Karuna: The Tragedy of a Rebel (Part III)

"By the end of April 2004 it was as if the rebellion didn’t happen. The Tigers were back in the East, reopening their police stations, reactivating their courts and re-conscripting the child soldiers released by Karuna. The LTTE also began a systematic campaign of murder targeting Karuna supporters and sympathisers. Several prominent Karuna loyalists were murdered. The Norwegians who had withdrawn from their monitoring duties in the East during the rebellion came back doing little to hide their elation at the way things turned out." LG File Image: Col. Karuna with Former LTTE women leader to East , Akila and another female cadre of the LTTE in Thoppigala before his broke away from the LTTE.

Read Part II

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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)

III - Resurrection after Good Friday

When the much expected ‘mother of all battles’ between Vellupillai Pirapaharan’s men and the loyalists of his erstwhile favourite Col. Karuna ended in just three days the Sun God looked more omnipotent than ever before. The rebels resisted the Tiger offensive briefly, and unsuccessfully. Then Karuna did the unthinkable – he disbanded his fighters and disappeared, into political oblivion, many believed. Pirapaharan’s ‘Blitzkrieg’ won plaudits even from his Southern opponents; they praised his strategic brilliance and dismissed the rebellion as a storm in a tea cup. The fact that the Good Friday offensive was facilitated in part by the UPFA administration did not tarnish the glory of the victor; nor did it discredit the Lankan state.

Karuna’s decision to avoid a head-on battle was a logical one. He could not have won such a confrontation given the Lankan state’s decision to back Pirapaharan. His best option was not a war of position in which he will be on the defensive but a classic guerrilla war where he can be the attacker and pick the time, place and manner of engagement. An internecine war would have caused innumerable deaths and devastated the East, the main battle theatre. And the real losers of such a war would have been the Tamil people of the East, the very ones Karuna invoked in his moment of rebellion. Karuna had asserted that he rebelled against Pirapaharan partly because the latter was planning to sacrifice thousands of Eastern Tamil men and women – and girls and boys – in a new war against the Lankan state. If Karuna consented to an all out war against the LTTE he would have been partially responsible for creating the very outcome he was supposedly trying to prevent through his rebellion. As the UTHR stated, “Now Karuna is mocked as a man who ran away after a show of bravado. It might have been convenient for some if he had carried on a bloody war for months longer, but whatever his motives, Karuna did the right thing in asking his followers to go home rather than sacrifice hundreds of children under him” (Information Bulletin No. 36: The Batticaloa Fiasco and the Tragedy of Missed Opportunities – 29.5.2004).

Rebellions are superfluous in democracies where opposition is the norm, and virulent opponents often socialise over a drink or a meal or a deal. Rebellion becomes vital – and even glorious – in dictatorial setups where absolute intolerance prevails, such as the LTTE. The sole representative status is an article of faith for Pirapaharan. As long as a single Tamil opponent of the LTTE remains standing, the Tiger State would be incomplete, psychologically. That is why for the LTTE the total elimination of all Tamil resistance is an objective indissolubly linked to that of Tiger Eelam. With the Good Friday offensive the Tigers’ sole representative status was hallowed by the blood of fellow Tamils, once again. Not only was Karuna the rebel defeated; a lesson was taught to all other anti-Tiger Tamils (including, and perhaps especially, potential rebels within the LTTE) – opposition to the Tigers did not pay; any rebel will not only be annihilated by the LTTE; he will also be abandoned and betrayed by the Lankan state, with the complaisance of the world.

By the end of April 2004 it was as if the rebellion didn’t happen. The Tigers were back in the East, reopening their police stations, reactivating their courts and re-conscripting the child soldiers released by Karuna. The LTTE also began a systematic campaign of murder targeting Karuna supporters and sympathisers. Several prominent Karuna loyalists were murdered. The Norwegians who had withdrawn from their monitoring duties in the East during the rebellion came back doing little to hide their elation at the way things turned out. The Tigers boasted that Karuna had abandoned his men and run away to Australia. The East seemed quiescent, with no sign of resistance.

