Tigers leave unfinished business
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - In a nationally televised address from parliament on Tuesday, Sri
Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa hailed "a day which is very, very
significant - not only to us Sri Lankans but to the entire world", and declared
the country "liberated" from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after
a 26-year war.
The myth that the LTTE is militarily invincible has now been laid to rest,
along with its chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and the entire Tiger top brass.
In a cry for unity, Rajapaksa said, "We must find a homegrown solution to this
conflict. That solution should be acceptable to all communities."
And therein lies the rub for a nation that has been torn apart by
the years of civil war, with more than 70,000 people killed and thousands
displaced in a struggle that pitted the majority Sinhalese against the minority
Tamils.
Prabhakaran was said to have been shot dead by the armed forces on Monday
morning as he attempted to escape the war zone in a convoy that included an
ambulance. On Tuesday Sri Lankan television showed grisly pictures of a body it
claimed was Prabhakaran with a massive head wound, suggesting he was not
fleeing as the government had said but either shot himself or was shot at
point-blank range.
Prabhakaran's death is said to have come shortly after soldiers stumbled on the
bodies of several key LTTE leaders, including his son and heir-apparent Charles
Antony, LTTE intelligence chief Pottu Amman, naval chief Soosai, the head of
the political wing Balasingham Nadesan, and the head of the defunct peace
secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan.
A day earlier, the LTTE's chief of international relations, Selvarasa
Pathmanathan, conceded defeat in a statement on Tamilnet. The LTTE was
silencing its guns, Pathmanathan said.
With the death of Prabhakaran and the defeat of the LTTE, a momentous chapter
in Sri Lanka's history has come to an end. Fifty-four-year old Prabhakaran was
no ordinary guerrilla leader. A military genius and a brilliant strategist,
Prabhakaran transformed the LTTE from a ragtag band of boys into a formidable
fighting force that was able to stand and confront armies far better equipped
than his own.
Until two years ago, the LTTE controlled almost a third of Sri Lankan
territory. It ran a parallel administration in parts of this territory, one
that included legal courts, a police force, a tax system, even a bank. The LTTE
had a powerful army, a navy and even a nascent air wing. It is the only
insurgent organization in the world to have possessed and used aircraft of its
own.
The LTTE survived over three decades. Skillful maneuvering out of tight
corners, even reaching out to one enemy to get rid of another, was responsible
in part for its survival. That skill, however, was finally exhausted.
From July 2007, the LTTE began losing territory, first in the east and then the
north. Its political headquarters, Killinochchi, fell to the armed forces in
January this year. Then it lost the strategic Elephant Pass, and following that
Mullaitivu, its military stronghold. The Tigers were restricted to a shrinking
sliver of territory on the east coast over the past month. They lost that over
the weekend.
Throughout the past year, the LTTE appealed to the international community to
intervene. It hoped that parties and politicians in the southern Indian state
of Tamil Nadu would put pressure on the Indian government to bail it out and
that the plight of civilians would prompt India, the West and aid agencies to
push for a ceasefire. But all these attempts to pull itself out of a corner
came to nothing.
The Tiger chief has often been described as a cat with nine lives, having
escaped capture and assassination attempts several times. Even a month ago, the
Sri Lankan army chief admitted his troops had missed capturing him "by a
whisker". On Monday, Prabhakaran's luck finally ran out.
But it isn't luck, or rather the lack of it, that is responsible for the defeat
of the LTTE. Several factors contributed to bringing about its decline in
recent years.
One is the hostile international environment that all non-state actors engaging
in armed struggle encountered after the terror attacks on the United States on
September 11, 2001.
Already tagged with the terrorist label by several countries, the LTTE's global
fundraising, its front organizations and the logistical network came under
immense pressure. The impact of a split in the LTTE in 2004 was even more
devastating, with the breakaway faction under its former eastern commander,
"Colonel Karuna", joining hands with the government in the military operations
against the LTTE.
And then in 2005 Rajapaksa became president. A hardliner, his orders to the
armed forces were unambiguous: they were to fight the LTTE not to merely weaken
it but to defeat it, to "finish it off" once and for all. And that was what the
military, better equipped than ever before, set out to do.
