Janaka Perera

A group calling itself Vavuniya Citizens Group is planning to erect a memorial minaret at Mullivayikal for what it calls victims of ‘Tamil killing.’   The term almost sounds like successive Sri Lankan governments were – as a matter of state policy – engaged in hunting members of this community over the years as if they were some wild animals.

To the majority of Sri Lankans May 18 marked the seventh anniversary of the defeat of LTTE terrorism which claimed the lives of Tamils, Sinhalas, Muslims and others for over 30 years but the VCG remembered the day as the seventh year since the end of ‘killing Tamils’.

Instead of the ‘end’ the VCG needs to be reminded of how the killing began in the 1970s with the emergence of separatist violence. Its first prominent Tamil victim was Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiappah whom Prabhakaran and his gang gunned down in 1975.

In later years many other Tamil victims of LTTE terrorism included TULF General Secretary Appapillai Amirthalingam, TULF stalwart Vettivelu Yogeswaran, PLOTE  Leader Uma Maheswaran (who entered the political mainstream), Neelan Thiruchelvam, Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, Ketish Loganathan, EPRLF Leader Padmanabha and 12 of his party members, TELO Leader Sri Sabharatnam and his men numbering about 400, Jaffna Mayor Sarojini Yogeswaran, Sivakuraj Kurukkal, Chief  Priest of Koneswaran Hindu Kovil and Minister Jeyeraj Fernandopulle.

But does the VCG want to remember them?   Does the group wish to remind itself who pushed Tamils in the name of liberation from a perceived frying pan into a fire that raged for three decades? The answers to both questions are not difficult to guess.

In addition to the clashes between the Tigers and security forces, the disputes among Tamil militant outfits led to the loss of lives in thousands within two decades.

We know the Tiger Leadership repeatedly stressed that they were the sole and authentic representatives of the Tamil people.” Therefore any Tamil who rejected this claim was not considered a true Tamil in the eyes of Tiger sympathisers.

On August 10, 2007 the press reported Batticaloa District TNA MP S. Jeyanandamoorthy as saying there is absolutely no difference between the LTTE and the Tamil people.

The LTTE is the people and the people are the LTTE,” he insisted.

It recalls Hitler saying all true Germans are Nazis.

States the VCG’s media release:

The guards of the Tamil people who also were the liberators, LTTE, took forward the freedom fight for the Tamils, fight to live, and fight to free the Eelam Tamils grew up at various periods, which was historical.”

We wonder why members of this group call themselves Vavuniya Citizens instead of citizens of the LTTE’s mythical Tamil Eelam which is committed to wage ‘a war of resistance’ against Sri Lanka.

The VCG’s ‘remembrance’ clearly reflects Velupillai Prabhakaran’s hackneyed rhetoric about the ‘genocidal Sinhala State’ on which he used to focus on during his so-called ‘Maveer’ (Great Heroes) Day speeches.  The correct term should have been auto-genocide since many young Tamils who followed him ended up as suicide bombers in addition to those who died in combat.   The LTTE invented suicide belts and pioneered the use of women in suicide attacks.

They were among the sacrificial goats who helped the pro-LTTE Tamil Diaspora to keep the pot boiling so that the latter and their children and their children could prosper in Western Europe, North America and Australia – but ironically not in Tamil Nadu the leaders of which continues to keep the Tamil Eelam myth alive.

The LTTE was the only terrorist outfit to assassinate two heads of state – former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 both of whom were killed by suicide bombers in the month of May. In 1994 Sri Lankan Presidential Candidate Gamini Dissanayake met the same fate.

On May 21st falls the 25^th Anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. On that day 1991 Gandhi was campaigning for the upcoming parliamentary elections. After successfully campaigning in Visakhapatnam, his next stop was Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. About two hours after arriving in Chennai, Rajiv Gandhi was driven by motorcade to Sriperumbudur stopping along the way at a few other election campaigning venues. When he reached a campaign rally in Sriperumbudur, he got out of his car and began to walk towards the dais where he would deliver a speech. Along the way, many well-wishers, including Congress Party workers and school children, garlanded him.  Then the LTTE assassin, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam alias Dhanu, approached and greeted him. She then bent down to touch his feet and detonated an explosive laden belt tucked below her dress. Gandhi, his assassin and 14 others were killed in the explosion that followed. The assassination was caught on film by a local photographer, whose camera and film was found at the site though the photographer also died in the blast.

The killing of Rajiv Gandhi was the biggest blunder the LTTE made.

According to a report in the ‘Hindu’ April 20 Rajiv Gandhi’s killers will not be released on New Delhi’s orders. On this issue Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi were trying to score points in view of Tamil Nadu elections but failed.

If the Sri Lankan Government imagines that it can achieve so-called reconciliation – whatever it means – by allowing VCG types to construct memorials it is only wishful thinking.