Karuna: The Tragedy of a Rebel (Part I)

(January 30, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan alias Col. Karuna rebelled against not just the LTTE and its self-deified leader; he also rebelled against deeply held convictions and beliefs of Tamil nationalism. His tragedy was not that he failed; given the monumental task he set himself, failure was hardly an unlikely outcome. His tragedy was the role he played in his own fall.

______________________________________

LG File Image: From Left to Right V.Muralitharan a.k.a (Karuna Amman) broke away from the LTTE in April 2004 (now leader of the Tamil Makkal Viduthalaip Puligal (TMVP)),Ms. Adel Balasingham (wife of Anton Balasingham), Anton Balasigham, Velupillai Prabhakaran ,S. Thamilchelvan (Head of the Political wing),V. Rudrakumaran (New York lawyer and legal advisor) ,Dr Jay Maheswaran (former international co-ordinator TRO (Melbourne), and economic advisor to the LTTE) All members of the LTTE peace delegation for peace talks with the UNP govt (most likely photo taken between Oct 2002 and Jan 2003)

by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. But the task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”
Albert Camus (The Rebel)

INTRODUCTION

Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein was the most pre-eminent general of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II during the Thirty Years War. The hero of Catholic Europe, he saved the Imperial army from disaster, imposing defeat after defeat on the Protestant forces. Eventually, tired of the continuous internecine bloodletting in the name of religion, Wallenstein rebelled against the Emperor, with peace and religious tolerance as his rallying cries, and began secret negotiations with his erstwhile enemies, the protestant princes of Europe. The rebellion failed, partly due to Wallenstein’s own errors, partly because he had set himself up as a rival to his sovereign in a Europe which still believed in the divine right of kings. Abandoned by many of his close friends and allies, Wallenstein was murdered by an imperial agent.

Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan alias Col. Karuna rebelled against not just the LTTE and its self-deified leader; he also rebelled against deeply held convictions and beliefs of Tamil nationalism. His tragedy was not that he failed; given the monumental task he set himself, failure was hardly an unlikely outcome. His tragedy was the role he played in his own fall. If Col. Karuna died, killed by the agents of Vellupillai Pirapaharan, one year ago, he would have remained a hero to many Eastern/anti-Tiger Tamils, an iconic figure capable of inspiring future rebels and dissidents. Karuna survived the wrath of the Tiger; but in the ensuing contestation with the LTTE he increasingly resorted to those anti-democratic and anti-civilisational methods he learnt from Pirapaharan. Encouraged/permitted by a Sinhala supremacist regime, he became almost as much of an oppressor to the Eastern Tamils as Pirapaharan was. His forces emulated the Tigers in most of their abhorrent activities, beginning with child conscription. There is credible evidence, provided by such impeccable sources as the UTHR and the Human Rights Watch that the TMVP engaged in abductions, killings and extortions. These crimes tarnished the image of the Karuna rebels; in fact at some point they transformed the rebels into new oppressors, a not infrequent occurrence in history.

The rest of the story is a sordid one. Once the East was retaken by the Lankan forces, Karuna’s value receded in the eyes of his Sinhala protectors. Despite his degeneration Karuna did not give up his insistence on greater devolution for the North-East. This could have irritated some of his Sinhala patrons who did not believe in the need for a political solution since they did not believe in the existence of an ethnic problem. Whether the regime created the Karuna – Pilliyan schism or whether it was the natural outcome of Karuna’s transformation from a rebel with a cause to a war lord with an attitude is unclear. In the end Karuna was sent out of the country to join his family in the UK, on a diplomatic passport under an assumed name. Today the man who posed the most potent challenge to Vellupillai Pirapaharan, the man who demonstrated that the mighty Sun God has feet of clay, is incarcerated as a common criminal in the UK.

The rebel fell but that does not make his act of rebellion incorrect or unjust. Karuna was right to rebel against Pirapaharan. With the LTTE in command the only future that is in store for Lankan Tamils is one consisting solely of death and destruction. Even if Pirapaharan succeeds, he will create a state few Tamils would want to live in, because it would be a state even more unfree and unjust than a Sinhala state. Rebelling against their own supposed liberators is the only way Tamils can create a future for themselves.

