Tamil Tigers still active in Europe; Their next goal is to destroy India (Travel with MP Prabhakaran)

(This is Chapter 23 from Mr. Prabhakaran’s book, An Indian Goes Around the World – I: Capitalism Comes to Mao’s Mausoleum, which we have been serializing in this space. Chapter 24, “What India and Virgin Mary Have in Common,” will be published next week. Read the series every Monday. – Editor)

I had sat on this story for several months before I first published it in The East-West Inquirer, an online monthly I edit, on February 21, 2010. The reason for my reluctance to publish the story soon after I hit upon it was my fear that, by doing it, I would be causing unnecessary alarm in India.

“But then,” I asked myself, again and again, “what about the consequences of not publishing it? Don’t I have a responsibility to alert India on the possibility of another terrorist attack? Will I be able to forgive myself if the self-proclaimed Tamil Tiger from Sri Lanka did mean what he said and does carry out the threat he vowed he would? How can I forget the fact that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which changed the world for the worse forever, could have been prevented if only those in power in the U.S. at the time had not ignored the clear warning they had that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was determined to attack America? And what about the warnings India had about a possible terrorist attack in Pune, in the State of Maharashtra? The attack – a terrorist-bomb explosion – took place on February 13, 2010. Wouldn’t India have saved itself a lot of agony, if it had taken the warnings seriously and taken precautionary measures?”

Questions like these helped me get over my initial reluctance to publish the story. The essence of the story is that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which waged a guerrilla war in Sri Lanka for over a quarter century to carve out a separate homeland for the Tamil minority in that island nation was defeated by the Sri Lankan army in May 2009, is still active in Europe. If the words of one of the Tigers are to be believed, its next target would be India.

Information of Vital Interest to India

On August 14, 2009, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was the last evening of my 30-day tour of Europe, before leaving for New York the next morning. After wandering around the city until I couldn’t drag my feet any longer, I ambled into an Internet café.

I visit Internet cafés, while traveling around the world, to check my emails and browse the online editions of some of my favorite newspapers. This time, I accomplished more than that. My visit became instrumental in gathering some information that could be of vital interest to India and a few Indian officials.

As soon as I walked in, my eyes fell on an Indian-looking man sitting at one of the computer terminals. He took a good look at me. “You can use this terminal,” he said, pointing to the one next to him.

“Thank you,” I said. As I sat down, I realized that I made a mistake in accepting his offer: He smelled alcohol very badly.

“Are you from India?” he asked me.

I said yes and asked him, “Are you?”

“No,” he said, in a tone that indicated that he was offended by my question. “I am a Tamil Tiger from Sri Lanka who has been living in Europe for the past 20 years.”

In every Western European city I visited, I have come across many Tamils. Most of them are from Sri Lanka. Almost every South Indian-looking guy I ran into in Paris was a Sri Lankan Tamil. They all presented themselves as the victims of the civil war that had been going on in their country. Some of them could as well be Tamil Tigers clandestinely working among Sri Lankan émigrés to raise money and material support for their guerrilla campaign.

It’s no secret that the LTTE, the guerrilla outfit Velupillai Prabhakaran put together in 1976, grew into a formidable force with its own army, navy and air force, because of the support it received from Sri Lankan Tamils living in Western Europe and North America. But they all extended their support discreetly. This was the first time I met one who proudly and loudly proclaimed that he was a member of the LTTE. And he was proclaiming it while living in a country that has banned it. In all, 32 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., India and Canada, have declared the LTTE as a terrorist organization. Among them, 27 are members of the European Union.

“I hate India,” the shabbily-dressed Tiger said, and then asked, “Which part of India are you from?”

“I was born and brought up in Kerala,” I told him. Before I could tell him where I live now and when I left Kerala, he shot the next question: “Why do Malayalees hate Sri Lankan Tamils?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him. “I don’t know any Malayalee who hates Sri Lankan Tamils simply because they are Sri Lankan Tamils. After all, both come from the same ethnic stock and both have similar cultural background.”

Three Malayalees on LTTE’s Enemy List

My stress on our common bond made little impression on him. He spelled out the reason for his, and admittedly the LTTE’s, hatred for Malayalees: The LTTE lost the war it fought against the Sri Lankan army because of three Malayalees – M. K. Narayanan, Shiv Shankar Menon, and Vijay Nambiar. Mr. Narayanan, who took over as governor of West Bengal on January 24, 2010, was a legendary figure in India’s intelligence community for nearly half a century. It was what he did in his capacity as national security adviser, from 2005 until he became governor, which the Tamil Tigers detested.

Shiv Shankar Menon, who was recalled from retirement to take over from Mr. Narayanan as national security adviser, was one of the ablest foreign secretaries India had since its independence. During his tenure as foreign secretary, he allegedly did things that made the Tamil Tigers mad.

