Velupillai Prabhakaran, aged 54, whose death while trying to escape advancing Sri Lankan government troops was confirmed on May 24, founded and led the Tamil Tigers (formally the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE), turning it into one of the most organised, effective and brutal terrorist guerrilla groups in the world.
From 1983 Prabhakaran led a violent war against the Sinhalese-dominated government of Sri Lanka for a separate state for ethnic Tamils, who make up about 13 per cent of the population. During that time he established a mini-state covering the northern and eastern third of the country, with its own navy and air force, and parallel institutions of civil administration, police force, banks and tax collection.
A fan of Clint Eastwood films, Prabhakaran was credited with inventing the suicide vest; his "Black Tiger" suicide units – almost half of them women – killed thousands of people and assassinated two world leaders, the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasunghe Premadasa in 1993. The war, which cost 70,000 lives, was characterised by a level of brutality and fanaticism seen in few other civil conflicts.
A stocky, soft-spoken man with a bushy moustache, Prabhakaran looked more like the local bank manager than a guerrilla leader. He had no coherent political philosophy beyond a vague commitment to socialism, yet he inspired fanatical devotion among his fighters.
This cult of personality, nurtured by propaganda and terror, inspired his suicide units to acts of "thatkodai" (Tamil for "the gift of life"), and underpinned the requirement for all fighters, male and female, to wear cyanide capsules around their necks to be swallowed if capture was imminent.
Ironically, Prabhakaran came close to getting what he claimed to be fighting for. In 2002 the strength of the rebel insurgency forced the Sri Lankan government into a Norwegian-brokered peace process in which real autonomy for the Tamils was on the table. It collapsed in violence four years later, mainly because Prabhakaran had done nothing to convince Sri Lankans or the international community that he wanted peace and had used the lull in fighting to regroup and rearm.
A negotiated settlement would have required him to accept free elections that would probably have brought moderate Tamil parties to power. For while Prabhakaran was a hero for many Tamils, his power stemmed as much from his elimination of political rivals and moderate Tamil leaders as from genuine devotion.
As it was, his intransigence led the Sri Lankan government to conclude that there was no way out of the situation other than outright military victory over the LTTE and the capture or death of its leader.
The youngest of four children, Velupillai Prabhakaran was born into a Hindu family of the low fishermen’s caste on November 26 1954 in the northern coastal town of Velvettithurai on the Jaffna Peninsula. His father was a middle-ranking agricultural officer.
Velupillai was an indifferent student, but confessed in one of his rare interviews that he was fascinated by Napoleon and Alexander the Great, and inspired by the Indian nationalist leaders Subhash Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh.
He entered his teens at a time of rising Tamil nationalism, after the Sinhalese-dominated government implemented a series of measures, many of them blatantly discriminatory, to correct (as they saw it) the overrepresentation of Tamils in the higher echelons of commerce, the professions and the administration. As efforts by Tamil political leaders to mediate got nowhere, young Tamils began to form their own more radical groups.
In 1972 Prabhakaran helped to launch a militant group called the Tamil New Tigers (which became the LTTE in 1976). He rose to prominence in 1975 when he assassinated Alfred Duraiyappah, the mayor of Jaffna, shooting him at point blank range as he entered a Hindu temple. Buoyed up with this success, he wasted no time in imposing a strict code of conduct over his followers, including bans on smoking, drinking and sex.
Their militancy gained momentum after a wave of anti-Tamil riots in 1983, sparked by an LTTE attack which left 13 Sri Lankan police officers dead. The violence, known as the Black July pogrom, left between 1,000 and 3,000 Tamils dead, drove many Tamil youths to join the LTTE and marked the beginning of the long-running civil war.
Prabhakaran spent much of the next 20 years on the run, moving in secret between various heavily-guarded underground jungle hideaways, from which he would emerge once a year to speak to the faithful on what he called Heroes’ Day. As the war continued, the LTTE moved from attacks on police and soldiers to bombings of civilians and Buddhist places of worship. While the organisation initially funded itself by robbing banks, recurring episodes of anti-Tamil violence, seemingly condoned by the government, meant that Prabhakaran was also able to tap into the sympathy – and pockets – of Tamils living abroad.
The LTTE was well-supplied with recruits, including women and children, and until the mid-1980s their training camps in Tamil Nadu were sponsored covertly by Indian intelligence. When there were not enough volunteers, they began to conscript in the region they controlled. Families which did not supply either fighters or cash could expect retribution.
It was one of Prabhakaran’s female recruits who carried out the mission many regard as his greatest mistake: the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The attack was intended to keep India – which had sent a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka in the late 1980s – from further meddling, but it had the effect of alienating Indian opinion, and a Madras court and Interpol subsequently issued warrants for his arrest.
Prabhakaran was said to have weaknesses for boiled crab and chocolate, a passion which was thought to have inspired one of his more eccentric orders: that his fighters should never kill people while they were eating. His ban on sexual relations was suspended for the higher cadres in 1984 after he married Mathivathani Erambu, one of a group of students abducted by the LTTE during a political hunger strike. The couple had a daughter and two sons, one of whom is reported to have been killed alongside his father on May 17.
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