The story should have ended there; it did not. Suddenly and unexpectedly the spectre of Karuna was haunting the triumphant LTTE. Within a month of the Good Friday offensive the attacks on Tiger operatives in the East began; seven Tiger operatives were killed followed by a bomb attack on two members of the Jeyanthan brigade which functioned as the vanguard in the Good Friday offensive. The Tiger, the hunter, was becoming the hunted. Simultaneously the Karuna faction began an online Tamil newspaper (Neruppu). There was talk of forming a political party. The unexpected resurgence of Karuna energised the beleaguered anti-Tiger Tamils in Sri Lanka and created an unprecedented surge in opposition to the LTTE within the Tamil Diaspora.

When Karuna loyalists began targeting members of the LTTE in the East, the Tigers at first denied that the attacks were happening. When the attacks intensified, and it became impossible to continue to pretend they were not happening, the LTTE began to blame the Lankan Army. The Tigers commenced a propaganda blitz against the SLA, accusing it of jeopardising the ceasefire, even lodging a formal complaint with the SLMM to that effect. The SLMM investigated the matter and ruled out any involvement by the Lankan Army in the spate of attacks against the Tigers. The Tigers replaced Karuna’s replacement Ramesh with Karikalan in an effort to wipe out the rebels. They scored some successes, including the killing of Reggie, Karuna’s older brother who was directing operations on the ground. Yet the attacks continued.

For the Tigers the resurrection of Karuna was the worst possible nightmare. True, Karuna was a shadow of what he could have been had the Lankan state opted to back him rather than the LTTE or at least remained truly neutral in the battle of the Tigers. Still, the very fact that Karuna survived, and continued with his resistance were significant defeats for Pirapaharan. It was not Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, the imperfect man and the fallible leader, the Tigers feared, but what he symbolised. In his continued existence, even after the Good Friday offensive, and in his capacity to launch attacks on Tigers, however small scale, he represented the idea and the possibility of rebellion. And for Pirapaharan nothing could have been more of an anathema.

Sebastian Haffner, a German opponent of the Nazis, has described the favourite Nazi ploy of scapegoating, which was used with devastating success against many opponents including the state of Czechoslovakia: “By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist” (Defying Hitler). The Tigers too had a habit of making their opponents the issue, the stumbling block, the spoiler. Time and again, even as they broke every rule in the book, the Tigers were able to place the blame on their opponent, be it anti-Tiger Tamils, Muslims, India or Sri Lanka. Alarmed by the unexpected resurrection of Karuna the Tigers tried the same method. The Karuna group was accused of undermining the ceasefire, of endangering the peace process. The UPFA was told that if it wanted to prevent the Fourth Eelam War, Karuna group will have to be reined in.

Unfortunately for the Tiger the usual combination of lures and threats failed to achieve the desired results. This time around it was not so easy to put the gene back in the bottle. Ranil Wickremesinghe had shown uncharacteristic firmness in punishing the UNP parliamentarian who had helped Karuna and a few loyalists to come to Colombo after the Eastern Tigers were disbanded. On the issue of Karuna the UPFA leaders sounded almost as pro-Pirapaharan as Wickremesinghe. Even so, the government hesitated to pull the Tigers’ chestnuts out of the fire, again. Perhaps someone remembered how the Tigers double-crossed the regime after the Good Friday offensive. The quid-pro-quo was the support of the TNA parliamentarians for the UPFA which did not enjoy a majority in parliament. Instead the TNA voted against the UPFA and for the UNP in the crucial battle for the post of the Speaker. The memory of that ‘betrayal’ may have prevented the UPFA from acting as the cat’s paw for the Tiger, again.

Available evidence indicate that after the Good Friday offensive a section of the Lankan state helped Karuna loyalists to survive and provided them with political and military cover to resist the Tigers. That was certainly what the Tigers and their allies alleged; if that allegation was true it certainly made sense. Given the unreconstructed nature of the Tigers, it was logical for the Lankan state and the Karuna rebels to make common cause against a common enemy. That is what the state should have done when the rebellion broke out. Perhaps some members of the government and a segment of the armed forces realised their mistake when they saw with what insouciance the Tigers broke their promise. The Owl of Minerva does fly at dusk, as Hegel famously said.

