He is Sri Lanka's Milosevic
The personalities and the roles played by Slobodan Milosevic and Velupillai Prabhakaran
are so close that any analysis on any one of them is valid for both as seen in the
following article. This article appeared originally as the Time (April 5,1999) cover story
on Slobodan Milosevic. With a few interpolations and change of names and places the role
of Milosevic fitted that of Velupillai Prabhakaran like a glove. Velupillai Prabhakaran
has lost almost every battle he's fought—
except the one to stay in power.
With apologies to Johanna Mcgeary, senior foreign correspondent of Time, who wrote the
original on Slobodan Milosevic.
Who wants to die for Velupillai Prabhakaran? He is one of the great losers of history. He
failed to hold together his elusive homeland in Jaffna, and he failed to build in its
place a Greater Eelam.
In the past 14 years, he has launched three wars with no success in sight. He is currently
on the verge of losing a piece of real estate which is held dearly to be of strategic
importance to the Sri Lankan forces as they advance in dense jungles of the north.
As Asia's most disruptive dictator since the fall of Pol Pot, he bears responsibility for
the extermination of Muslims, Sinhalese, Indians (e.g. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) and
his own Tamils. He is also responsible for the massacres and the setting up of the first
concentration camps in Sri Lanka, for the displacement of nearly a million in Sri Lanka
and for the impoverishment and ostracism of his own people in the north.
Rejecting all peace offers, Prabhakaran has repeatedly chosen war. Like a shark that has
to keep moving to stay alive, he is willfully exposing the withered territory of mythical
Eelam to the might of Sri Lankan forces for the sake of his own power. As always, he
gambled that talk, hopes, threats and destruction would wear his enemies into retreat.
When that didn't happen, he put in jeopardy virtually everything left to him, courting
death for his people and damage to his own dream of a homeland, the
decimation of his military machine, the hastened secession of Eelam, and perhaps even the
end of his regime.
For Prabhakaran, terrorism has been a way of life. The Tamil standard bearer does not talk
about his family. Like Milosevic he has a son and a daughter – both in their teens
and both exempted from his "baby brigades" which consist of teenagers dragged
into the war much against their parents' wishes. He is a drop-out who did not progress
beyond the first years of a secondary education. His best training ground was with the
smugglers of the north who plied a contraband trade sneaking in goods from South India to
Sri Lanka. He is a Hindu militant who has never known the art of negotiations or the
democratic process.
He came into power through the gun, killing the moderate Tamils opposed to his
fundamentalist fanaticism.
His first victim was the former Mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiyappah, a mild-mannered,
moderate politician who preferred to follow the pragmatic tradition of living in peace
with all communities. He was gunned down in 1975 in cold blood when he was on his way to a
Hindu temple. This launched Prabhakaran's career and since then he turned himself into a
Tamil/Hindu zealot, assuming so thoroughly the image of a ruthless functionary that the
international community, led by USA, has branded him a "Tamil Tiger Terrorist."
James Burn of The NewYork Times (June 25,1995) went further and identified him as
"the latest Pol Pot of Asia".
As he consolidated his power through sheer terror tactics his image as a
"liberator" of the Tamils declined. He became the most wanted man in South Asia
— wanted by the Indians (for assassinating Rajiv Gandhi), wanted by the Sri Lankan
government and, most of all, wanted by his own Tamil people for slaughtering rivals or
incarcerating dissidents in Nazi-type concentration camps.
En route to grab power (which he describes as being "the sole representative of the
Tamils") he fell in love with an attractive recruit. But there was one hitch: unlike
Prabhakaran she came from a higher caste. The girl's parents did not approve of the
marriage. He was still an unknown quantity with an uncertain future at that time. Later
when he wiped out his rivals and established a force loyal personally to him and not to an
ideology or institution the parents forgot his inferior caste status.
His strength has been in exterminating his opponents without any qualms. By a calculated
process of eliminating his closest Tamil rivals in the '80s he found his way into the
national and international headlines. His weakness too is in not knowing the limits of
violence. His terror tactics has alienated all his former allies. His best ally was India
which provided him a fall-back position either to withdraw or to forge ahead with its
political, diplomatic and military backing. But when his suicide-bomber
assassinated Rajiv Gandhi he lost India for good. His second best bet was the fund of
goodwill in the Western capitals manipulated by the expatriate Tamil lobby. But when his
terror tactics, which targeted non-combatant civilians on a mass scale, increased he lost
the support of the international community. His local political and military base could
have been expanded and strengthened if he allied himself with the other Tamil militant
groups. Instead he took to the gun, imitating Clint Eastwood, to behead all the potential
Tamil rivals who dared to put their heads up from their bunkers. Those who survived his
onslaught have teamed up with the Sri Lankan government in working out alternative
programmes for peace and reconciliation.
