The guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has avoided death and capture for more than three decades....!!!

Cornered Tamil Tiger leader has god-like status
Stewart Bell, National Post
Published: Friday, April 24, 2009

Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The National Post's Stewart Bell reporting from Sri Lanka as the civil war draws to a close. Today, he examines the life of the notorious leader who for years has led the Tamil Tigers through bloodshed and battle.


The guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has avoided death and capture for more than three decades as he wages South Asia's longest-running civil war.

But his luck is running out.

As supreme commander of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Prabhakaran once presided over a rebel mini-state more than twice the size of the Palestinian Territories.

But he lost it with startling speed to the Sri Lankan armed forces, who won it back town by town and have now cornered Prabhakaran and the remnants of his rebel force.

On Friday, Brigadier Shavendra Silva said Prabhakaran was preparing to make a final stand in the strip of jungle still held by the Tamil Tigers.

"But, even at the last minute, he will try to escape," warned the brigadier.

Prabhakaran hardly looks the part of a ruthless guerrilla, even in his trademark tiger-striped camouflage: He is short and stout with a soft voice and a fondness for history books.

But his face has become the symbol of militant Tamil nationalism, appearing on posters, calendars, watches and the placards waved by his adoring supporters, many of whom live in the Toronto area.

They call him National Leader, or Sun God.

"A supernatural image has been created of Prabhakaran," says a U.S. military profile quoted in Colombo's Island newspaper. "The mysticism surrounding Prabhakaran, reinforced with massive propaganda campaigns, has endowed him with a god-like status and a cult-like following."

When RCMP counterterrorism investigators raided the World Tamil Movement office in Toronto in 2006, they found a framed photomontage of the "Eight Greatest Commanders of the 20th Century." It showed Prabhakaran encircled by the likes of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin and Yasser Arafat.

Through a combination of guerrilla and terrorist attacks, Prabhakaran hopes to exhaust Sri Lankans and ultimately win independence for ethnic Tamils in the tract of palm jungles and sandy coastline under his control.

He already has a name for his nation: Tamil Eelam.

The Tamil Tigers are determined and resourceful. They built a fleet of small submarines and a squadron of warplanes. They can also be merciless killers. A branch of the rebels called the Black Tigers is devoted solely to carrying out suicide bombings.

Prabhakaran turned to Canada to finance his forces, writing in a 2002 letter that he expected Canadian Tamils to send him $3-million "in a timely manner" for nation-building.

The World Tamil Movement office in Toronto set up an elaborate fundraising scheme that targeted Tamil-Canadians for donations and wired the money to overseas accounts linked to the rebels, the RCMP says. Between 2002 and 2006, the transfers totalled more than $3-million.

Sri Lanka has changed dramatically since winning independence from Britain in 1948, but Prabhakaran has stubbornly refused to abandon the dream of statehood for the island's minority Tamils.

Prabhakaran was born in 1954 in Valvettithurai, a town of sea traders and smugglers on Sri Lanka's northern coast. He is the youngest of four children born to a devout Hindu mother and middle class father who served in Ceylon's post-colonial government.

"He was as normal as any boy," his sister, Vinothini Rajendran, who lives in Toronto, said in an interview. "Normal, only he was reading a lot." His mother loved history books and Prabhakaran pick up her passion.

"The pocket money that my parents gave me I spent on books," he told the Sri Lankan magazine Velicham in 1994. "There was a book shop in my village. It became my habit somehow or the other to buy all those valuable books there and read them."

It was through books that he learned about the Indian freedom struggle and guerrilla fighters like Subash Chandra Bose, whom he called his "guiding light." (Bose was a dubious role model given that he sided with the Nazis during the Second World War.) "It was the reading of such books that laid the foundation for my life as a revolutionary," he said.

Prabhakaran's views about revolutionary violence were also shaped by a teacher named Venugopal who "used to din into our ears that the Tamils should take up arms." He says he was 14 when he fully embraced militancy. It was a time of rising unrest among Tamil students, who were losing faith that their grievances could be resolved through parliamentary politics. Prabhakaran joined with a group of youths who pooled their pocket money for a gun. They were never able to save enough to buy one, although they did set fire to a bus.

"Our aim was to struggle for freedom and to attack the army. I was the leader of the movement," he told Velicham. "This is how I spent my youth, filled with thoughts about struggle, freedom and the urge to do something for our people."