As his men carried out guerrilla operations against the LTTE in the East Karuna began to make political interventions, through the media. He apologised for his past errors and expressed his commitment to a political solution within a united Sri Lanka. He also expressed willingness to work with both the government and other parties to find solutions to the problems faced by the Eastern people. Again according to available evidence he did enjoy considerable support in parts of the East during this time. He also tried to win support among Sinhala and Muslim civilians in the East and along its border.
Karuna’s task was not an easy one. No state, no organisation can hold the East unless it understands and respects Eastern diversity and finds some way of accommodating it. This requires tolerance, pluralism and democracy. Nearly two decades ago the UTHR warned “Division, mutual suspicion and a feeling of worthlessness in the East are thus integral to the LTTE’s strategy, which based on Tamil chauvinism has also meshed with the aims of Sinhalese chauvinism. The organic unity of the East needs to be rediscovered” (Special Report No. 7). The possibility of a better future for the East, the victim of serial discrimination and multiple betrayals, depended on how well the Karuna rebels could rise to this challenge. Karuna needed to win over the Eastern Tamils; he also needed to reach out to the Sinhalese and Muslims in the East, not an easy task given his history and his Tiger bred habits.

Karuna also needed to build a broad unity of anti-Tiger Tamils. Such a united front would have increased their bargaining power vis-à-vis not only the Sri Lankan state but also the Southern society and the international community. It would have furthered the cause of devolution, by making the South understand that the alternative to Tiger Eelam cannot be the old unitary state. This unity necessary and desirable was also impossible. Perhaps Karuna did not try hard enough; perhaps both he and Douglas Devananda were not completely immune to the ‘sole representative’/ ‘sole saviour’ mania. Even in the face on an enemy who is intent on their extermination, the unity of anti-Tiger Tamils was - and remains - impossible.

The Karuna group also needed to pay attention to politics and the people. Popularity and legitimacy are harder to achieve and even harder to maintain. They require good politics. Here a valuable lesson can be learned from a very unlikely source – the Hamas. Hamas’ electoral success partly stemmed from the solid pro-people work of the ‘other Hamas’, the Hamas which builds and runs pre-schools, youth clubs and health clinics, provide poor people with assistance and even organise free weddings. As Hanan Ashrawi stated “Hamas victory reflects the consequences of mismanagement of the (Palestinian) Authority, corruption, Fatah’s hogging of power and indifference towards peoples’ needs and rights’ (Al Jazeera – 27.1.2006). As one of the Hamas leaders, Mahmud al-Zahar pointed out “We did not fall upon Gaza from the moon. We are living within the society and know what the street wants and what their conscience is” (ibid). In fact Hamas has been implementing this dual strategy for many years, engaging in social welfare work with as much commitment and dedication as they did the military work.

This is a path that could have been taken by the Karuna rebels especially in the aftermath of the tsunami. Granted, the LTTE’s sole representative policy made it hard – and at times near impossible – for the rebels to engage in political and social welfare work among the Tamil people. But perhaps the rebels – like the LTTE and most other anti-Tiger Tamils – did not understand the absolute need for and the vital importance of such work. Perhaps they too regarded such activities as unimportant, even unsuitable (too soft; not ‘macho enough’). But the politico-military necessity of such ‘work among the masses’ can be understood by the fact that organisations as manifestly hard as Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon realised the need for such work, engaged in such work, consistently, continuously, as a matter of strategy. Incidentally their social welfare work is one reason the Hamas and the Hezbollah can win new recruits without having to resort to conscription (especially child conscription).

Somewhere along the line the Karuna faction stopped trying to be better than the LTTE. It ceased to give politics the required priority or to respect the rights of the people it was supposed to represent. The Tigers had dubbed them paramilitaries and they began to confirm to this label, perhaps due to circumstances, perhaps due to their own predilections. As the UTHR pointed out, “Any opposition to the LTTE without a political commitment to human rights and democracy would be ultimately disastrous…. In the case of the Karuna faction much caution is required in making a distinction between receiving possible support from some sections of security forces and being paramilitaries with direct ties to state forces, even though the faction is sadly today largely known for killings in the manner of its parent. This is a trend that portends long-term disaster” (UTHR - Information Bulletin No. 38 – 21.7.2005). Disaster, in this case, did not take a long term to happen.

To be continued