Book excerpt: How Prabhakaran’s obsession with power destroyed the LTTE

Looking back at the wholesale annihilation of the LTTE in 2009, an epoch-making event that none of its supporters even remotely thought could ever happen, a former LTTE woman guerrilla lamented that the ultimate destruction was the outcome “of our own sins”. She went on, “Within the confines of our organisation, our vision was blurred. We couldn’t see the moral decay, the egregious wrongs we were committing. It is only now, standing on the outside, looking back with eyes wide open, that the horrifying scale of our errors becomes painfully clear.”

LTTE chief Pottu Amman’s admission in early 2009 about the three blunders that contributed to the serious reverses in the battlefield speaks extremely poorly about the complete lack of strategic vision on the part of the LTTE leadership, Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman included. Pottu Amman blamed the LTTE’s decision to expel all the Muslims from Sri Lanka’s north in 1990, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the long period of forced recruitment of children by the LTTE as major miscalculations.

The killing factory

There is no doubt that these were serious misjudgments, but they were not the only acts of bungling by a headstrong insurgent group led by men who could not see beyond their nose. Even if we go only by Pottu Amman’s admission, it does need to be asked as to who took these three decisions. Surely, the expulsion of the Muslim community, the killing of Rajiv Gandhi and the forced induction of children were taken by none other than Prabhakaran and carried out by lieutenants, one of whom was Pottu Amman, his official executioner.

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For sure, the LTTE committed innumerable blunders throughout its history, starting from killing anyone and everyone who fell foul of Prabhakaran. Only a fascist group could have snuffed out members of rival Tamil groups in the manner the LTTE did — as if those being killed were street dogs that had to be eliminated in any way. TELO leader Sri Sabaratnam begged for mercy when he was gunned down by the LTTE’s Jaffna military commander Kittu, who was known to abuse and beat up even LTTE members he did not like.

The LTTE similarly killed in India, mafia-style, EPRLF leader Kandasamy Pathmanabha and his close associates and, a year later, Rajiv Gandhi. When the LTTE fooled and shot dead TULF stalwarts Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran, it exhibited cowardice at its worst. Not satisfied, it went on to kill several Tamil moderates, including the widow of Yogeswaran. The LTTE had no compunction in killing innumerable Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims, VIPs and ordinary folks included, in the most macabre manner. Some of those killed (Tamils and Muslims) had once shown sympathy for the Tamil cause. But it did not matter.

The LTTE did not just kill; some of its leaders seem to enjoy killing people. Every killing was deemed justified — as long as the victim had been dubbed a “traitor”. Pottu Amman is once known to have thrust a young disgruntled LTTE guerrilla into a gunny sack and banged it against a tree till the unfortunate victim turned into pulp. LTTE prisons practised some of the most depraved ways of torture, forcing many to lose their sanity. Indeed, the LTTE became a sophisticated killing machine, turning assassinations and brutal murders into a fine art. One LTTE guerrilla, called Jimkali Thatha, who had made the mistake of siding with Karuna after the 2004 split in the outfit, was badly tortured and burnt to death on the orders of Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman.

Why antagonising India was not a viable strategy

Despite working on the LTTE story for long, I am yet to see any meaningful evidence that would show that the group’s former Number Two, Mahattaya, was indeed an Indian spy — a baseless charge that was used to execute him and scores of his supporters. Nor do I think that Kiruban, another LTTE member who had dramatically escaped from India and who too was linked to Mahattaya, was working for the Indian intelligence.

When a young LTTE guerrilla, Thiyagu, fell in love with a woman Tiger and she became pregnant, both were simply shot dead — notwithstanding the fact that Thiyagu was among the 20 bodyguards who had helped Prabhakaran to escape the Indian military encirclement in late 1987. The order to kill the young lovers was approved by Prabhakaran, who himself married his wife after falling in love with her at first sight.

In 1988, LTTE members brutally thrashed a young member, Vellai, who was suspected of spying for the Indian Army. He was buried up to his shoulders, forced to swallow cyanide and then his skull was shattered with an axe. Indeed, some of what the LTTE did was not done by any other liberation group in the world, with the possible exception of the latter-day Islamist outfits.

A Tamil source says that when a group of excited girls reached an LTTE camp to sign up, a woman guerrilla who met them at the gate shooed them away. “Ponga, ponga! Ithu thooyamana iyakkam illai,” she said. (Go away, go away! This is not a puritan organisation.) Even Thileepan, who died fasting for the LTTE in Jaffna in 1987, had warned some young Tamil women in the LTTE that the Tigers were not from within what they looked from the outside.

K.T. Sivakumar alias Anton Master was one of the earliest associates of Prabhakaran and a member of the LTTE Central Committee. He was also the founder and head of the LTTE Military Office. He was the most senior LTTE member to quit the outfit over Prabhakaran’s decision to wage war against India. Anton Master explains what propelled him to rebel, “The LTTE was not established nor did its fighters sacrifice their lives to combat the Indian government or its army. I firmly believed that antagonising India was not a viable strategy, and I also understood that Sri Lankan Tamils could not achieve their goal by making India an enemy. Unfortunately, this understanding was something Prabhakaran lacked.”