At 17, Prabhakaran launched the New Tamil Tigers. It was 1972 and Ceylon had just changed its name to Sri Lanka and unveiled a constitution that made the Sinhalese spoken by the country's Buddhist majority the official language, and recognized Buddhism as the dominant national faith. To the island's Tamil minority, it reinforced suspicions they would always be second-class citizens.

Prabhakaran's dream was to create a homeland for ethnic Tamils in the northern and eastern parts of the island. But the police came down hard on the movement and identified Prabhakaran as trouble. Police visited his parents' home, but he slipped out the back door and took a boat to southern India.

He founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at a secret meeting in Jaffna in 1976. "I named the movement ‘Liberation Tigers' since the tiger emblem had deep roots in the political history of the Tamils, symbolizing Tamil patriotic resurgence. The tiger symbol also depicts the mode of our guerrilla warfare," he said in a 1986 Newsweek interview.

Initially, Prabhakaran trained the fighters himself, although he admitted he was a self-taught guerrilla. "I use my natural instincts and I watch war films and westerns by Clint Eastwood," he told Newsweek.

The sequence of events that would erupt into all-out civil war began with the death of Prabhakaran's lieutenant and close friend, Charles Anthony. Prabhakaran quickly retaliated by ambushing a group of Sri Lankan soldiers, killing 13.

It was the bloodiest Tamil Tigers attack yet and it shook the country's ethnic Sinhalese majority. In Colombo, Sinhalese extremists began rounding up and killing Tamils and looting and burning their homes.

Hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled to places such as Canada while others decided to stay and fight for independence.

"A lot of youngsters joined the movement," said Colonel Karuna Amman, a former Tamil Tigers commander. The anti-Tamil violence had another important effect: India's intelligence service began training and arming the Tigers.

Those close to Prabhakaran describe him as stubborn, committed and disciplined. He does not drink or smoke, and abstains from even the tea for which Sri Lanka is famed. Neither will he drink coffee or soft drinks. "He drinks only milk," a former senior Tamil Tiger who now lives in Canada told the National Post.

He expects the same puritanical conduct from his cadres, who were issued cyanide to swallow if captured. Tamil Tigers fighters had to appear neat and keep their bases pristine. Prabhakaran even sent an envoy to his jungle camps to make sure they were brushing their teeth regularly, the former senior guerrilla said.

India deployed a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka in 1987, but the Tigers turned against the troops and they withdrew in 1990. A year later, Prabhakaran exacted his vengeance: A Tamil Tigers suicide bomber detonated her explosive vest next to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Revenge is a recurring theme in Prabhakaran's life, said the Indian journalist Narayan Swamy, the author of the biography Prabhakaran; Inside an Elusive Mind.

After Gandhi, the Tigers assassinated President Ranasinghe Premadasa with a suicide bomb, and the Oxford-educated Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, the most senior Tamil in the government, was killed by a suspected rebel sniper. The Tigers made assassination attempts against Prime Minister Chandrika Kumaratunga, Defence Secretary Gotibaya Rajapaksa and the Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka. He also killed off the leaders of rival militant groups.

"He's like a mafia person," Col. Karuna said, "always revenge."

In 2002, Prabhakaran agreed to a ceasefire while Norway tried to broker peace talks and brought the government and the rebels together in Oslo and Geneva. "We had a good opportunity," Col. Karuna said. But he said Prabhakaran would not settle for anything less than full independence and simply used the halt in fighting to re-equip his forces.

Prabhakaran gave his last videotaped speech in November. Standing at a wooden lecturn, wearing his fatigues, he acknowledged the war had become "intense and widespread," but he vowed to fight on.

"This land is ours," he said.

He chastised countries that had outlawed the Tigers, as Canada did, and called on Tamils around the world to "raise their voices, firmly and with determination, in support of the freedom struggle."

Despite his defiance, the Tigers are in rough shape - isolated internationally for their tactics, outmanned and outgunned. Sri Lankan troops entered the rebel capital Kilinochchi on Jan. 2. It was a ghost town. Prabhakaran had fled, along with his fighters and the civilians that human rights groups accuse him of using as human shields. The rebels retreated toward Mullaitivu, the last city under their control, but that fell to government troops three weeks later.

"We are hunting for him," said military spokesman, Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara.

