From Che to Prabakharan: Dead or Alive?

From Che to Prabakharan: Dead or Alive?

Amazing footage the other day. On May 18, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabakharan (left: please excuse the tiny photo!), supposedly died! For LTTE supporters, this is merely Sri Lankan government propaganda. Hard to accept this when the Sri Lankan army has dealt a death-blow to the LTTE, which admitted defeat on May 17. Hard to accept this when you check out this You-Tube footage of the dead terrorist or freedom fighter, depending on where you stand on the issue of a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaSL7XinAvk

It is indeed hard to believe that the LTTE leader is dead. It was hard to believe that about forty years ago in 1967 the mythical figure of revolutionary Marxism, the Argentinean Ernest Che Guevara, was executed by the Bolivian army. See right for the photo of the dead Che that was shown to the world press on October 10, 1967. Both Prabakharan and Che lived and died by the gun of armed struggle. Prabakharan, like Che, was larger than life. He was a mythical figure in the struggle of independence for Tamils against the Buddhist-Sinhalese dominated Sri Lankan state. It is hard for LTTE supporters to imagine that their leader and demi-god is dead. He has been the heart and soul of the LTTE since 1976. He helped to create a precursor organization to the LTTE in 1972. He was the man responsible for the wave of suicide bombings that began in 1981, before Islamists would use it to vicious and great political effect in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, the United States, England, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Prabakharan was both a nationalist and a Marxist. His campaign against the Sri Lankan state was waged viciously for 26 years, without consideration for human life. His nationalism/Marxism was a contradiction in terms ideologically, one that also mired the political trajectory of jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Ocalan was captured by the Turkish state in 1999, knocking life out of the violent armed struggle of the PKK. Yet, both Prabakharan and Ocalan are more nationalists than Marxists, believing in first and foremost the national liberation of Tamils and Kurds respectively. Similarly, the defeat of the LTEE and now the death of the all-powerful leader spells trouble for Tamil nationalists. Sri Lanka might take this victory as an opportunity to solve the political crisis that led the Tamils to armed rebellion in the first place. They might offer Tamils autonomy and greater Tamil participation within the highest sectors of the Sri Lankan government.

It took time to accept that the mythical hero of the Cuban Marxist Revolution in 1959 died in the misty Bolivian jungles in an inglorious, sobering spectacle with few fighters against a powerful Bolivian army. This was the heroic Che of perpetual revolution, the man who sought to make revolutions in remote places like the Congo and Bolivia. The man that was not even supported by Castro or the communists in Bolivia because he was an eternal revolutionary in the Trotskyite mould. It will take time for LTTE supporters to accept that their leader, who was persona non grata for 32 governments worldwide, has gone in a blazing fury of Sri Lankan fire. It will take time because for LTEE supporters Prabakharan was leader, hero, god, and the symbolic hope of Tamil independence. As one Indian commentator noted, Prabakharan was not merely the representative of the Tamil national dream, but their "everything." Their "everything" that caused great suffering for Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese alike in a protracted, cruel, and gruelling civil war since 1983.

Tamir Bar-On