Mr. Nambiar has held many responsible and respected positions at the United Nations. Among them was the position he held as chief of staff under Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, from January 2007 to December 2009. He has been special adviser to the Secretary General on Myanmar since 2010. However, it was his work as India’s permanent representative at the U.N., from 2002 to 2004, that earned him the LTTE’s ire.

According to the drunken Tiger, it was “because of the stupidity of those three Malayalees that the Sri Lankan government received intelligence on our [the Tamil Tigers’] movements and it was because of the naval blockade imposed by India that we stopped receiving weapons from abroad. And because of that we lost the war.”

What he said did not sound like the opinion of one individual. It sounded like something that was discussed at higher levels of the LTTE leadership. For that reason, I decided to sit and listen to him, suffering the stench of alcohol that came out of his mouth and the embarrassment I felt every time he bad-mouthed India and invited the attention of others sitting nearby. I was hoping to glean from his drunken outbursts anything that could be useful to India and to those whom the LTTE had put on its enemy list. “Velupillai Prabhakaran may be dead,” he continued. “But let India not be under any illusion that the war is over. It will not be over until we Tamils destroy India.”

Velupillai Prabhakaran and the Tamil Question

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder-leader of the LTTE and one of the most feared terrorists in the world, died on May 18, 2009. He was gunned down by Sri Lankan troops while trying to flee the battle zone in an ambulance van. By the time the LTTE admitted defeat in what was one of the longest civil wars in Asia, it had claimed the lives of nearly 80,000 people, most of them innocent civilians. The victims were Sinhalese as well as Tamils. Many of the Tamils who joined his guerrilla outfit did so under duress. A large number of them were young girls and boys and some of them were kidnapped. Those whom the LTTE sent on suicide missions were sent at gun point. In fact, suicide bombing, which is now so common among Islamist insurgents, was the brainchild of the LTTE.

True, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE, on May 5, 1976, with good intentions. He did it to redress the grievances of his Tamil brethren. The grievances were caused by a series of measures adopted by the Sri Lankan government that were discriminatory to the Tamil minority. The Tamil minority in Sri Lanka constituted 30 percent of its population. Until those measures came into force, the Tamils were a contented, prosperous minority in the country.

The first discriminatory measure against the Tamils came in the form of the Official Language Act. Passed in 1956, it replaced English with Sinhala as the country’s official language. Most Tamils, descendants of those brought in from India by the British to work as plantation laborers and clerks, were fluent in English. Their mother tongue being Tamil, and the official language of the country being English, they had not bothered to acquire even a working knowledge of Sinhala, the language of the Sinhalese majority. The new language act, which the Tamils dubbed “the Sinhala only act,” forced large numbers of them to quit their jobs in civil service. The language requirement in recruitment tests virtually barred new ones from getting in.

Then came the attempt by the Sri Lankan government to elevate Buddhism, the religion of the Sinhalese majority, to the status of state religion. The Tamils were 15 percent Hindu, 7.5 percent Muslim and 7.5 percent Christian. Almost all of them were of Indian origin, and many still have their relatives in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Naturally, India was concerned. It feared incurring the wrath of its vast Tamil population, if it remained unresponsive to Sri Lankan Tamils’ grievances. It also feared a mass exodus of them to India. After all, the two countries are separated by a strait which is only 25 miles wide. All this meant that the Indian government could not afford to be indifferent to what was going on in Sri Lanka.

When Velupillai Prabhakaran moved to India, set up home and started LTTE training camps in Tamil Nadu, in September 1983, the Indian government under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi chose to look the other way. Though not wise as a foreign policy decision, India was left with no other choice. It could ill-afford to overlook the fact that most people of Tamil Nadu had expressed support for the cause the LTTE championed.

Whatever gains the LTTE made in the early stage were attributed to the help it received from the intelligence apparatus of the Indian government, the Research and Analysis Wing. But when the LTTE took to terrorism to advance its cause, the Indian government decided to distance itself from it. Other governments around the world, which until them had been sympathetic to the legitimate grievances of Sri Lankan Tamils, also became disgusted with the terrorist tactics Prabhakaran and his followers employed. India, which had already earned the displeasure of both the government and the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka, now became a target of attack by the LTTE as well. Sri Lanka even accused India of interfering in its internal affairs.

A disenchanted Prabhakaran quit India, in January 1987, and relocated his training facilities to Sri Lanka. The guerrilla war against the Sri Lankan government, which he had been directing from India since 1983, now intensified. Swathes of land in the Tamil-dominated areas in the north and east of the country came under LTTE control.

On June 5, 1987, when the Sri Lankan army laid siege to Jaffna, the largest city in the LTTE-controlled area, India ordered its Air Force to airdrop food parcels in the city. It feared that inaction on its part would lead to starvation and deaths among the innocent Tamils caught up in the war. The LTTE did not show an iota of appreciation for what India did. The Sri Lankan government, as was expected, repeated its interference charge against India.

