Velupillai Prabhakaran
Velupillai Prabhakaran was an Eelam Tamil guerrilla and a major figure of Tamil nationalism, being the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE was a militant organization that sought to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka in reaction to the oppression of the country's Tamil population by the Sri Lankan government. Under his direction, the LTTE undertook a military campaign against the Sri Lankan government for more than 25 years.
Prabhakaran was the youngest of four children, born in Valvettithurai, on Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula's northern coast. Considered the heart of Tamil culture and literature in Sri Lanka, Jaffna was concentrated with growing Tamil nationalism, which called for autonomy for Tamils to protest the discrimination against them by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan state and Sinhalese civilians since the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948.
Founded in 1976, after the 1974 Tamil conference killings by Sri Lankan government police, the LTTE came to prominence in 1983 after it ambushed a patrol of the Sri Lanka Army outside Jaffna, resulting in the deaths of 13 soldiers. This ambush, along with the subsequent pogrom that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Tamil civilians, is generally considered the start of the Sri Lankan Civil War. After decades of fighting, including the intervention of the Indian Army, the conflict was halted after international mediation in 2001 following the LTTE's tactical victory in Eelam War III. By then, the LTTE, which came to be known as the Tamil Tigers, controlled large swathes of land in the north and east of the country, running a de facto state with Prabhakaran as its leader. Peace talks eventually broke down, and the Sri Lanka Army launched a military campaign to defeat the LTTE in 2006.
Prabhakaran, who had said, "I would prefer to die in honour rather than being caught alive by the enemy", was killed in a firefight with the Sri Lankan Army in May 2009. Prabhakaran's reported death and the subsequent ceasefire announcement by Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers' chief of international relations, brought an end to the armed conflict.
A significant figure of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism, Prabhakaran is often seen as a martyr by Sri Lankan Tamils. However, he is acknowledged to have created one of the most ruthless and sophisticated insurgencies of the modern era, with many of the tactics he pioneered influencing political militant groups globally. Prabhakaran himself argued that he chose military means only after observing that nonviolent means were ineffectual and obsolete, especially after the Tamil Eelam revolutionary Thileepan's fatal hunger strike in 1987 had no effect. Influenced by Indian nationalists Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, both of whom participated in the revolutionary movement for Indian independence, Prabhakaran declared that his goal was 'revolutionary socialism and the creation of an egalitarian society'.
Early life
Velupillai Prabhakaran was born in the northern coastal town of Valvettithurai on 26 November 1954, the youngest of four children. His parents, Thiruvenkadam Velupillai and Vallipuram Parvathy, belonged to the Karaiyar community. Thiruvenkadam Velupillai was the District Land Officer in the Ceylon Government. He came from an influential and wealthy family who owned and managed the major Hindu temples in Valvettithurai.Angered by the discrimination and violent persecution against Tamil people by successive Sri Lankan governments, Prabhakaran joined the student group Tamil Youth Front during the standardisation debates. In 1972, he founded the Tamil New Tigers, a successor to many earlier organizations that protested against the post-colonial political direction of the country, in which the minority Sri Lankan Tamils were pitted against the majority Sinhalese people.
In 1975, after becoming heavily involved in the Tamil movement, he carried out the first major political assassination by a Tamil group, shooting Alfred Duraiappah, the mayor of Jaffna, at point-blank range in front of the Hindu temple at Ponnaalai. The assassination was in response to the killings of Tamils in the 1974 Tamil conference incident, for which Duraiappah was blamed due to having backed the then-ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party.
