Prabhakaran has no one to
blame but himself
The Island Editorial
Courtesy The Island 05-11-2007
LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is mourning for his political wing
leader S. P. Tamilselvam, who perished in an air raid on Friday together
with five others. There are two schools of thought about that killing.
One is that the Sri Lanka Air Force mounted that decapitation strike
using intelligence it had gathered on its own; it had marked the target
weeks ago but desisted from taking it until time was opportune. And
the Tigers struck in Anuradhapura. Others argue that Tamilselvam’s
enemies within the LTTE leaked information about his hideout, as he
had fallen out with the leadership towards his tragic end.
Prabhakaran, as his history reveals, knows more than one way to skin
a Tiger, according to the second school of thought. He, as is well known,
doesn’t tolerate dissent and goes to any extent to remove from
his path anyone who, he thinks, will be a threat to his leadership one
day. The de facto deputy leader of the LTTE Mahattaya or Mahendraraja
became too popular within the organisation and it was expected that
he would one day succeed Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran got him ‘arrested’,
kept in a dungeon and finally got him murdered together with over 200
of his loyalists. Prabhakaran is also said to have betrayed Kuttumani
because he was perceived as a threat. Kuttumani was arrested on a tip-off
from the LTTE itself and later killed in the then UNP government-instigated
prison riots in 1983. Prabhakaran’s rivals still have serious doubts
about how a vessel with Kittu, another popular LTTE leader, on board
came to be intercepted in 1993, causing his death. More recently, immediately
before Karuna’s breakaway, Prabhakaran sent for both Paduman and
Karuna and the SLMM arranged for their travel to the Wanni. An SLAF
chopper picked up Paduman from Trincomalee and proceeded to Batticaloa,
where Karuna was to board it. Karuna had second thoughts and refused
to join Paduman. That was the last seen of Paduman, who is believed
to be either killed or incarcerated in the Wanni as his loyalty to Prabhakaran
was in question.
The conspiracy theorists claim that the on-going dispute in the LTTE
over Prabhakaran’s decision to groom his son for leadership has
resulted in a bitter power struggle, which has led to the information
leak in question. The battles fought between the Sea Tiger chief Soosai
faction and the Pottu Amman loyalists in Scandinavia, they say, demonstrate
how serious the LTTE’s crisis is.
This view is, however, disputed by the other school of thought, which
insists that the full credit should be given to the SLAF for the successful
surgical strike mounted after months of intelligence gathering. The
military intelligence, the proponents of this view point out, has successfully
broken into the inner cells of the LTTE. Even before Tamilselvam fell
out with Prabhakaran, they argue, the army long rangers had almost accounted
for him, with the benefit of accurate information about his movements
and, therefore, Friday’s attack was something to be expected. They
ask why on earth the Prabhakaran faction should have helped the SLAF
gain mileage with a devastating airstrike and boost its morale in the
aftermath of the Anuradhapura debacle. Friday’s air raid also destroyed
sophisticated communication equipment belonging to the LTTE, they say,
and therefore it is not possible that the LTTE leadership had a hand
in the tip-off. Prabhakaran, they argue, could have clipped Tamilselvam’s
clips further and relegated him to obscurity after promoting another
person for that job, without enabling the SLAF to overshadow the Anuradhapura
attack. This argument, we reckon, seems tenable. Else, the Tiger leadership
wouldn’t have been so rattled and paranoid in the aftermath of
the attack.
"Our people are in profound shock and sorrow," Prabhakaran
has said of Tamilsevlam’s death in a condolence message, describing
him as a true leader loved by the people and respected by the international
community. De mortuis nil nisi bonum! But, it needs to be added that
Tamilselvam was no saint. He was a military man with a political face.
That’s why he was promoted to the rank of ‘Brigadier’
posthumously. Remember it is he who threatened to destroy targets in
the South following the fall of Thoppigala.
Tamilselvam was only a dwarf in comparison to the Tamil political leaders
and intellectuals the LTTE has assassinated such as Amirthalingam, Rajini,
Neelan, Yogeswaran, Sarojini, Padmanabha and Kadir. The LTTE also assassinated
President Premadasa, Gamini and Lalith and almost accounted for President
Kumaratunga. In India, it assassinated Rajiv.
Tamilselvam is the highest ranking LTTE leader to have been killed
after the pioneer of the LTTE’s crude air wing and Prabhakaran’s
personal friend Shankar, who died in an army long ranger attack about
six years ago. His killing made Prabhakaran confine himself to his well
fortified bunker all the time and opt for a truce, which was also partly
due to the fallout of the 9/11 attacks. He was so frightened that he
got the Norwegians to insert a special section in the CFA prohibiting
deep penetration operations. The UNF government played into his hands
by raiding the safe house of the long rangers at Athurugiriya and divulging
their identities. The LTTE decimated the entire intelligence network
that the deep penetration unit had painstakingly put in place over so
many years. But, the long rangers are said to be back in action in the
Wanni.
What Prabhakaran urgently needs at this juncture is a breather. His
ammunition stocks are running out with no hope of replenishment due
to the effective blockade by the Navy, which has sunk as many as eight
arms smuggling vessels for the past thirteen months. Now that the army
is poised to march on the Wanni and the military intelligence has outsmarted
Pottu Amman’s outfit—some foreign defence analysts with a
soft corner for the LTTE have warned that the LTTE leader is vulnerable
to airstrikes as never before—Prabhakaran might wave an olive branch
as a tactical ploy the way he did in 2001, contrary to the belief that
he will go all out to inflict heavy damage on the military in retaliation
for Tamilselvam’s death.
His message on the killing is devoid of usual threats. It sounds more
an appeal for international intervention. "Despite the repeated
and continuous calls from the international community to find a peaceful
resolution to Tamil national question," Prabhakran has said, "we
have not seen any goodwill from the Sinhala nation." (Emphasis
added). He has suddenly realised ‘peace’ and given something
to the peace lobby to hold on to. It will be interesting to see what
he has got to say in his ‘heroes’ day’ speech which is
due shortly.
Prabhakaran has no way of absolving himself of the responsibility for
Tamilselvam’s death. But for his decision to plunge the country
back into war last year by capturing the Mavil Aru anicut, Tamilselvam
would still have been smiling in Kilinochchi, ‘loved by the people
and respected by the international community’ as he says. Having
suffered a string of humiliating defeats, he had just scored a win,
when disaster struck. Worse, Prabhakaran has run short of surprises
for the Sri Lankan state. He has attacked almost every economic and
military target from the Central Bank to the Katunayaka airbase; killed
a President, a service commander and a large number of political and
military leaders; partly destroyed the main oil installation and the
fleet of the national carrier; committed a large number of massacres
and blown up civilian targets. But, he has not got anywhere near his
goal. Instead, he has to live in eternal fear, encircled in the Wanni
with the army threatening to move in any moment. His arms smuggling
network is in tatters and intelligence wing has been wrong-footed. Worse,
he is left with nothing new to do to frighten the State into submission.
A prisoner of his own violence, Prabhakaran has had to begin from the
very beginning after two decades of fighting. He has no one to blame
but himself.
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