Exclusive | Lankan Tamil diaspora to publicly accept truth about Prabhakaran's death at event

Although the military crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009 and wiped out its leadership, Prabhakaran included, the pro-LTTE Tamil diaspora and some of the surviving Tamil Tigers kept insisting that the feared leader had escaped from Sri Lanka and was living secretly in the West.

After 15 years of the baseless claim, during which some ex-LTTE fighters illegally raised vast sums of money in the West from gullible fellow Tamils, dominant sections of the diaspora have decided to accept the bitter truth.

Bitter truth

Accordingly, hundreds of Tamils from all over the West and beyond will converge on August 2 at Basel in Switzerland for a mammoth commemoration for Prabhakaran, who once controlled a third of Sri Lanka’s landmass as well as two-thirds of its winding coast.

The LTTE founder’s quarter-century long armed campaign to carve out an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka finally ended in a bloody carnage. The war claimed over a hundred thousand lives in the island nation and left a terrible trail of destruction and human suffering.

But the LTTE, which always paid homage to its fallen fighters, refused to do so in the case of Prabhakaran and instead, with help from select Tamil politicians in India as well as the pro-LTTE diaspora, kept the fiction alive that the guerrilla chieftain managed to give the Sri Lankan military the slip.

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On August 2, this carefully-constructed story – which included claims that Prabhakaran’s wife and only daughter were also living in the West – would be formally and finally laid to rest.

Laying fantasy to rest

The Switzerland event is being organised by the pro-LTTE diaspora, as well as former LTTE guerrillas, who fled Sri Lanka in 2019 or just before the Tamil Tigers were routed. Most ex-fighters now live in the West and continue to espouse the LTTE’s political line.

“The diaspora and many in the LTTE have realised that the time has come to admit the truth that was anyway known for a long time: that Prabhakaran was killed in May 2009. There is no use keeping any story to the contrary alive any further,” a Tamil source in Sri Lanka said.

“As it is, a lot of damage has been done by fostering the concocted theory that Prabhakaran would return to Sri Lanka one day to resume the fight for Tamil Eelam,” the source added.

Another Tamil source insisted that none of the estimated 12,000 LTTE fighters, who surrendered to the military in 2008-09 and have undergone official “rehabilitation” ever bought the story about Prabhakaran’s so-called escape.

“The guerrillas who now live under limited surveillance knew that Prabhakaran perished fighting,” this source said. “There is also guilt among them that they are alive while their leader was killed in battle.”

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A section of politicians in Tamil Nadu, who had vociferously backed the LTTE helped to keep alive the fantasy about Prabhakaran. The LTTE and its supporters were so sure that Prabhakaran cannot be killed that they found it impossible to accept he was no more despite foolproof evidence.

Prabhakaran memorials

In contrast, Prabhakaran’s family, in particular his only elder brother who lives in the West, always believed that the guerrilla perished in 2009. The brother has regularly held small private memorial events for Prabhakaran, disregarding the fiction of him being alive.

“The Prabhakaran Memorial Uprising Forum," a newly-formed body coordinating the August 2 event, is primarily driven by former LTTE leaders based in the UK (two), Switzerland (three) and Australia (one) along with some other key individuals from the Tamil diaspora. One of them edited a key LTTE journal.

According to the organisers, Prabhakaran became a “martyr” on May 18, 2009 (the military insists he was killed on May 19) and the get-together will commemorate the man “as an eternal leader whose legacy must be remembered”.

The event is being held in Switzerland, mainly because it is one of the few countries with a large Tamil diaspora which never outlawed the LTTE unlike the European Union, Britain, Canada and the US in the West.

On August 2, a statue of or a memorial to Prabhakaran will be unveiled in Switzerland. This will be later ferried to London and most probably installed in Oxford at a private estate.

Reviving LTTE ideology?

Some Tamil sources say that while the event is dubbed as a cultural and memorial gathering, the wider agenda will be to revive the LTTE ideology. In the process, more money may be raised from the diaspora, many of whose members have prospered during the decades they have domiciled in the West.

Also read: Ex-LTTE fighters trying to revive militant group in Sri Lanka: Report

The majority of the Tamils of Sri Lankan origin who will meet in Switzerland will be drawn from Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Germany and Italy. There will also be participation from Scandinavian countries.

According to one former LTTE guerrilla, similar events may later be held in other countries.

Prabhakaran and LTTE

Prabhakaran, born in Jaffna in November 1954, was a school dropout who took to militancy in the early 1970s. He founded the LTTE in 1976. An LTTE-led insurgency virtually tore apart Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009.

From a ragtag group of barely 40 fighters with 25 odd weapons, Prabhakaran built the LTTE into one of the world’s most formidable and well-armed guerrilla outfits whose suicide attacks and assassinations struck terror, causing global concern.

The LTTE’s two most prominent suicide bombing victims include Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa (1993) and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (1991).

In May 2009, after cornering the last of the LTTE fighters into a small belt in Sri Lanka’s north, the military crushed the group, killing its top brass, while a few leaders took their own lives so as to avoid capture.