Dissecting What Destroyed Prabhakaran, LTTE | Sivadas Sankar

BOOK REVIEW

The Rout of Prabhakaran
by M.R. Narayan Swamy

Konark
Pages: xvii + 142; Price Rs 895
(Also includes Inside an Elusive Mind: Prabhakaran: The First Profile of the World’s Most Ruthless Guerrilla Leader; Pages: xviii + 238)

Reviewed by Sivadas Sankar

Fifteen years after the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and the destruction of that militant organization, M.R. Narayan Swamy, a veteran observer of the Sri Lankan scene, has come out with a refreshing and most graphic political post-mortem of the rebel leader and his outfit which went down with him. 

In his The Rout of Prabhakaran, Narayan Swamy has gone into elaborate detail about the genesis of the dispute and the build-up to the violence that was to engulf the island nation and spill out beyond the Palk Straits that separates Sri Lanka from India.    

The twin-book chronicle on the LTTE includes his earlier unauthorized biography of Prabhakaran (Inside an Elusive Mind). The first part of his life is narrated in the Elusive Mind (2003) that describes the rise of Prabhakaran from Velvettithurai or VVT in northern Sri Lanka; within decades, he became the unquestioned ruler of a third of the island’s landmass.

The Rout is a dramatic account of how he lost his fiefdom by 2009, with the ultimate humiliation of being photographed dead, clad only in his undervest, an indignity that leaders like Saddam Hussain and Ceausescu were subjected to.

The youngest child of a modest government servant, Prabhakaran was born in 1954. A loner, he preferred to bury himself in Tamil books and comics. Although Tamil residents in VVT were politically loyal to the government, things started changing after the government altered its official language policy, making it compulsory for everyone to learn Sinhala or face the sack.

From early in his life, Prabhakaran would “sneak out of the backdoor of his house”. One night in 1972, with the police after him, he disappeared, determined not to give up until he “gave a homeland to his people”. When he almost achieved this, two decades later, Prabhakaran presided over a triumphant international news conference at Killinochchi, the HQ of his de facto Tamil Eelam. Prabhakaran lightened up when his adviser Anton Balasingham introduced him as the “president and prime minister of Tamil Eelam”.

This dramatic elevation of Prabhakaran was made possible only through a series of violent attacks on Sri Lankan positions after the army wrested Jaffna from him in December 1995. He hit back through a series of terror attacks over the next four years. The bloodbath included the spectacular January 1996 suicide bombing of the Central Bank building in Colombo and the massacre of a whopping 1,200 soldiers in Mullaitivu. The LTTE also attempted to assassinate President Chandrika Kumaratunga in December 1999, leaving her blinded in one eye.

Earlier also, Prabhakaran showed his diabolic prowess in innovative terror by organizing the first suicide truck bombing in South Asia on July 5, 1987, on a Sri Lankan Army base in Jaffna, a shadow of the audacious Beirut US Marines barracks bombing by the Islamic Jehad in October 1983. A string of spectacular assassinations like that of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1991) and President Ranasinghe Premadasa (1993) secured his place among the galaxy of terror masters worldwide, on par with the later Osama bin Laden.

Less than two months before the 9/11 twin tower attacks in New York, the LTTE stunned the world by attacking the Bandaranaike International Airport and the adjoining Air Force base at Katunayake. The US Justice Department was to describe it as “the most destructive act in aviation history”. By then, Prabhakaran had set up a parallel administration in much of Sri Lanka’s north with his police and courts, not to mention a massive military machine and ships which ferried weapons from around the world.

The discovery of a 4.6-metre-long submarine in Phuket in Thailand which the LTTE was fabricating stunned Sri Lanka. It is no wonder that Colombo sought the good offices of Norway for mediation in a desperate bid to end the seemingly unending conflict.

The earlier Indian military intervention, the author points out, brought about a major change in Prabhakaran’s personality for the worse: it made him heartless, despotic and intolerant even towards his colleagues.

Despite its slim nature (142 pages) as compared to the earlier Elusive Mind, The Rout masterfully and meticulously exposes all that went wrong for the LTTE and its founder-leader Prabhakaran -– and why. It uncovers the terrible blunders the LTTE and its chief committed, one after another, which finally led to its unimaginable destruction, shattering a Tamil community whom the Tigers had vowed to defend till the end. Ex-Tigers and numerous Tamil civilians also unburden themselves, recalling the numerous mistakes, both tactical and strategic, that Prabhakaran and his lieutenants committed.

This is a book that is a must read for all students of Sri Lanka and the ethnic conflict it endured for three long decades, a war that at one stage threatened to split the country apart. As the Rout points out, Prabhakaran could have charted a different course from the one he pursued; it may not have fetched him an independent Tamil Eelam but it could have saved thousands of lives.

(Review author: Sivadas Sankar is a veteran journalist)