The Sri Lankan Army's 11th Light Infantry later fought its way into a well-guarded house in a coconut grove 500 metres off the main road outside the town of Piramanthalkulama.

It didn't look like much at first, just a cluster of low brick buildings with thatched roofs. But the Eurostar satellite dish and the electric generators suggested it was more than a simple farmer's hut.

As the soldiers searched the compound, they noticed a surveillance camera at a door that led down to an air-conditioned bunker buried 15 metres below the jungle, its walls made of metre-thick concrete.

One of the underground rooms was painted robin's egg blue and furnished with rattan chairs, a few books, plastic flowers and a life-sized stuffed leopard. A framed photo of Prabhakaran in uniform was perched atop the refrigerator. Near the sleeping bunk, an M-16 and an insulin container (Prabhakaran is diabetic) sat on a wooden bedside table.

The military issued a statement saying that Prabhakaran's main hideout had been captured.

But the Sun God was gone.

There were rumours he had escaped to South Africa or Malaysia, but on March 27 the Sri Lankan government said that surrendered Tamil Tigers fighters had claimed to have seen him the previous week in a civilian No Fire Zone, although he was described as depressed, suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, and so "fat and heavy" that he was hard to recognize.

Thirty-seven years is a long career for a guerrilla on the run. Prabhakaran survived through a combination of shrewdness, caution and luck. "One day a bomb fell barely 50 metres from where he was, throwing up dust on his clothes," his biographer Mr. Swamy said. "But luck, as they say, deserts people at some point. That point seems to have arrived for him."

National Post.com
....................................
Recent Comments

Vedar, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

TVA - When is the time talk about the ruthless power hungry monster? It is the same mentality of people like you and the diaspora that has brought the innocent civilians in Sri Lanka the state they are in now. He should be made ineffective going forward if Tamils in Vanni has to prosper. If this monster is let back, then he will do the same for another 30 years and then there won't be any human beings left in Northern parts of Sri lanka.

Flag This | Link to Comment
Vedar, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

To Gowri: Prabakaran let young kids die for his safety - not for any cause, and when he run out of potions he is hiding behind civilians for his own life. His actions proves that he wants to run a kingdom the way he wants - not to resolve Tamil issue.

Flag This | Link to Comment
Vedar, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

To Gowri: Separate Eelam will do more damage to Tamils than anything else. The root cause for this problem is that the Tamils in North and their tunnel vision. It is their mindset and arrogance that lead this bloodshed. And for VP - he is paying the right price for what he did - what goes around comes around. Why can't you people force the Tigers to let the people go and fight until death? They can die as heros.

Flag This | Link to Comment
Vedar, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

To Gowri: What do you have to say of Prabakaran killing his own people in order to come to power - if you look at the numbers - he had killed more Tamils until now. Even now he has every thing to do with the people dying in Wanni. Why can't he force the people to leave - the same way he did to the Muslims in Jaffna ?

Flag This | Link to Comment
Vedar, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

GOWRY CANADA - There is no need for you to get worked up on this article. Most of this info in this article are not false. You and me we both know. As a Tamil from Sri Lanka this what I have to say - Tamils do not need a separate state within Sri Lanka to live peacefully. There are more than 1 million tamils live in Colombo and other places of Sri Lanka. And there is no such thing called Tamil Eelam. Sri Lanka was called as Eelam historically.

Flag This | Link to Comment
fairandshare, Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009

Only Newspaper that write unbiased and in support of ordinary Canadians who want to rid the world of Terror and terrorists and murderes like this guy whose rein of terror is going to end ! All these people who write supoorting him are terrorists also - whose Liberal vote is what liberal newspapers want like you know what that supports MP's in scarboro ! Shameless people - how can they look in the mirror and say I buy votes by supporting terrorists ?

Flag This | Link to Comment
TVA, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

To the author of this article I beg you this is not the time to write about pirabaharan or the ltte fighters its about the bombings of civilinas. The only causalties are only civilians no army or tigers dead innocent civilians and the inaction of the un innocent blood in their hands http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=29190 http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=29191

Flag This | Link to Comment
jferdy5, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

Hi Canfool, Yes, the Tamil Tigers are still active in Toronto (and apparently in this comment box as well) and still extorting funds from Tamils in Canada. This won't end until the Tamil Tigers are defeated in battle. They can conduct suicide bombings. But each one they conduct will work against them, showing that they're nothing but violent murderers.