India-Sri Lanka Peace Accord

Then came another strategic move on India's part which the LTTE found outrageous. On being requested by the Sri Lankan government, India signed a peace accord with it. In terms of the accord, signed on July 29, 1987, between Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India and President J. R. Jayawardene of Sri Lanka, India sent nearly 50,000 troops to Sri Lanka. The chief mission of the troops, known as the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), was to disarm the LTTE and enforce peace in the war-torn area.

Prabhakaran took the India-Sri Lank accord as a betrayal and vowed to “teach India a lesson.” A prolonged armed struggle ensued between Indian soldiers and LTTE guerrillas. Indian forces suffered heavy losses. The presence of foreign troops on their soil did not go well with the majority Sinhalese population either. In 1990, a humiliated India withdrew its troops from Sri Lanka.

India might have made many mistakes in whatever it did during the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka. But there is no mistaking that it did it in the interests of the Tamil minority there and of millions of Tamils back home. I was surprised that the Tamil Tiger who was lecturing me was under the impression that his terrorist outfit still enjoyed the support of all Tamils living in India. “Do you know there are sixty million Tamils living in India?” he asked me. “They are our brothers. They will join us in our war against India.”

That, I knew, was wishful thinking. Not even all Tamils living in Sri Lanka were willing to join the LTTE. Most of them considered themselves victims as much of LTTE terrorism as of the means employed by the Sri Lankan army to crush it. Now that the war is over, they have the additional burden of proving to their government that they were victims, not supporters of the LTTE.

Hoping to hear the drunk blurt out something about any secret plan he and his fellow Tigers might be hatching against India, I patiently listened to him. “India thinks it is a big power,” he continued. “Why is it that the big power doesn’t have a single friend among its neighbors?”

The reason, which I didn’t bother to tell him, is obvious: A big power, like a wealthy household, is always an object of envy among its neighbors. It is resented by them.

“Sri Lanka,” he continued, “is befriending Pakistan and China, not India. Why is it so?” The reason, again, is obvious: befriending your enemy’s enemy is a sure way of strengthening your position vis-à-vis your enemy. This is not to say that the Sri Lankan government’s attitude toward India has been inimical all the time.

He went on to say that the LTTE was determined to exploit all of India’s troubles. He listed those troubles thus: “Kashmiri militants are fighting to break away from you. Maoist guerrillas are fighting against you in the north and northeastern areas. You have troubles on borders with Bangladesh. Pakistan keeps sending terrorist bombers into your country.”

Hatred for Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi

The target of his ire then turned to Sonia Gandhi and her late husband Rajiv Gandhi. He justified with great relish the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The assassination, by a girl suicide bomber sent by the LTTE, took place on May 21, 1991, at an election rally in Tamil Nadu. According to this sadistic Tiger, it was “Rajiv Gandhi’s reward for the harm he did to us.” The “harm” he was referring to was the sending of Indian peacekeepers to Sri Lanka, discussed above. Maybe the assassination was what Prabhakaran had in mind when he vowed to “teach India a lesson.”

Every time the drunk uttered Sonia Gandhi’s name, he prefaced it with the b-word. It was embarrassing for me to hear it. “She was a restaurant waitress,” he said. “Rajiv Gandhi fell for her after a one-night stand. How stupid one could get.”

I wanted to tell him that whatever political stability India has been enjoying since Rajiv Gandhi was killed was largely due to Sonia Gandhi’s leadership of the Congress Party. But refrained from doing it for fear that my remark would only make him add the f-word to the b-word he had been spewing.

According to him, India is on the brink of breakup. I couldn’t tell whether it was the outburst of a drunk or the thinking of Tamil Tigers who he said were still active in Europe and America. If the latter is the case, it may be prudent for India not to laugh it away as the Bush administration did when ominous warnings came from Osama bin Laden that he was determined to attack America.

True, the LTTE has been reduced to a rump after the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran and his trusted lieutenants. But the capability of even a rump to wreak havoc should not be underestimated. An important lesson we learned from 9/11 is that it doesn’t take a superpower to hurt and humiliate another superpower. A few misguided youngsters can do it, if fired with fanaticism and given the wherewithal.

Photo:

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder-leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought a guerrilla war in Sri Lanka to create a separate homeland for the Tamil minority in the country. The 25-year-long war was crushed by the Sri Lankan army. The war ended with Mr. Prabhakaran’s death on May 18, 2009. He was gunned down by Sri Lankan troops while trying to flee the battle zone in an ambulance van. (The Associated Press picture is reproduced courtesy The Independent newspaper of the U.K.)

(To be continued)

(M. P. Prabhakaran can be reached by email at [email protected])

see also:
Dachau concentration camp memorial: A chilling reminder of Nazi atrocities