'From roaring to wailing' - The Island Editorial
So, the beleaguered Tiger chief made his annual speech
on Thursday. It may have come as an utter disappointment to his backers
at a time of their worst ever crisis. In 2005, he roared that he would
revert to war. And he carried out that threat. But, three years on he
himself is offering to stop war! What has gone wrong?
What characterises Prabhakaran's speech is a carpet
biter's rage and venom. He exudes genocidal racism from every pore.
Bizarrely, he has chosen to remain silent on Kilinochchi, which he vowed
to defend at any cost a few weeks ago. His silence is, arguably,
tantamount to concession of defeat. Else, he would have repeated his
pledge to defend his self-declared capital. He seems to be aware that
when torrential rains cease, the army will move into Kilinochchi and
declare its capture.
Those of the Fuehrer's ilk never own up to mistakes.
How can 'the divine' err? Prabhakaran blames everybody for his sorry
plight but himself. He inveighs against the international community, the
Co-Chairs including Norway. That is tigrine gratitude! "Some countries
which identified themselves as so-called Peace Sponsors," Prabhakaran
fumes, "rushed into activities which impaired negotiations." And he goes
on: "When the ceasefire agreement ... was abrogated unilaterally by
Sinhala Sri Lanka, strangely no voice of protest was registered by any
peace sponsor." Wasn't it he who violated the CFA over 3,000 times and
began to launch unprovoked attacks on police and military personnel
immediately after the election of the incumbent president in November
2005? There was no need for anyone to abrogate the CFA. It became as
dead as a dodo the moment the LTTE started to target the police and the
troops. Had he respected the CFA, war would still have been absent.
Now that Prabhakaran has offered to stop war, what is
the solution he has in mind? He unilaterally suspended peace talks in
2003 as he failed to railroad the UNF government into setting up an
Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA), which was a halfway house
between federalism and Eelam. None other than US Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage viewed the ISGA proposal as something that went
beyond the concept of federalism. He said it did not have any
precedence. Why the UNF government could not bring itself to grant that
demand in spite of its legendary pusillanimity is understandable.
Is Prabhakaran ready to settle for anything less than
Eelam and/or an ISGA? An offer to stop war is of little use unless there
is a real commitment on the part of the LTTE to negotiate a feasible
solution. On Prabhakaran's own admission 'it was to expose the hypocrisy
of the Sinhala state and at the same time to impress upon the
international community our commitment to peace that we [LTTE]
participated in the negotiations'. Isn't this proof that the LTTE had
anything but a genuine desire for peace when it took part in the
previous peace processes?
The LTTE has, as the EU Parliament pointed out in
2006, spurned Provincial Councils, Regional Councils and federalism as
envisaged in the Oslo Declaration. So, what does Prabhakaran mean when
he says '... we wish to stop the war and seek a peaceful resolution to
the national question of our people'? Since Prabhakaran has rejected
even federalism, the peaceful solution he is contemplating must be
either Eelam on a platter or the ISGA. Isn't he trying to give the State
Hobson's choice once again?
Interestingly, Prabhakaran flaunts his religious
knowledge. He says, "In a country that worships the Buddha who preached
love and kindness, racist hatred and war-mongering vie with one
another." If he holds Buddhism in such high esteem, why on earth did he
massacre nearly two hundred Buddhist devotees in Anuradhapura in 1985
and butcher a busload of Buddhist monks at Arantalawa in 1987? He also
bombed the Sri Dalada Maligawa, where lies the sacred tooth relic of the
Buddha? Isn't the devil quoting Tripitaka?
In some Indian movies, the harder the villain is
thrashed, the better he becomes. Something similar seems to have
happened to the Tiger chief. The man who roared not many moons ago and
promised total war in his heroes' day speech in 2005 is now cooing. He
has developed a sudden aversion to war! "In Sinhalam," he laments, "from
politicians to spiritual leaders, from journalists to ordinary people,
their voice is raised only in support of the war." So, those members of
the Fourth Estate who have been trying to scuttle the war so as to curry
favour with the Tiger chief have failed to impress him. He has lumped
all journalists, holy men and unholy politicians together without
recognising the services of the anti-war types among them.
What really takes the cake is Prabhakaran's appeal to
India to lift the ban on the LTTE. He says, "Our people always consider
India as our friend." As was pointed out earlier, Prabhakaran does not
own up to his mistakes. "The racist Sinhala state," he says, "with its
intrigue, conspired to bring enmity between our freedom movement and the
earlier Indian administration." Then, who really blew Rajiv Gandhi to
smithereens and changed the course of India's political history? If
Prabhakaran thinks he can assuage India's fear, indignity and sense of
shame stemming from the Rajiv assassination, he is sadly mistaken. This
is what an eminent Indian writer says in an article, LTTE and the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, reproduced in this newspaper today: "To
seek to destroy the integrity of the Indian nation is unpardonable but
to imagine that the nation will forgive the perpetrators of the act is
to scoff at the national conscience." Thus, if the Tiger chief is toying
with the idea of duping India once again into supporting his macabre
cause, he is living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
What a pathetic figure a hero has cut!
Courtesy: The Island |
