Remind on Tamilselvan

"On November 2, Raghu made a desperate phone call to the solider friend to tell him that he needed the shirt urgently. The original owner of the shirt wanted it back for emotional reasons after hearing about the death of LTTE’s political wing chief S P Thamilselvan. The shirt was a gift from Thamilselvan."

by.G Babu Jayakumar

(November, 20, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) One morning, when Raghu wanted a fresh shirt for work, he asked his friend, with whom he had spent the night, to spare one. After rummaging through his wardrobe, the friend found only one clean shirt but was reluctant to part with it since it was a gift. Assuring him that he will return it, Raghu took it but subsequently gave it away to another friend in the armed services when he had come down to Chennai.

On November 2, Raghu made a desperate phone call to the solider friend to tell him that he needed the shirt urgently. The original owner of the shirt wanted it back for emotional reasons after hearing about the death of LTTE’s political wing chief S P Thamilselvan. The shirt was a gift from Thamilselvan.

He had bumped into Thamilselvan in Kilinochi four times when the film crew from Chennai, in which he was a part, had been shooting a Tamil film Aaniver in Sri Lanka in 2006. It was during the third meeting that Thamilselvan gave him the shirt.

In the first meeting when he shook hands with the former guerilla fighter, he wondered if the bespectacled man had really been a ruthless militant, who had played a leading role in the overrunning of the Elephant Pass army base in northern Sri Lanka in 1991, besides leading several military operations. For it was a gentle handshake. The palm was too soft for someone who had handled lethal armoury, he recalls.

Thamilselvan, in his view, came across as an affable, soft-spoken man always smiling. In the first meeting with the crew, he had taken trouble to get to know each member and remembered every thing about them in the subsequent meetings. When someone mentioned Madurai as his hometown, Thamilselvan had recounted his visits to the Government Rajaji Hospital in Madurai for treatment when he was living in India.

Thamilselvan had his arms training in Indian soil. He was the de facto bodyguard of LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran during their stay in Chennai during the 1980s. Since then he had enjoyed the confidence of Prabakaran — he survived an internal purge in the LTTE in 1993 that saw the extermination of many leaders on suspicion of spying for India — and it was the close association that catapulted him to the top rung of the political wing.

Perhaps it was his pleasing personality and suave manners that made him the new mascot of the LTTE, which was then looking for an image makeover given the fact that the international community was growing tired of its assassination sprees and reckless violence. Perhaps the leadership found in him the best candidate to stick to it its ideals at the negotiating table, to which the Scandinavians were trying to bring the LTTE. Perhaps the leadership felt that he could not contribute much in the battlefield in view of his leg injury, suffered in 1993 while fighting the Lankan army near Pooneryn.

But even after he had swapped the jungle fatigues for sophisticated suits, he remained within Tiger territory in Kilinochi, making rare forays outside of it. Whenever he had to fly abroad, he used to arrive at the Colombo airport in a helicopter and then board the aircraft from there, says K Venkataramanan, an Indian journalist who was reporting for a news agency from Colombo in 2001 and 2002.

Venkataramanan recalls his meetings with Thamilselvan at the LTTE headquarters in Kilinochi, not far from the building that was targeted for bombing by Lankan airforce jets at the dawn of November 2. Journalists wishing to meet him were made to wait at the headquarters, where he would land at the appointed hour in a 4x4 Pajero with his interpreter, George, in tow. George, a retired postmaster, was a fixture in all Thamilselvan’s engagements with the international media. For Thamilselvan, who hails from a humble background — he was being trained to be a barber — was not proficient in English.

Even in the meetings with Tamil speaking journalists like Venkataramanan, George would be around to repeat the leader’s words in English. On his part Thamilselvan was known for his bombastic language, reeling out convoluted answers harping on the Eelam cause even for simple answers — a trait that mirrored his deep commitment to the struggle.

Born on August 29, 1967, Suppiah Parmu Thamilselvan plunged himself into the insurgency at the young age of 16 after the riots of 1983. When the Indian Peace Keeping Force was in Sri Lanka to enforce a peace accord with the island government in 1987, Thamiselvan led the attacks on Indian troops as the Jaffna zonal commander of the LTTE.

In 1995, he, along with his men, fled Jaffna and relocated himself in the Vanni area. But by 1994 he had started welcoming the peace delegations to Jaffna as the chief of the political wing. He had attended peace talks in Thailand, Norway, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. After the 2004 tsunami, he was in the vanguard of the struggle to get foreign aid for rehabilitating those affected in the LTTE-controlled coastal regions.

After the talks held at Geneva in 2006 which ended up in the Norwegian-brokered peace process falling apart, he is said to have been directing LTTE troops in the frontlines, though the walking stick that he carried had become his trademark, exemplifying him as a dove — and not a gun-totting hawk — in the eyes of the international community. Yes, he died a full-blooded guerilla. The posthumous conferment of ‘Brigadier’ is perhaps LTTE’s way of acknowledging that.