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Founding of the LTTE
In the early 1970s, United Front government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike introduced the policy of standardisation which made the criteria for university admission lower for the Sinhalese than for the Tamils. Several organizations to counter this act were formed by Tamil students. Prabhakaran, aged 15, dropped out of school and became associated with the Kuttimani-Thangathurai group formed by Selvarajah Yogachandran and Nadarajah Thangathurai who both also hailed from Valvettithurai.Prabhakaran along with Kuttimani, Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran and other prominent rebels joined the Tamil Manavar Peravai formed by a student named Satiyaseelan in 1970. This group comprised Tamil youth who advocated the rights of students to have fair enrollment. In 1973, Prabhakaran teamed up with Chetti Thanabalasingam and with a fraction of the Tamil Manavar Peravai to form the Tamil New Tigers. Their first notable attack was held at the Duraiappa stadium in Jaffna placing a bomb in an attempt to murder the Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiappah. A member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party who was loyal to Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Duraiappah was seen as a traitor by the Tamil masses. Failing the attempt, Prabhakaran managed to shoot and kill Duraiappah who was on a visit at a Hindu temple at Ponnalai on 27 July 1975.
On 5 May 1976, the TNT was renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.
Eelam War I
The LTTE by the 1980s operated in more attacks against police and military forces. On 23 July 1983, Prabhakaran led LTTE cadres in an ambush on an army patrol that killed 13 Sri Lankan soldiers in Thirunelveli, Sri Lanka. As a response to this were one of the worst government sponsored anti-Tamil riots held resulting in the destruction of Tamil houses and shops and deaths of hundreds of Tamils and making over 150,000 Tamils homeless. As a result of the riots several Tamils joining the LTTE and the LTTE marked the beginning of the Eelam War I. With Prabhakaran being the most wanted man in Sri Lanka, he had said in 1984, "I would prefer to die in honour rather than being caught alive by the enemy." Prabhakaran held his first speech on 4 August 1987 at the Suthumalai Amman temple in front of over 100,000 people explaining the position of the LTTE. This speech is seen as a historic turning point in the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism. In the same year, Asiaweek compared Prabhakaran to revolutionary Che Guevara, while Newsweek called him "the stuff of legend".Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
The LTTE were allegedly involved in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the ex-prime minister of India in 1991, which they denied involvement and alleged the event as an international conspiracy against them. However, in a 2011 interview, Kumaran Pathmanathan, who was the Treasurer of LTTE and its chief arms procurer, apologized to India for Velupillai Prabhakaran's "mistake" of killing former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He further said Rajiv's assassination was "well planned and done actually with Prabhakaran and. Everyone knows the truth". The TADA Court issued an arrest warrant for plotting of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. In October 2010 the charges against Prabhakaran were dropped by the TADA Court after the Central Bureau of Investigation filed a report stating that he was dead and the case was closed.Peace talks
Prabhakaran's first and only major press conference was held in Killinochchi on 10 April 2002. It was reported that more than 200 journalists from the local and foreign media attended this event and they had to go through a 10-hour security screening before the event in which Anton Balasingham introduced the LTTE leader as the "President and Prime ''Minister of Tamil Eelam."'' A number of questions were asked about LTTE's commitment towards the erstwhile peace process and Prabhakaran and Dr. Anton Balasingham jointly answered the questions. Repeated questions about his involvement in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination were only answered in a sober note by both Balasingham and Prabhakaran. They called it a "tragic incident" they requested the press "not to dig into an incident that happened 10 years ago."During the interview, he stated that the right condition has not risen to give up the demand of Tamil Eelam. He further mentioned that "There are three fundamentals. That is Tamil homeland, Tamil nationality and Tamil right to self-determination. These are the fundamental demands of the Tamil people. Once these demands are accepted or a political solution is put forward by recognising these three fundamentals and our people are satisfied with the solutions we will consider giving up the demand for Eelam." He further added that Tamil Eelam was not only the demand of the LTTE but also the demand of the Tamil people.
Prabhakaran also answered a number of questions in which he reaffirmed their commitment towards the peace process, quoted "We are sincerely committed to the peace process. It is because we are sincerely committed to peace that we continued a four month cessation of hostilities". He was also firm in de-proscription of the LTTE by Sri Lanka and India, "We want the government of India to lift the ban on the LTTE. We will raise the issue at the appropriate time."
Prabhakaran also insisted firmly that only de-proscription would bring forth an amenable solution to the ongoing peace process mediated by Norway: "We have informed the government, we have told the Norwegians that de-proscription is a necessary condition for the commencements of talks."