Karuna was right to rebel. He was right in his effort to chart a different future at least for the Tamils of his birthplace, the East. He was wrong not in his act of rebellion but in his failure to be true to the ideals and values he upheld to justify that rebellion. Ultimately Karuna betrayed Eastern Tamils almost as much as Pirapaharan betrayed Lankan Tamils. With that betrayal he undermined the raison d’être of his very existence as a rebel against the Tiger. Karuna’s failure is also sourced in the manner in which the Lankan polity responded to his rebellion. The pro-appeasement lobby treated him with dislike and disdain; the Sinhala supremacists made use of him and betrayed him once he outlived his uses. Karuna’s failure to build a broad alliance with other anti-Tiger Tamils ensured his political isolation and hastened his downfall.

• ______________________________
• "Mahattaya’s tragic fate helped the next rebel within the LTTE to survive. Karuna is said to be one of the people used by the Tiger Supremo to arrest Mahattaya and disband his loyalists. That intimate knowledge of Mr. Pirapaharan’s modus operandi came to Karuna’s rescue a decade later when he embarked on his rebellion against the Tiger Supremo. When the Pirapaharan summoned the Eastern leaders to Vanni, Karuna probably felt a sense of deja vu."
• ______________________________

If the Karuna rebellion was handled correctly, it could have encouraged other schisms within the LTTE. That potential was destroyed by Karuna’s own mistakes and the mishandling of the Karuna factor, from start to finish, by the Lankan state and polity. Looking at Karuna’s ultimate fate, who in the LTTE would want to follow in his footsteps or trust the Sinhala establishment? Others may leave the LTTE but none are likely to rebel against the Tiger Chief. Such a rebellion cannot succeed without the backing of the Lankan state and Karuna’s tragic fate is a powerful reminder of the ultimate end of any Tamil who make the fatal error of expecting the Sinhalese to act with a sense of enlightened self-interest.

I – PRE-HISTORY OF A REBELLION

Karuna was the first rebel in the world of the Tiger. His rebellion was unprecedented in the LTTE’s history. Before Karuna there were dissidents but no rebels. When Uma Maheswaran fell out with Vellupillai Pirapaharan it was a battle of rough equals for supremacy, brought to a head by a personal difference. The manifestation of Mahendraraja alias Mahattaya’s differences with Pirapaharan did not go beyond the limits of insubordination. His experience at the peace talks with the Premadasa administration obviously convinced Mahattya that a negotiated solution to the conflict was possible. Consequently he was unhappy about Pirapaharan’s decision to break off negotiations and commence the Second Eelam War. According to available evidence Mahattaya expressed his dissenting ideas within some Tiger circles. Pirapaharan reacted with the ferocity of a Tiger to this act of insubordination by his hand picked deputy even though Mahattaya never went public with his opposition or tried to rally a segment of the LTTE around his alternate position.

Psychologically handicapped by his inability to understand the full scale of Pirapaharan’s megalomania (perhaps because the metamorphosis from Thambi into Surya Thevan was yet to come) Mahattaya allowed himself to be arrested without putting up any resistance and was rewarded with a painful, ignominious death.

Mahattaya’s tragic fate helped the next rebel within the LTTE to survive. Karuna is said to be one of the people used by the Tiger Supremo to arrest Mahattaya and disband his loyalists. That intimate knowledge of Mr. Pirapaharan’s modus operandi came to Karuna’s rescue a decade later when he embarked on his rebellion against the Tiger Supremo. When the Pirapaharan summoned the Eastern leaders to Vanni, Karuna probably felt a sense of deja vu. He did not go, and thus avoided the trap which Col. Paduman (the then LTTE Commander for Trincomalee) fell into (he was almost certainly murdered).