Flag This | Link to Comment
GowriCanada, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

To Stewart Bell: Few things to correct: “ India deployed a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka in 1987, but the Tigers turned against the troops and they withdrew in 1990. “ It was on the request of Sri Lanka President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The 1987 “Indo- Sri Lankan Accord” signed to merge the EAST and North of SL Hopefully to end the civil war. The current SL State Terrorist nullifies it. As usual, it has been the typical behaviour of SL State Terrorist for the past 60 years.

Flag This | Link to Comment
GowriCanada, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

To Stewart Bell: Few things to correct: “ He already has a name for his nation: Tamil Eelam. “ Tamil Eelam was declared even before LTTE. “ Sri Lanka has changed dramatically since winning independence from Britain in 1948 “ SL did not fight to win independence. British gave it. Before British came to SL (then Ceylon), North and East of SL was ruled by a Tamil king. It was Tamils traditional homeland.

Flag This | Link to Comment
GowriCanada, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

To Stewart Bell: “ The National Post's Stewart Bell will be reporting from Sri Lanka as the civil war draws to a close. “ I hope you will not be sitting in a hotel and echo the SL State Terrorist statement. Rather like any other internationally respected journalist, tell the truth to the World. You have never voiced for suffering/dead Tamil civilians. Rather, you have always with the SL State Terrorist, which treat Tamils as a second-class citizen and kills its citizen. Anyways, Good Luck.

Flag This | Link to Comment
GowriCanada, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

Separate Eelam only way to end Lankan ethnic strife: http://www.ptinews.com/pti%5Cptisite.nsf/0/BD7508456AC63A66652575A3006234C5?OpenDocument

Flag This | Link to Comment
GowriCanada, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

Obama Administration - White House Statement “ ………..We call upon the Government of Sri Lanka to stop shelling the “safe zone” and blocking international aid groups and media from accessing those civilians who have managed to escape………………..It would compound the current tragedy if the military end of the conflict only breeds further enmity and ends hopes for reconciliation and a unified Sri Lanka in the future.

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

goverment force /army force, who are their brothers, sisters, ,cousins, ,who are ex rapist, muderers who are given high posts/money so to hide the criminal activies by the evil forces, who are living in luxury life, while many tamls, abducted, murdered, raped, disappered without trace, many in thousands, and thousand contue live with out shelter, food, water, many to continue to die, it sickens me the whole world is watching these not doing anyting to support the tamil race.god be with them

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

goverment continue to buy war weapons to wipe out whole race instead of using the money for development and for the food and water for affected people. or should canada watch the srilankan criminal goverment force wipeout whole race/culure.

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

these evil forces even dont mind killing their own kids to hide the truth. lots of their own people , jurnalist murdered who were exposing the truth. high level forcesliving in high class where are 5 months old baby a terrorist?, pregnant woman dying, child as 5months dying of malnutrition, i m disgraced to call myself belonging to the majority group. goverment forces giving ex rapists,murderers, high posts, so they can continue to do all criminal activities.

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

These forces trying to solicit underaged gals in haiti and got caught by the media. they thought they could get away like the do in there homeland. GOOGLE SEARCH SRILANKAN ARMY RAPE .

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

more than 80000 dead, continuing to die, of these bomb, churches/temples, schools , hospitals, in no fire zone area. jurnalists , and humanatarian aid personals, politican murdered, these ruthless, barbarines of the government forces continue to murder in mass amount, children with amputed legs, hands, with shattered body parts all over the place. blocking all medical aids, food, to the affected area. no one has been brought to justice.

Flag This | Link to Comment
rita200909, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

While the world is watching the srilankan army rape girl as young 8 yrs be raped and murdered, where more than 80000 with corps burried, or burnt. lots and lots named as tigers and gets abducted, murdered, woman and including underaged gals in mass amount getting rapped and murdered, in out of prisons.

Flag This | Link to Comment
OaO Asithri, Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

Canadians, here are two current articles - A MUST READ - that finally calls a spade a spade: http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=d0c65895-f2cf-42f1-9edf-11b20fb5e422&ParentID=35e42956-ae3a-4c4f-8c0c-2bf6c0aae84b&Headline=Don%E2%80%99t+write+the+Tigers%E2%80%99+obit+yet AND http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/26/tigers-at-bay/