The bitter road from Vadukoddai to Mullativu

By H. L. D. Mahindapala

(February 18, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) Mullativu – the last pocket held by the Tamil Tigers – illustrates without any ambiguity the failure and the tragedy of Jaffna-centric politics.

First, the over-ambitious and misguided political leaders of Jaffna who passed the Vadukoddai Resolution raised hopes of a separate state only for the Tamils. They endorsed violence as the means of achieving it. Mullativu marks the disastrous end to the massive violent assault to break up the Sri Lankan state. Now they have to collectively answer the question: did they sacrifice the lives of their people and all what they had gained over centuries to end up in a miserable hole in Mullativu with no exit?

Next, Mullativu has stripped naked the emperors of Jaffna-centric politics who posed as heroic saviours of the Tamil people. In reality they had no solution to offer their community from the beginning except mono-ethnic extremism rejecting multi-cultural co-existence within a democratic framework. The consequences of breaking away from the democratic, multi-cultural main stream were devastating as seen in the retreat to the jungles in Mullativu. In short, Jaffna-centric politics led eventually to a dead-end. At the end of the day the children of the Vadukoddai Resolution who took to violence were forced to run as fast as they could to save their lives. The script writers of Jaffna politics never envisaged this pathetic end. They never expected their heroes to run away from the battlefield, like a rag-tag army of medieval mercenaries, hastily constructing sand banks or digging holes in the ground to stop a technologically and military superior army advancing inexorably to crush them.

The tragedy, on the other hand, is that the Jaffna Tamil political class/caste, in the guise being protectors of Jaffna Tamils, led their people like lemmings to the most humiliating end in their history. The end referred to here is not the military defeat but the descent of Tamil politics into the hell of chaos. Mullativu marks the despair of Tamils looking frantically for a viable Tamil leadership that can guide them out of the hell hole in which they are stuck. The task of the new leadership is to bring them out into a world where they can coexist once again as traditional neighbours who shared this nation as common trustees of the land.

The tragedy of Mullativu testifies to the unscrupulous way in which the Tamil civilians of all ages are being sacrificed by the Tamil leadership for no meaningful gain at all. The Tamil heroes who promised to protect the Tamil people are now shamelessly hiding behind the Tamil people using them as a human shield. Mullativu has blow up the myth of Velupillai Prabhakaran being the sole protector of the Tamils. He is now fighting with his back to the wall to save himself and whatever is left of his crumbling killing machine. The tragedy faced by the Tamils of Jaffna is that their leaders, in competing with each other to be the sole representatives of Jaffna Tamils, had callously and ruthlessly dragged the Tamil people to an end without dignity. It is now up to the Sinhala leadership to restore to them the human dignity that their leaders never gave them in the casteist past or never could give them in the Evil-laamist future.

Mullativu is also another example of where the Tamil leadership creates the crisis for themselves and their people and then, without any qualms, blame the “Sinhala governments” when they get bogged down in crises caused by their own folly. Prabhakaran could not achieve anything by dragging the Tamil people into the hell hole of Mullativu. Nor did he have a moral right to put the lives of the Tamil people at risk purely to protect his self-serving and short-sighted interests. From Vadukoddai to Mullativu the Tamil leaders have been digging holes for their people. And when the Tamil leaders too fall headlong into the bottomless pits (like Prabhakaran) they turn round and blame “the Sinhala governments”.

This is typical of Jaffna-centric politics. They promise heaven and lead their people to hell and when they are burning in the hells, fuelled by their mono-ethnic extremism, they blame “the Sinhala governments”. The history of Jaffna politics has been an unending litany of complaints blaming “the Sinhala governments”. They have never taken responsibility for their misguided policies and failures. In the Vadukoddai Resolution their main aim of was to ride on the backs of their people promising to beat the Sinhalese and take them to goals which they cannot achieve. Mullativu will stand forever as the graveyard of peninsular politics of hate. Mullativu, hopefully, will be remembered as the final resting place of all the ethno-centric extremism bred in the womb of Jaffna.

Mullativu will also go down in the annals of Tamil history as the shameful outpost of Tamil cowardice. It is the place where Prabhakaran is using his people as his last weapon. He has nothing else to protect him. No firepower. No man power. No territory. No friends either abroad or at home, except the deluded diaspora. So in the most cowardly act of his life he is hiding behind the Tamil people forced to stand as a human shield to protect him and his family. Is this the great hero of the Tamils?

In the early days the boast was that Prabhakaran gave dignity to the Tamil people. What dignity is there left for the Tamil people when they are shot in the back by Prabhakaran as they try to escape his grip and run away from the war zone? If Prabhakaran – the man who has killed more Tamils than all the others put together -- is considered to be the hero of the Tamils who gave them dignity then should not the affluent Tamils in the diaspora mint an exquisite Mahamanithar medal for all the others who have killed Tamils?

