Mahatya was a Prabhakaran loyalist and a brilliant guerrilla tactician. He broke the back of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) fighting LTTE.
Mahatya was a Prabhakaran loyalist and a brilliant guerrilla tactician. He broke the back of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) fighting LTTE. Yet a few years later, when IPKF was out of Sri Lanka, he fell from grace. His fault? As the No 2 in the Tiger hierarchy and someone who was known to be close to Prabhakaran, he advised the LTTE leader in the early 1990s to go for peace, not war.
Suddenly, Mahatya disappeared from circulation. Enquiries later revealed he was shot by a firing squad. This is Prabhakaran – ruthless and elusive, a hero to some and terrorist to others.
A master strategist and one of the world’s leading guerrilla leaders, the real Prabhakaran is known only to a handful. Holed up as he is in the LTTE’s military headquarters in the jungles of Mullaitivu, not many outsiders have access to him.
Whatever his faults, the Tamil minority of Sri Lanka owes a debt of gratitude to him. By taking up arms against the chauvinistic Sinhala-Buddhist ruling elite, he succeeded in bringing into international focus their plight as second-class citizens of the island state. The atrocities on Tamils by the Sinhala majority were obnoxious.
They had few rights and had to be content with whatever was doled out to them. Earlier, Tamil leaders had faced this discrimination politically and got no concessions from the Sinhalese.
But once the armed conflict began, the majority too realised that Tamil Tigers were brilliant fighters and their commitment to Prabhakaran made them even more formidable. Tiger cadres in the early days were never captured, they preferred to swallow cyanide rather than reveal LTTE secrets to the army.
Prabhakaran is the man who introduced suicide bombers to the world. Yet, his lack of political understanding has cost LTTE and Tamils dear. Unlike another South Asian guerrilla leader, Nepal’s Maoist chief Prachanda, Prabhakaran failed to capitalise on his military success. He has consistently refused generous offers of peace by Colombo. Indians had brokered a good deal, which gave Tamils the rights they deserved, but Prabhakaran was not ready.
President Chandrika Bandaranaike, one of the few Sinhala leaders who sympathised with Tamils, was ready to give even more, but Prabhakaran preferred to fight.
A monumental blunder was to assassinate India’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. But he refused to think through the consequences, remembering only that IPKF was sent to Sri Lanka when Gandhi was prime minister. By killing him, LTTE lost out on crucial Indian support. It is still suffering the consequences.
Today, the world has changed. No one has sympathy for terrorist tactics, however genuine the cause. Prabhakaran is a cornered man, but not one to give up. Terrorist strikes will continue. A daring air attack can also take place. But the Lankan government can live with this.
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