“What is a rebel?” asks Albert Camus and answers, “A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation” (The Rebel). Karuna’s act of saying no, publicly, gave a new lease of life to the anti-Tiger Tamil cause. Without that act of rebellion the anti-Tiger Tamil cause may not have survived the appeasement process of Ranil Wickremesinghe. If omens have a place in politics, the Third Peace Process in Sri Lanka had an unpropitious beginning. The ceasefire between the Lankan government and the LTTE came into effect on the Christmas Eve of 2001. That very day the LTTE killed Anandaraja, a 34 year old former member with one child. (UTHR - Information Bulletin No. 28 – 1.). This slaying of an unarmed dissident was reported by the UTHR in its Information Bulletin of Jan. 2nd 2002 but went unnoticed by the Wickremesinghe administration and the Norwegian facilitators. The killing and its response it die not elicit constituted a forewarning of what the anti-Tiger Tamils could expect under the ceasefire and what the Tiger agenda was vis-à-vis any potential or real alternative. As the South became seeped in a peace euphoria, the anti-Tiger Tamils began to be seen as ‘spoilers’ impeding a negotiated peace with the LTTE by their very existence.

This was the politico-psychological context in which Karuna rebellion happened. And perhaps it happened in the only way possible as a rebellion by the East against Northern dominance. The liberation of the East from Northern subjugation and the restoration of the basic human and democratic rights of the Eastern people formed the positive principle of the Karuna rebellion, the raison d’être for breaking up the LTTE.

The East is the permanent periphery of both Sri Lanka and the nascent state of Tiger Eelam. Development of underdevelopment is the inescapable Eastern reality. The history of the East is one of continuous neglect and multiple discriminations - by the state and the Sinhala political establishment, by Tamil political leaders and the LTTE and by the Muslim leaders based in Colombo. The East was everyone’s stepchild, one of the poorest provinces in the country, poor in every sense of the word, from income levels to educational and health standards. The exchange between the South and the East, and the North and the East was always unequal, economically and politically. The East was used by Sinhala nationalism and Tamil nationalism in its mutual contestation; both took from the East, giving hardly anything in return. The East, like the Deep South, often invoked but never succoured, is symbolic of the hypocrisy and cynicism inherent in both Sinhala and Tamil nationalism.

Ironically this neglected and often despised East has a disproportionate say in the fate of Sri Lanka and Tiger Eelam. The East has always being the weak link, both for the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil groups - because the East is neither Sinhala nor Tamil; it is both and Muslim besides, in almost equal proportions. Sri Lanka cannot remain undivided if it cannot win the allegiance of the East; Tiger Eelam cannot come into being and survive if it cannot win the allegiance of the East. The East has a deciding vote, because it has the option of being or not being the bridge from undivided Sri Lanka to Tiger Eelam.

East, poorer and less developed than the North, provided the bulk of the cadre for the Tigers. Most of the leaders however came from the North. Eastern cadres, even when they did move up through the ranks to positions of responsibility, often did not fare well. It is also interesting that one of the first individual acts of dissension against the Tiger policy of internecine killing came from the East, from Batticaloa. It is a little known story but an important one, given subsequent developments: “Until quite recently the Eas­tern militant cadre showed a community spirit which ignored group divisions. When this posed a challenge to the leadership in Jaffna, they had to send men from Jaffna to create division and restore their authority. When the LTTE took on the TELO in May 1986, the native born Batticaloa LTTE leader, Kadavul, issued a statement expressing the need for Eastern Tamils to be united and assured the other groups that they would not be harmed. The LTTE leadership had to send Kumarappa and Pottu to enforce the divi­sion. Francis, another LTTE leader born in Batticaloa, was very highly regarded and is said to have been against the killing of Batticaloa resident Sinhalese in October 1987. The killings were ordered by the Jaffna leadership. Francis later died a miserable man” (UTHR Report No.7 - emphasis mine).

It was all these factors, from inescapable demographic reality to discrimination by one’s own, which turned the East into the breeding ground for the first open rebellion against the LTTE in March 2004. Karuna, the highest ranking Easterner in the LTTE hierarchy, a favourite of Vellupillai Pirapaharan and one of the most effective Tiger commanders returned to his roots both literally and politically in his moment of rebellion. He demanded a guarantee from the LTTE leader that his new Eastern recruits – most of them conscripted children – will not be sent to fight in the North. Unsurprisingly the Tiger leader refused to even consider such a guarantee. Karuna then proposed a de facto separation of the LTTE into a Northern and an Eastern wing.

Pirapaharan ordered him to come for a meeting to discuss and iron out existing differences. Karuna refused to go meekly to the Tiger lair thereby kicking off the first rebellion in the history of the LTTE.

To be continued