What is happening in Mullativu is obscene, immoral and inhuman -- and that, unfortunately has been the quintessence of Tamil politics in the post-Vadukoddai Resolution. The deification of Prabhakaran by the Tamil diaspora in particular was because they worshipped his power to kill at will. They marched in Western capitals to glorify the murders financed by them. The more he killed the more he was deified as the saviour of the Tamils. But what glory or dignity is there for the Tamils when he shoots his own people in the back as they run in search of safety?

The Frankenstein of Jaffna could thrive only on a diet of bloody violence. He came out of the Vadukoddai violence and the last move left for him is to fall on the Vadukoddai sword. He took up the sword and he never gave it up. He never lived with his people or others in peace. He derived his power primarily by bleeding the Tamil people to death. He survived only in the killing fields. He organized and ran the most efficient program for serial and systematic killing. It was a four-fold program: 1. he sent the Tamil people (particularly under aged children) as cannon fodder to face the Security Forces; 2. he decimated all those Tamils who opposed him; 3 he sent handpicked Tamils as human bombs to target his perceived enemies and 4, worst of all, he shot them in the back when they ran away from him. This summarizes the power and glory of Prabhakaran..

When the Tamils crowed that Prabhakaran has brought them dignity what they meant was that his organized violence was capable of decimating all the others, including the non-Tiger Tamils, who opposed his brand of Evil-laamist politics. They were wallowing in the blood that flowed from Prabhakaran’s violence. While the civilized world was banning him either as a wanted criminal or as an insufferable terrorist the Tamils in the diaspora were actively collecting funds to finance his death squads hunting Tamil dissidents.

Prabhakaran got his first Tamil head in July 1975 when he killed unarmed Mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiyappah. He has not stopped killing since then. And after 33 years of killing he is now holed up in Mullativu. Who is to be blamed? He blames everybody – India, international community, “the Sinhala governments” etc -- except himself. What is unacceptable and unforgivable is his refusal, even at this late stage, to acknowledge the suffering of his own people caused by his intransigence to let them go.

So far he has offered the Tamil people only a quantifiable amount of absolute misery. What else can he offer now? He can’t offer Eelam. He can’t wage a conventional war. He can’t offer peace. He can’t offer security or protection. And even when he is cornered with no escape route he keeps shooting at his own people running away from him into safer grounds in the security zones. He, in short, is the ultimate symbol of the brutal political culture of Jaffna that dates back to the casteist Vellahla regime in feudal times.

It must be noted that Prabhakaran’s cult of violence is not much different from the traditional Hindu-Vellahla culture. The Vellahla elite oppressed, persecuted and held the helpless low-caste people hostage inside a casteist concentration camp of the peninsula for centuries purely to protect and sustain the ruling Vellahla supremacists. Though Prabhakaran comes from a lower caste he remains, and always acted, as the political child spawned by the Vellahla supremacists. He never failed to use their ruthless tactics, organized into a more sophisticated force, to keep the Tamils in their place.

At the root of the Sri Lankan crisis is the identity politics of Jaffna Tamils who ceremonially and officially declared war on the rest of the nation when they passed the Vadukoddai Resolution in 1976 to achieve their separate state based on imaginary geography and fictitious history. It was a conscious policy decision that sealed the fate of Jaffna Tamils. The old Vellahla guard held the reins of power as long as they remained within the democratic mainstream. But once they decided to go down the uncertain path of “extra-parliamentary” violence power slipped out of their hands and fell into the hands of the brain-washed youth who took to the gun like duck to water.

The Vadukoddai Resolution called on the youth to take up arms. This call produced 32 violent youth groups in the seventies. The one common factor shared by them was identity politics feeding on anti-Sinhala extremism. Out of the 32 fragments the group that emerged on top was the most ruthless organization based on a fascist personality cult. The mixture of fascism, personality cult and identity politics is an explosive Molotov cocktail. Nazis were the first to grab state power based on ruthless identity politics. The Tigers’ pseudo-state in the Vanni will not be the last.

If the leadership in Jaffna decided to remain in the parliamentary main stream, like the other Tamil-speaking communities, the history of Jaffna and of the nation would have been different. But in 1976 they summoned the Tamils to take the route that would eventually end in Mullativu-- a bloody, 33-year-old journey to nowhere. All those who idealize, or glorify, or justify or even hope to go down once again the road from Vadukoddai to Mullativu are doomed to relive the past littered with hate, bitterness, blood and corpses.

Besides, if Prabhakaran is the kind of hero that we can produce then we are destined to live in the fate expressed in the words of Bertolt Brecht who wrote:“ Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”
-Sri Lanka Guardian