The gory end

There are many aspects of Prabhakaran that have come under increasingly intense scrutiny from former LTTE fighters. Ex-guerrillas say that from the time when he appeared to consult and debate with others, even if not in depth, Prabhakaran changed radically after the mid-1980s. This is when he seemed to become convinced that anyone not doing enough for or who had seemingly backtracked from the cause of Tamil Eelam was a traitor.

As years passed, he became a totalitarian, convinced that he was some kind of a demi-god who could do no wrong and who alone had the best interests of the Tamils at heart. As the LTTE kept winning military victories, he thought he was invincible and that attaining an independent Tamil Eelam was only a matter of time. The Sri Lankan State, he convinced himself, would never be able to defeat him.

Thanks to the fact that those around him were mainly “yes men” and eager to flatter him and did not have the guts to point out the shortcomings in his approach, Prabhakaran came to harbour a feeling of inflated self-importance about himself. Nothing else could have induced him to assassinate leaders like Rajiv Gandhi and Ranasinghe Premadasa. And when he decided to snuff out someone’s life, it did not matter who had helped him in the past.

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Not everyone in the LTTE would have wanted to turn India into an enemy or have Rajiv Gandhi assassinated. Rajiv Gandhi had personally given Prabhakaran a bullet-proof vest in 1987 and would likely have conceded to most of the LTTE’s demands if only Prabhakaran had not been so intransigent. Premadasa, who was naïve about the Tigers, provided the LTTE with weapons and money, but once his usefulness was over (as deemed by Prabhakaran), he was blown apart by a suicide bomber — just as Rajiv Gandhi was. Prabhakaran is said to have taken money from Mahinda in return for ensuring his victory in the presidential election but later planned to have Mahinda killed as well.

TULF star Amirthalingam was a virtual mentor once until Prabhakaran decided he was not worth living any further. He had no compunction in ordering the killings of TELO leader Sabaratnam and EPRLF chief Pathmanabha even though he had shared rooms and meals with them. He wanted to kill PLOT founder Uma Maheshwaran too, but the latter survived only due to the intervention of some sympathisers in Tamil Nadu (he died later at the hands of PLOT colleagues). EROS leader Velupillai Balakumar was spared because he was always subservient to Prabhakaran and eventually merged his group with the Tigers — only to meet a gory end, like the LTTE chief, in May 2009.

How LTTE collapsed like a pack of cards

Unlike rival militants, moderates like Amirthalingam, the intellectual Neelan Thiruchelvan, the erudite Lakshman Kadirgamagar (who was Sri Lanka’s foreign minister when an LTTE sniper murdered him), the committed Tamil academic and activist Rajani Thiranagama and many others could have posed no challenge to Prabhakaran militarily; but once they were deemed “traitors” (for different reasons), the death warrants issued by the LTTE chief were carried out, no questions asked. In what ways these and numerous other killings ordered by Prabhakaran helped the Tamil cause are difficult to fathom. In the case of Rajiv Gandhi, Prabhakaran repeatedly lied that he had no hand in the killing. In the case of Rajani Thiranagama, the LTTE tried to blame the EPRLF.

In the final analysis, no one was left to question Prabhakaran, irrespective of whatever he did. Questioning the Sun God would have amounted to heresy. As the Tamil society became emaciated from within, it lost all critical and rational thinking. The traits that came to identify an overwhelming majority of LTTE fighters was blind allegiance to the supreme leader, a leader who could never go wrong and who, like Phantom, the comic character Prabhakaran loved in his younger days, could never perish, come what may. Even LTTE songs were dedicated to him and his valour. If the leader wanted something done or someone killed, the order had to be carried out — without “ifs” and “buts”. This was brainwashing at its best. It is only this blind and unquestioned faith that made over a dozen LTTE guerrillas held by the Sri Lankan military to commit suicide after being ordered by the LTTE to take cyanide, leading to a terrible military confrontation with India. Although these suicides were also ordered by him, Prabhakaran reacted as if he was surprised by the mass deaths.

In the long run, if former LTTE guerrillas are to be believed, Prabhakaran came to be associated with insecurities that accompany all dictators. No wonder, he enjoyed flattery. Those who dared to raise uncomfortable questions had no place in the LTTE; in earlier times, some dissenters were allowed to quit the Tigers. In the later period, when paranoia gripped the Tigers, they were executed without mercy, preferably after torture. It is no wonder that when Prabhakaran died, an organisation that once seemed would never crack up collapsed like a pack of cards, leaving no trace of its existence except in the form of harrowing and numbing blood-soaked memories.

(Excerpted from The Rout of Prabhakaran by M.R. Narayan Swamy, with permission from Konark Publishers)