Defender of Tamil nationalism — it was a seductive image, one that reached back to
the Tamil claims of victimization. It gave him the aura that served as an express ticket
to total power. Conducting a new symphony of ethnic hate, Prabhakaran stepped into the top
slot which provided no space for any rival. Virtually his first act was to reject any
peaceful or democratic process which, under any circumstances, would be a protracted path
that tests the nerves of intransigent and impatient "fixers".
Playing up nationalist passions, Prabhakaran helped ignite full-scale ethnic war with the
Sinhala majority (76%).. In the early phase, even the intellectual elite supported his
nationalist euphoria. But once he had used them to enhance his position, he either
liquidated them ( e.g. he has decimated the entire Tamil leadership who initially paved
the way for ethnic hate in Sri Lanka) or made his fellow-travellers eat crow. Firmly
ensconced in the Tamil middle-class diaspora as their cult figure,
Prabhakaran has proved to be smart and cunning. He has developed a mystique by being
invisible and unapproachable except to his close and dwindling coterie. He cultivates
silence partly because he is laconic and partly because he relies on the political myths
and guns to do the talking for him. "He does not believe in ideas," says a Sri
Lankan observer. "He makes no value judgments." .
Power, according to those who know him, is the one thing he truly loves. He exercises it
daily, in matters large and small. From his subordinates, he brooks no challenges. When
75,000 Muslims were pillaged, their women raped and properties grabbed and driven out of
Jaffna by the LTTE cadres it was clearly at his orders. He initiated the first known
ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka long before Milosevic ever dreamt of it. When 175 Muslims at
prayers were slaughtered by his gunmen in the
eastern belt it was his way of saying, notes a diplomat involved, "This is my turf,
and I'm boss." When Sri Lankan government representatives appear at the Tiger door
for talks, he glows in the knowledge that his Eelam flag is on display as a sign of his
power. He does not flaunt decorative symbols of office or stage showy ceremonies and cares
nothing for state protocol. But if he shirks the glamour of power, he still loves
delicious moments of control.
Though the Tamil expatriates and intellectuals exploit every available human rights
institution globally, they secretly revel in his power to slaughter as the appropriate
political answer to the Tamil problem. His killing machine boosts their pride and they
feel it is their duty to oil the coils of Prabhakaran's mechanical guillotine.
Despite having proved himself a cunning politician, he is said to be insecure, even
paranoid. Diplomats, eager to point at what they see as limits to his popularity, say he
is so fearful for his personal security that he refuses to go out in public. While he may
partly be cultivating the dictator's aura of mystery, some Tamils say he is fundamentally
a deeply suspicious, withdrawn and secretive person.
At once immoderate and capricious, Prabhakaran has made himself one of the Sri Lankan
government's most difficult enemies. Lessons learned from one encounter do not necessarily
apply to the next. Delhi concluded after the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement, when the IPKF
forced him to the negotiating table, that he respected what he feared and would give in to
force and threats. Prabhakaran learned something different: how to exploit the divisions
between Sri Lanka and India. Diplomats who thought that Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement showed
they "could work with him" discovered he rarely works well with anyone.
Certainly his Eelam strategy has been confounding. In part, says an Indian offi cial,
Prabhakaran seems closed off to reality. When negotiating, he relies on a mix of charm and
tirades about the victimization of the Tamils. Says the official: "Every second
sentence is wrong or a lie. He withdraws into the dark recesses of his soul and lives
inside it like a prisoner of his own mind." He never says yes or no, never puts his
own name to a formal agreement. While his vicious behavior in Sri Lanka has
evoked comparison to Hitler, those who know him say Prabhakaran doesn't dream so large.
"He wants to be the tinhorn dictator of Jaffna forever," says an Indian.
official. "Beyond that, nothing." —Many analysts have suggested that he
wants to prolong the agony of his Jaffna Tamils just to maintain his myth that he is their
saviour. He has come to believe in this myth and he sees other Tamil rivals as traitors to
the cause of Eelam. "It's very Tamilian - and the Jaffna Tamils are like us.,"
says a
Tamil Nadu observer. "Celluloid heroes of Tamil Nadu grab the centre stage in
politics giving hope to the myth that they alone can be saviours."Prabhakaran has
miscalculated disastrously before, but he has also brilliantly calculated his hold on
power. Which will it be this time? There are those in India and Sri Lanka who hope that he
has gone too far in presiding over death and destruction. Perhaps all those losses may
finally convince the Jaffna Tamils that Prabhakaran's heroism will not bring them anywhere
near to their political aspirations, let alone peace which has eluded them like their
Eelam.
This version was by H.L.D.Mahindapala - one time Editor of the Sunday Observer.
Sunday Times :
25 April 1999 |
