THE END OF PRABHAKARAN (and LTTE, of course)

The news broke out in 18th May 2009 that the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran is dead, killed by the Sri Lankan Army while he was fleeing the war zone in an ambulance. Nobody would believe the news at first. Prabhakaran was like that. He looked invincible and several times in the past, he had escaped from being captured, just by the breadth of hair. On the 19th Of May the Sri Lankan army sent out pictures of his dead body. By the look of it, it resembled Prabhakaran. The eyes, the forehead, the furrows, all matched. There were flies around the body and it looked like almost the rear of his head was blown away. The Sri Lankan President announced that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is completely finished off and all its leadership fully annihilated. Prabhakaran’s son Charles Antony, his closest aide Pottu Amman, and the head of Sea Tigers; Soosai, all had been killed. The TVs showed the Sri Lankan public out in the open, dancing and celebrating the end of LTTE and its dreaded chief.

Truly speaking, a dark era had come to the end in Sri Lanka and to some extent, in South Asia. It ran for close to four decades. Something that got started as a legitimate movement to protect the aspirations of a suppressed minority, had grown so big and assumed demonic proportions. LTTE started as a resistance movement, it became a terrorist outfit and then it grew into a big army that controlled close to one fourth of the Island nation. It made deep inroads into India (particularly the south) and even today, it has huge sympathizers there. The cause had lots of sympathizers in India and across the globe. However, the way it was run was ruthless. LTTE controlled the entire Tamils of Sri Lanka by sheer fear psychosis. It finished off (‘butchered’ is the right word) anyone in the community in Sri Lanka who spoke a word against it. Prabhakaran ran it with an iron hand. He has assumed megalomaniac proportions in the control of the Organization. The law was that of the bullet. Anyone didn’t accept it, bites dust. LTTE and Prabhakaran were very intolerant indeed.

LTTE was a complete military outfit. It had Army, Naval units and after Charles Antony had come back from studies, an Air force unit. Until the arrival of the present incumbent, Mr. Rajapaksa to power as the President of Sri Lanka, LTTE maintained its supremacy in the north and East of the country. With Rajapaksa in, things started getting difficult for LTTE. It started becoming weak. The departure of Col. Karuna (earlier the head of LTTE in east Lanka, currently a Lankan cabinet minister) started the dent and the erosion was steady thereafter. From the earlier sympathy of hapless Tamil’s protector, the world started viewing LTTE as a terror organization and many countries started banning it. LTTE came to be blacklisted in the UN and Prabhakaran started losing friends. Many of his close aides also died and left (some others, he killed, thinking that they had grown up to being a threat to him; e.g. Mahatiya). In the last year, the world heard of him as closeted in his bunker and there were reports about him going senile. The last six months or so, LTTE existed with great difficulty and that too by using the hapless Tamils as human shield. The writing was very much on the wall for Prabhakaran. Finally the end was to come. He bit dust by the bullet.

Looking back at the growth and times of Prabhakaran and LTTE, one would see many wrong decisions made by it. The signing of Indo Sri Lankan agreement and the IPKF days led to the killing of Rajiv Gandhi and Prabhakaran lost Indian support with that. LTTE went on killing President Premadasa, Minister Lakshman kadirgamar, Army chief, host of Monks and religious leaders, Lankan Tamil Politicians and the Tamil intelligentsia (e.g. Amrutha Lingam). It made several attempts on the life of President Chandrika Kumarathunge. It became dreaded to its own people. LTTE also annihilated other Tamil organizations built for similar causes (TELO, PLOT, EPRLF etc). It never believed in sharing any platform.

LTTE and Prabhakaran never thought of settlement through discussions. It only believed in then power of gun. Unlike the IRAand PLO, it never built up a political party or political base to go into negotiations. It only negotiated ceasefires, to prepare and start the war all over again. Where do such organizations go?

The Himalayan blunder that LTTE committed was of boycotting the 2005 presidential pole of Sri Lanka. LTTE thought that by keeping away, it could again create a situation to portray the Sri Lankan state as an aggressor against a minority community. But it boomeranged. The Tamil sympathizer Mr. Ranil Wickramesinghe lost the election and Mahinda Rajapaksa came to power. The bad days of LTTE and Prabhakaran began with that. Now it is all over. A man who terrorized the country and the world, a man whose very name used to send chill down the spine of many, A man whose utterings shook the powers that be, lies dead with half his head blown away, surrounded by flies and creatures, with no one to claim the body.

What does it all say? ANYONE WHO TAKES THE SWORD, ENDS BY IT...................