After Prabhakaran

Sri Lanka now needs a healing touch

(May 19, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) A day after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam conceded defeat, proclaiming that its 26-year battle against the Sri Lankan armed forces had reached its ‘bitter end’, comes the army’s claim that they have gunned down its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and his top commanders. Though die-hard supporters of the eelam (freedom) cause are bound to rue the fall of Prabhakaran whose commitment to it was unswerving, there is understandable jubilation in Sri Lanka which bore the brunt of a civil war that took 70,000 lives, including those of several top national leaders, and shattered the economy of the beleaguered country. Successive heads of state and government had been promising to defeat the LTTE but had failed. President Rajapakse has succeeded by resorting to unalloyed military solution.

Prabhakaran lived by the gun, operating from underground hideouts since 1972 in his fight over the discrimination against ethnic Tamils by the Sinhalese-majority Sri Lankan state. He chose violence to achieve his aim. In the early years of his struggle, he set about eliminating the top leaders of Tamil groups that did not see eye to eye with him. In due course he assumed dictatorial sway over the LTTE, motivating the cadres to do or actually die for the cause. At its peak, the LTTE controlled one-third of the land area in the country and managed to acquire its own fleet of aircraft and some naval ships. It was the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Premadasa two years later who set the international community against the Tamil Tigers and led 32 countries to place the outfit on the terrorist list. This was a reflection of the LTTE’s transformation from an organization of freedom fighters to a dangerous organisation that motivated mostly young, impressionable minds to plant bombs and kill indiscriminately anyone who stood in its way.

The decimation of the LTTE is virtually total. But if serious resentment is not to build up again among the Tamils, it is imperative that President Rajapakse’s regime shows statesmanship. It must begin a process for a meaningful dialogue with saner representatives of Tamils in the north and the east. The impoverished, displaced Tamil masses need to be duly rehabilitated. Tamils in general would need to be absorbed in the country’s mainstream and made to feel emotionally one with the rest of the country. This is not a time for euphoria. It is a time to re-build the nation and to heal old wounds. A spirit of reconciliation after the victory can over a period of time lead to harmony and peace in the nation that it has not seen for years.

-Sri Lanka Guardian