Abstract
This book is a reporter’s story which provides a first-hand account on one of the most important ethnic conflicts in South Asia. The author’s career in the Deccan Herald newspaper from 1984 till his retirement in 2009 as an Associate Editor perfectly matched the rise and fall of the Tamil Tiger movement in Sri Lanka which he was closely associated with.
To the journalistic story, the foreword given by a senior academician on Sri Lanka, Prof V. Suryanarayan, adds flavour. Suryanarayan acclaims that Murari’s several on-the-spot studies of the Sri Lankan ethnic problems along with his professional and personal relations with several leaders provided a great advantage. His closeness with the former LTTE spokesperson Anton Balasingham, Suryanarayan says, helped the author to have a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of Tamil militancy, intra-militant relations and other differences in leadership.
Murari’s book is the second to be published on Tamil Tigers immediately after the war. In 2010, SAGE also published, The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story, a book of another journalist, M.R. Narayan Swamy. This book though mostly gives an account of the last war, Swamy’s earlier books like Inside an Elusive Mind: From Boys to Guerrillas provided a biographical version of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran and his militant movement.
If someone is looking for a comprehensive account of LTTE’s movement or of its leader from Murari’s book, as the title implies, then it will, to some extent, disappoint you. This book, overall, covers the peace efforts, internal party dynamics and external Indian element, especially the Tamil Nadu role and discusses LTTE’s politics alongside its strategies in the times of war and peace. The events are mostly in chronological fashion making the book more exciting with author’s personal experiences and interactions. It has many interesting anecdotes and the author’s fascinating narration like a story-teller gives freshness to the subject and captivates the reader. The language is lucid and various topics in the chapters are smoothly intertwined maintaining the course of events.
Murari’s book has five chapters, with a preface and an epilogue. What went wrong with Prabhakaran’s fight for Eelam and the leadership vacuum created among Tamils with his exit are outlined in the preface. With the passing of Prabhakaran, the author says, the Eelam dream lies shattered. The Sri Lankan Tamils the world over, who out of fear or for other reasons raised him to the level of a cult figure, now feel orphaned. In his view, an LTTE without Prabhakaran is unthinkable, as it was his baby and no one can nurture it the way he did all his life. Issues involved in political reconciliation and the commitment of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to bring a solution to the decade’s long conflict are also examined in the preface.
The author presents his insights on the Sri Lankan conflict from the July 1987 India–Sri Lanka agreement when he made his first visit to Sri Lanka. In the first chapter, ‘The Accord that Failed’, the author makes the reader travel with him right from the time he lands in Colombo airport navigating the reader into the political and historical particulars of the agreement and the dynamics surrounding it. Traversing further, he gives details of the security situation in the city and in Jaffna where he attended the press meet with Prabhakaran after the agreement was signed. The chauvinism of Sinhala leaders on the one hand and the shrewdness of the LTTE leader on the other continuously kept the Indian government in a dilemma from the time the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement was signed in 1987 till the ‘inglorious exit’ of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) from Sri Lanka in 1990. In all the issues discussed in various sub-topics of the chapter, this has been prominently observed. India’s flawed policy towards Sri Lanka, LTTE’s guerrilla tactics and how the IPKF was sucked into the war leaving the impressions of Sri Lanka becoming India’s Vietnam were discussed by the author, also putting forth his personal interactions with the IPKF, Tamil party leaders and militant cadres in Sri Lanka. The author says that the Sri Lankan army succeeded in 2009 where the IPKF failed in the 1980s (p. 47) because IPKF’s goal was to contain the Tigers and not decimate them.
After the exit of the IPKF, the Eelam war started again in June 1990. How Prabhakaran always waited for a spark before starting the fireworks is examined by the author in the second chapter, ‘Eelam War II’. It witnessed the occupation of the north-east and killing of non-LTTE Tamil leaders by the LTTE; also discussed is the relationship between the LTTE and Tamil Nadu, India and Tamil Nadu and Indo-Sri Lankan relations during that time. On assassinations, saying that the LTTE ruthlessly makes use of people to achieve its ends, Murari writes that he does not believe that Nalini, her brother Bhagyanathan, Padma and photographer Subha Sundaram, from whose studio the killer squad left to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi, were key conspirators and most of them, especially the Indian players, were sucked into the plot (pp. 122–123).
The third chapter, ‘Chandrika Era’, examined the peace efforts, Sri Lanka’s internal party politics and the conditions that led to Eelam war III. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) told Chandrika that the ethnic issue had two dimensions—the Tamil question and the LTTE problem. While the Tamils were for peace and would accept any reasonable settlement, the LTTE would be much more difficult to handle (p. 157). Further, Murari says, Prabhakaran missed the Indian support in 1995, despite the orchestrated campaign in Tamil Nadu about the Tamil ‘genocide’; the Narasimha Rao government in New Delhi refused to intervene much the same way as the Manmohan Singh government in May 2009 refused to act under pressure from the DMK leader. Prabhakaran realised only towards the very end that the so-called Tamil Nadu factor died with Rajiv Gandhi and New Delhi had come to the stage of looking at a post-LTTE scenario (p. 167).
After the failure of Chandrika’s devolution efforts and fall of Elephant Pass in 2000, the entry of the Ranil Wickremasinghe-led UNP into Sri Lankan ethnic politics as PM in 2001 and his failed peace talks with the LTTE with Norway’s mediation led to the start of another battle, Eelam War IV. The fourth chapter, ‘The Long and Uneasy Truce’, marks this stage in Sri Lankan politics. The author’s experiences during the 2002 ceasefire period in Killinocchi, the capital of the LTTE-held territory, where the LTTE hosted nearly 200 journalists from the world are included, and the author describes how the LTTE was paranoid about the security of its leader and the multiple, meticulous security processes the visitors had to undergo. The press conference with Prabhakaran, Murari says, was intended to convince the West that the LTTE was a liberation movement and not a terrorist organisation which was then facing bans by the Western countries.
With the beginning of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, the author examined his political and military strategies that signalled the start of war and the end of ‘terrorism’ once and for all in the fifth chapter, ‘The Last Phase’. In this chapter, an episode on the death of Anton Balasingham in 2006 provides many interesting anecdotes and the author’s personal interactions with him (pp. 296–300). The capture of Tamil areas under LTTE control and especially the fall of Killinochi to the Sri Lankan army: the author brings out the intensity of human disaster in the last stage of war by even quoting first-hand sources. The bitter end to important LTTE cadres and their leader Prabhakaran is meticulously examined and presented with many important facts.
The book has an epilogue written two years after the war. The author calls the final war as the ‘war without witnesses, a war fought behind closed doors, with access denied to journalists and international humanitarian agencies like the UN’. He briefly mentions the report of the three-member UN panel in which both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE are held responsible for 40,000 civilian deaths and its recommendation for an independent, international investigation into war crimes. He leaves with a question on what role the world is going to play now.