil cause by systematically wiping out the leaders of the other militant Tamil groups that existed and decimating their organisations in a move to emerge as the sole representative of the Tamil cause. Elections will be prevented by violence. Prabhakaran will patiently wait for complacency on Colombo’s part and any ensuing security lapses to stage devastating acts of terror. In essence, he will start all over again and could potentially claw his way back if allowed to.

The key to ensuring that Prabhakaran goes down the same road and fades away as Idi Amin did lies in the sincerity, determination and tenacity of the Rajapaksa government (and every other that follows it). Rolling back every discriminatory law and practice against the Tamils and guaranteeing them equal rights and opportunities would need to be its first priority. Ignoring the Tamil Diaspora, however much it may rankle, would not be beneficial for Colombo. Colombo only has to remember that the rise and dominance of Prabhakaran was largely dependent on Colombo’s policies and attitudes.

As an immediate goal, [the ghost of] Prabhakaran will be counting on the few Black Tigers lurking in Colombo to blow up at least one of the troika. This would give him a respite, however brief, and save him from biting into the vial he sometimes carries around his neck.

And should he be forced to feed on the cyanide, it would mean the absolute destruction of his fantasy and the organisation he has so brutally cultivated around himself. His death would splinter the group, leaving his surviving lieutenants scrambling for the throne and the vast financial empire Prabhakaran has industriously built across three score countries.

His son and heir apparent, Charles Anthony, is not considered a serious contender for the top job.

In this hour of unprecedented defeat, the bluster and the belief in his personal immortality will not have dimmed. I wonder if Prabhakaran’s handshake has changed.

For an answer to that, over to the friendly Arakan rebel in Myanmar or the sympathetic politician in Europe, whose extended hand welcomes Prabhakaran ashore as he searches for a sanctuary. In all likelihood, Prabhakaran - with all his chips down-would impress his saviour with a firm, masculine shake of the hand.

The author is a former photo-journalist, currently teaching media and international relations at NTU, Singapore.