The mirage of Eelam

By Malini Parthasarathy
Courtesy: The Hindu

(April 25, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The LTTE’s shortsighted and adventurist positions have cost the Tamil ethnic cause dearly even as valuable time has been lost in the failure to consolidate the gains achieved through political negotiations.

With more than a 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils breaking free and escaping the intense fighting in northern Sri Lanka between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan Army, the myth that the island’s Tamils regard the LTTE as their sole protector and Eelam as their only hope is shattered.

It is becoming increasingly evident, as the catastrophic dimensions of the human tragedy unfold, that the thousands of suffering civilians trapped in the thin wedge of LTTE-held territory were being used as human shields by the desperate terrorists now on the run.

Distraught

The pictures published daily, which show distraught and anxious Tamil families walking through slushy fields and backwaters and jumping into small boats to ferry them out of the nightmare, make clear that the Tamil community is no longer willing to be held hostage by the blood-soaked designs of the LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The world is understandably perturbed by the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of civilians being forced to flee their homes and herded into overflowing refugee camps in Vavuniya and Mannar with limited supplies of water and food. Yet the U N and other international agencies appear to have acknowledged that it is the LTTE which is primarily responsible for this disastrous situation.

Conflict

While urging the Sri Lankan Government to give access to the conflict zones to be able to provide help to the stranded Tamil civilians, the U N has firmly placed the onus of defusing the current situation on the LTTE. The Security Council has demanded that the LTTE immediately lay down arms, renounce terrorism, and join the political process through dialogue.

Of course it would be unrealistic to expect that the LTTE, which has spent more than two decades in a ruthless militaristic quest for hegemony in the Tamil political arena at the expense of all else, will suddenly see the light and surrender. If anything, the LTTE’s ceaseless self-aggrandizement has been the biggest impediment in the long struggle for equal rights for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

This is indeed a moment of reckoning for the LTTE, which has had a fascist stranglehold over the Tamils in northern Sri Lanka and has been designated a terrorist organization and proscribed in more than 30 countries. For Tamil Nadu’s politicians to continue to portray the LTTE as a brave liberation force and to lionize Prabhakaran, the man behind the assassination of a former Prime Minister of India, represents a betrayal not only of Indian national sentiment but also of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause.

Viciousness

A lot of the LTTE’s viciousness and destructiveness was directed not at the so-called Sinhala enemies but within the Tamil political movement itself, targeting and eliminating courageous and visionary leaders such as Appapillai Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam of the TULF, whose lives were entirely devoted to the Tamil ethnic cause.

As those familiar with the twists and turns of the Sri Lankan Tamil struggle know, the situation today is radically different from that which existed in 1983 when the Sri Lankan Tamil tragedy burst into international consciousness as a result of the ‘Black July’ pogrom against the island’s Tamils by Sinhala chauvinists. In 1983, the Tamils were a truly dispossessed people denied even basic democratic rights and equal citizenship rights by an oppressive Sri Lankan state dominated by the Sinhala majority.

For decades the Tamils did not have an effective political leadership to articulate their just demands, with the mild-mannered leaders of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) being seen as ineffective in countering Sinhala majority chauvinism.

Thus the romantic aura that surrounded the young militants, or the ‘boys’ as they were affectionately called, who burst on the scene in the early 1980s with their various groups, Prabhakaran himself, Sri Sabaratnam of TELO, Uma Maheswaran of PLOTE, and K. Padmanabha of EPRLF, reflected the hunger of Sri Lankan Tamils for strong heroes who would lead them in the struggle against Sinhala majoritarian oppression.

One reason for the romanticization of these militant groups by the Sri Lankan Tamil community was its perception that from 1948, the Sri Lankan state had been impervious to the pleas of the Tamil community to amend the discriminatory state policies favouring the Sinhala majority, including making Sinhala the only official language, thereby rendering Tamils outsiders in their own country.

It seemed to the Sri Lankan Tamil community that it was not until the rise of Tamil militancy that Colombo felt the need to sit up and listen to the angry voices of the alienated Tamils.

Dramatic moments that caught the international imagination such as the Thimpu Declaration in 1985 by the five Tamil militant groups, which asserted that Tamils were a nation with the right to self determination and a homeland, perceptibly increased the pressure on the Sri Lankan state to respond to the demand for power sharing with the Tamil minority.

But very soon that goodwill for these groups evaporated as signs of their proclivity for extreme violence emerged in their savage internecine fighting. One by one, TELO, PLOTE and EPRLF were devoured by the LTTE, which was determined to establish its hegemony as the ‘sole representative’ of the Tamil people.

Devolution

Even as other groups, led by the TULF were using India’s good offices to press Colombo for a framework that would devolve powers to the Tamils and allow for a merger of the northern and eastern provinces that could constitute a Tamil homeland, the LTTE was disdainful of these parleys.

Thus a pathbreaking achievement like the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement of July 1987, which marked a paradigm shift in Sri Lanka and promised a genuine transition to a federal type of power sharing structure, was undermined not by Sinhala chauvinists but by the LTTE.

-Sri Lanka Guardian