Prabhakarans wisdom

September 9, 2013, 12:00 pm Former Army Commander and Democratic Party Leader Gen. Sarath Fonseka is quite adept at attracting media attentiontoo much of it, at times. He has said something interesting at a recent propaganda rally in Jaffna; if Prabhakaran had surrendered, he would have been with the government by now, contesting the PC polls on the UPFA ticket. Gen. Fonsekas statement reminds us of Prabhakarans reaction to an offer made by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga way back in 1994. Having been elected Prime Minister in 1994, she offered him the entire Northern Province on a platter for a period of ten years sans elections if he agreed to eschew violence and separatism. He contemptuously turned it down. CBK was genuinely interested in resolving the conflict through devolution and it was during her tenure that a political solution could have been evolved. But, Prabhakaran remained cocky and intransigent. The leader of a guerrilla movement has to have an aura of mystery about him for his cadres to repose blind faith in him to the extent of laying down their lives for him. A terror kingpin cuts a very pathetic figure in captivity as is common knowledge. How would Osama bin Laden have looked if he had been taken all the way to Washington and forced to appear on TV? He would have worn the same look as Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi in the hands of their captors. Prabhakaran, no doubt, wanted to be removed to safety by a foreign power during the final phases of the war. He had managed to cheat death that way in 1987 thanks to India. But, in 2009, he obviously did not want to surrender to the Sri Lankan army; he did his damnedest to run away until the last moment. He did not believe in democratic politics. Else, he could have taken to politics much earlier with the blessings of India and even become the Chief Minister of the North-East in 1988. It was his aversion to politics that made him different from the likes of JVP founder leader Rohana Wijeweera. After his release from prison following the UNPs victory at the 1977 general election, Wijeweera experimented with democratic politics only to be accused of furthering the interests of the UNP under President J. R. Jayewardene as a political hit man to keep their mutual bete noire, SLFP leader Sirimavo Bandaranaike at bay; the JVP came to be cynically dubbed the Jayewardene Vijeweera Peramuna. He was not so lucky in 1989, when he was captured, executed in captivity and cremated after being forced to make, under torture, a confession and a public apology for the JVPs mindless terrorism. The rest is history. Gen. Fonseka has driven home his point that the UPFA, while boasting of having slain Tigers, is wooing ex-Tigers for expediency. Interestingly, at the last presidential election it was the other way around. The former army chief himself declared on Nov. 29, 2009, after announcing

his decision to run for president as the Oppositions common candidate, that he was ready even to secure the support of Prabhakarans parents to defeat President Mahinda Rajapaksa! The LTTE rump, its proxies and the pro-Tiger expatriates threw their weight behind Gen. Fonseka though they had been levelling very serious allegations of war crimes against him. Today, they wouldnt touch his party with a ten-foot pole! The same goes for his former southern allies who backed him to the hilt at the last presidential polls but are avoiding his Democratic Party like the plague. That is the name of the game in Sri Lankan politics which, not to put too fine a point on it, has all the trappings of a partner-swapping orgy. There are neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies in politics; there are only permanent idiots or gluttons for punishment who exercise their franchise to burden themselves with timeserving political scumbags. Prabhakaran, in spite of his terrorism, had the wisdom to avoid dirty politics.