Some continue to say that the tail wagged the dog. But, it’s clear that it was regulation kennel practice that took place i.e. the dog wagged the tail. The diaspora and the Tamil lobby groups did not control Prabhakaran, Prabhakaran controlled these entities to the last.
Prabhakaran did so, sitting in that miniscule one kilometer by one kilometer sliver of land, and to his dying breath tried to use his pet poodles and darling Dalmatians in the diaspora and in the national and international lobbies to sue for a cessation of hostilities by government forces, so that he could live to fight another day, and eventually claw his way back and create more senseless mayhem in his chimerical pursuit of a separate state of Eelam.
So, there is no question about it. Jehan Perera and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu worked for Prabhakaran, though they were not cyanide capsule carrying members of the LTTE inner circle. Kumar Rupesinghe ditto, though Rupesinghe seemed to have cut his losses realizing the LTTE rout long ago, and settled himself to a low profile life of a NGO pamphleteer and moonlighting peace sadhu gadding about on his peacock throne four-wheel drive backseat.
Paikiasothy was fighting to the bitter end to do the bidding of the Thalaivar and though we are not saying the conduits were direct (Prabhakaran probably did not call Paikiasothy direct from his Vanni sliver of land on his hand-phone...), what can be said is that Paikiasothy knew exactly what he was doing, which was to mobilize international opinion to stave off the inevitable, which we saw in the form of a corpse laid out along the Nandikadal lagoon last week.
Tolerance
However, these NGOs still existed in Colombo, which speaks volumes for the tolerance and the core democratic inclinations of the Sri Lankan state, attributes all decried by these pamphleteers who were raising the bogey of tyrannical junta rule, which they said was accompanied with brutal suppression of democracy and free speech. Now we do not give the government a blemishless report card, but for times of war, there has been admirable tolerance to put up with the likes of the Saravanamuttus and the Jehans and essentially preserve the general atmosphere of normal civic life...
However, in the end, Prabhakaran and his NGO minions made the significant miscalculation in thinking that they can pull this thing off, and force a ceasefire by raising the human rights cry, when in the main, international opinion was covertly if not overtly happy over the rout of a terrorist organization in this time of a so-called global war on terror.
Read Friday’s papers, for the news that the United States has formally congratulated Sri Lanka on its victory over the terror menace of the LTTE. Both Robert Scher, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, and the US ambassador Robert O. Blake officially congratulated Sri Lanka for its victory over the LTTE.
It is wholly true that Prabhakaran’s clout was totally disproportionate to the dying warlord’s influence he commanded in a biscuit-tin sizes sliver of land. But that’s because Prabhakaran was able with the aid of a battery powered phone to bend all of those networks that he has built over the years to manufacture the propaganda that he hoped would be his shield arising out of the human shield —- the shield of disapproval of the international community which, he hoped, would prevent the annihilation of his terrorist cabal and himself.
Those networks did bend to do his bidding, which is why Barack Obama made a personal statement from the White House lawn on Sri Lanka.
That was the level of influence Prabhakaran was able to yield from his sliver of real estate, with the help of a battery powered gizmo.
Congratulatory message
But yet, you need to read the sub-text of the international community’s plethora of statements on Sri Lanka over the last few weeks to comprehend that the United States was willing to talk, to censure both sides, to put on a show, but was never willing to act to let the egregious LTTE terrorists off the hook.
In the end, the congratulatory message proves it all.
In their hearts of hearts, the United States wanted to see the end of the LTTE, as much as the UN did, and India did.
It’s just Prabhakaran’s minions in Colombo who were frenzied in their self-flagellation on behalf of the LTTE.
Jehan Perera was on his knees saying stop the war, because the LTTE cadres might commit mass suicide.
Did any such thing happen? Since when did the potential mass suicide of a bunch of terrorists, preclude a terrorist organization led by a ruthless terrorist leader from being eliminated?
Perera, you can see now that the United States has congratulated Sri Lanka for eliminating the LTTE. So much for your incendiary claim that about the potential deleterious effects of LTTE mass suicides.
Paikiasothy was willing to quote any spurious ‘human rights report’’ and was eager to damn the Sri Lankan government for civilian killings, barely mentioning the fact that the LTTE held these civilians hostage.
All of this was dealt with in this newspaper by this writer, but Paikiasothy was unable to answer these arguments at any time — and unwilling to face the challenge of a public debate.
We can take any of Paikiasothy’s polemics during the last phase of the army operation in Puthukudiyarippu, and prove clinically beyond any shadow of doubt that if he wrote hundred words censuring the Sri Lankan government, he wrote only .005 words in censure of the LTTE, the organization which caused all this misery for the civilians in the Vanni in the first place.
Never was intellectual dishonesty more obvious. Never was it more certain that the Jehans and the Paikiasothys worked for their Vanni boss, and I’m sure they won’t even have a word to say in the face of such an indictment. Paikiasothy lamented hour on the hour that the end game is not ending — well it ended, so what say you now, pardner?
I ask one question. Are you the people who purport to speak on behalf of the Tamils in Sri Lanka?
Prabhakaran and these people such as Jehan and Paikiasothy, and Kumar earlier, were symbiotic species. Prabhakaran’s physical demise would surely mean that these, his acolytes are going to be supremely irrelevant now in the larger national discourse.
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