PRABA's Brother in Law: The open display of Tiger symbols threatens to divert sympathy from the plight of civilians trapped in the war zone....!!!

Protests aren't the way, LTTE leader's Canadian family says

Apart from a few portraits of the same smiling man, there is nothing to adorn the tired, beige walls of Bala Rajendran's apartment, where Tamil surnames fill the lobby directory.

Identical pictures hang in hundreds of homes all over Scarborough, where the smiling man - Velupillai Prabhakaran, supreme commander of the Tamil Tigers - is revered as the lone defender of their long-oppressed Sri Lankan minority.

In Mr. Rajendran's 11th-storey apartment, though, the pictures mean something more. They are family photos, because his wife, Vinothini, is the Tiger leader's older sister.

Lately, similar images of the rebel supremo have loomed a little too large for Mr. Rajendran's liking, along with Tamil Tiger flags, at major protests in Toronto. Sympathetic as he is to the cause, he thinks these rallies are a mistake.

Led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam pioneered the use of explosive vests in hundreds of suicide attacks. The Tigers have been condemned for using child soldiers and extracting ‘war taxes’ from expatriate Tamils. (LTTE Handout/AP)

"Personally, I don't like these people going and blocking the roads," Mr. Rajendran, 67, said in an interview at his home yesterday. "It causes inconvenience to certain others," and the open display of Tiger symbols threatens to divert sympathy from the plight of civilians trapped in the war zone.

The Rajendrans, who have stayed home during the protests, have neither seen nor heard from Mr. Prabhakaran in three decades. They have relinquished their family ties in favour of the higher purpose the 54-year-old leader has espoused since adolescence: Tamil independence from 60 years of Sinhalese-led rule in Sri Lanka.

"Now he's a common man, working for all of us," Mr. Rajendran said.

"He belongs to the community."

Mr. Rajendran characterized the recent rallies, which closed the inner-city Gardiner Expressway on Sunday and earlier choked off downtown University Avenue for several days, as the product of "letting off steam" by angry young Tamils.

"We're old enough to control our temper," he said, "but the youngsters are a bit too enthusiastic."

The Rajendrans staunchly support the Tigers' push to carve out a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka, even as the rebel army appears to face imminent defeat on a tiny and ever-shrinking sliver of land on the country's northeast coast.

Having grown up after the end of British colonial rule in 1948 and seen the Tamils steadily lose ground to the Sinhalese majority, they sympathize with the sentiment behind the rallies in Toronto, where an estimated 200,000 Sri Lankan Tamils are said to comprise the largest such group in the world outside South Asia.

Like the flag-waving protesters, Mr. Rajendran considers the Tigers a legitimate military force to regain the human rights denied them by the Sri Lankan government, and feels Canada's terror designation, rather than bringing peace, is only emboldening anti-Tamil elements within the regime.

However, he also knows that because of the ban, public displays of Tiger symbols cause many Canadians to equate the Tamil cause with terrorism, not human rights.

"In my opinion, no Tamil likes to be called a terrorist," Mr. Rajendran said of a term that has nonetheless dogged his brother-in-law, Mr. Prabhakaran, from his earliest days as a young militant through the 26-year civil war that the Sri Lankan government currently appears determined to end, once and for all.

Mr. Prabhakaran's deadly reputation stretches back to 1975, when he walked up to the mayor of Jaffna, a Tamil he considered too cozy with the government, and shot him as he entered a Hindu temple. The slight, soft-spoken leader has been on the run ever since, building a record of ruthlessness and tightening his hold on the Tamil cause along the way.

Under Mr. Prabhakaran's watch, the Tamil Tigers pioneered the use of explosive vests in hundreds of suicide attacks, including one that killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. International monitoring groups have documented numerous other political assassinations, condemned the Tigers' use of child soldiers and their use of intimidation to extract "war taxes" from expatriate Tamils in Canada and around the world.

As the Sri Lankan army's offensive on the Tigers' last bit of territory intensifies, groups including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have accused the rebels of holding tens of thousands of civilians hostage in the war zone amid heavy shelling and shortages of food and medical care.

Tamil protesters, however, have dismissed these claims as propaganda that the international media, barred from the conflict zone by the Sri Lankan government, have been all too willing to swallow. They counter with claims that Tamil civilians have indeed fled, only to be rounded up by the army and held - and in some cases abused -in government camps.

If civilians remain in the war zone, Mr. Rajendran said, it's because "they prefer to die rather than get caught by the Sri Lankan army and be tortured and die and face all these insults."

It is in this context, he said, that protesters in Canada are hoisting the Tiger flag and his brother-in-law's picture, practically awkward as it might be.

"He's only fighting for the people, and if he does something bad, it is to defend the people or save the people," Mr. Rajendran said. "Our demands are not unreasonable. We have been asking only for our rights."

(The Globe and Mail)

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The view stated here was reasonable one. Who have created the LTTE? Sri Lankan government and Indian government. It was obvious. 1983 was the main cause for the creation of that organization.

Posted By: Mayu

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