However, the seeds of the LTTE's destruction lay in the organization itself, in
decisions that would come back to bite it in subsequent years.
Its decision to assassinate former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil
Nadu 1991 was perhaps its biggest blunder. That killing not only earned the
LTTE the terrorist label from India, but also made India a permanent enemy. Its
support base in Tamil Nadu was eroded and its logistical network dismantled.
And worse, it had to contend thereafter with a robust military cooperation and
other links between Delhi and Colombo.
Another blunder was its misreading of the potential of the 2002 ceasefire and
the talks that followed. Instead of seeing this as a chance to reach a
settlement of the conflict, the LTTE saw it as an opportunity to rearm and
regroup. It walked out of the talks and did everything possible to make the
peace process fail. The war that followed was disastrous for the Tigers.
It gravely miscalculated when it called on Tamils to boycott the 2005
presidential poll. The impact of that boycott saw Rajapaksa win by a wafer-thin
majority. Perhaps it thought that Rajapaksa as president would result in
rallying Tamil support around the Tigers. It did not foresee that Rajapaksa
would prove to be their nemesis.
The LTTE appears to have believed its own propaganda. It believed it was
militarily invincible. Its closing of the sluice gates of Mavil Aru in July
2006, inviting the vastly stronger armed forces to launch an offensive and at a
time when international sentiment was not in its favor, can only be described
as suicidal.
The LTTE's use of suicide bombings, its intolerance of dissent, the recruitment
of children and its utter disregard for human lives severely undermined support
from foreign governments. It is proscribed in 32 counties. This contributed to
international reluctance to call for a ceasefire as this would have let the
Tigers off the hook. When the calls for a ceasefire came eventually, they were
too weak, too half-hearted and too late to save the LTTE and its top brass.
The LTTE overestimated itself, even when its military capabilities were waning.
It was losing territory and fighters over the past year and should have
reverted to guerrilla warfare. In its desperation to hold onto territory and
perceiving itself as a conventional army, it fought a defensive war when it
lacked the numbers and the firepower for such a strategy. In the circumstances,
defeat was inevitable. The LTTE defeated itself.
Prabhakaran was uncompromising in his commitment to the creation of an
independent Tamil Eelam. Perhaps too uncompromising for the good of the LTTE or
the Tamil people whose interests he claimed to protect.
There were political solutions, like the India-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 that
provided the Tamils with a measure of autonomy. But such solutions Prabhakaran
rejected as inadequate as they provided for "less than Tamil Eelam".
Prabhakaran preferred returning to the battlefield time and again, uncaring of
the large number of Tamils who were getting killed in the bloody wars. Over
70,000 people are said to have died in the 25-year-long insurgency. This might
have been avoided had Prabhakaran been realistic and seriously explored a
political solution.
The LTTE no longer exists as a military organization and its military assets
and capabilities have been destroyed. But the LTTE is defeated, not dead.
Several Tigers would have escaped the armed forces and they will be thirsting
for revenge.
Both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE have declared the war over. But the
ethnic conflict is not over yet. The grievances of the Tamils, and their
alienation and anger that gave rise to militancy and organizations like the
LTTE in the first place, remain unresolved. The issues that kept the insurgency
alive for three decades are very much alive.
The irony of Prabhakaran and the LTTE is that even as they strengthened the
bargaining position of Tamils, they were simultaneously the biggest obstacle in
the path of a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
With Prabhakaran's exit, Tamil obstruction to a negotiated settlement has been
removed. But the obstacles to this among Sinhalese - Sinhala-Buddhist
chauvinists, the military and Rajapaksa's hardline regime - continue to exist
and have emerged stronger from the war.
If and when Rajapaksa opens negotiations with the Tamils, the latter will be in
a weak position, weakened not only by the absence of the LTTE but also
undermined by it. The LTTE systematically decimated a generation of Tamil
moderate leaders and intellectuals. The input of people like Neelan Tiruchelvam
and Ketesh Loganathan, intellectuals who were assassinated by the LTTE for
daring to differ with its methods, will be sorely missed.
The LTTE, which waged a war ostensibly to protect Tamils, has left them more
vulnerable than ever before.
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