Sorry, no afterlife for Prabhakaran or the LTTE

By Malinda Seneviratne

When gods turn out to be mortal the worshippers are benumbed and languish in disbelief. It is natural for the most naïve to cling on to the flimsiest of hope that the death was fabrication. After all, when those who are immortalized come to take up residence in vast swathes of one’s sense of meaning and being, and pledge over and over again to create for one a private heaven on earth, mortality is insufferable.

Prabhakaran’s politics required that kind of deification. Deification alone guaranteed that many if not all adherents would never believe that the deified could do wrong. It would always be shoved under the conscious-carpet or dismissed as vile fabrication by the unbeliever.

Deification can happen in two ways. First, and the more abiding, is a natural process whereby a human being with exceptional qualities is venerated over a long period of time, usually across several generations. The second is Prabhakaran’s kind of deification. It is actively and deliberately constructed by the to-be-deified and relevant sycophants.

It is the second type of ‘deity’ that causes the most anxiety. Gods don’t fail, and if they do, the fault has to be diverted to some other factor in order for the cosmology to remain in balance. In short, old habits die hard.

It is natural because for years the LTTE worked hard to build the image of invincibility. Indeed the image was several times larger than its reality but the exercise was successful in that the LTTE was able take successive governments, academics, journalists and foreign powers for quite a ride. ‘Kilinochchi will never be taken,’ the LTTE said, after having said that Mavil Aru, Mutthu, Sampoor and Vakarai will not be captured by the Sri Lankan security forces. One starts believing one’s lies, I suppose.

Meena Kumari, a woman who fled the LTTE when Puthukuduarippu was captured, probably put things in perspective. She is from Mannar. She had followed the LTTE when it withdrew in the fact of the relentless forward march of the Army. She had apparently believed Prabhakaran when he said that the Army can never defeat the LTTE comprehensively. It took several months and seeing the LTTE’s brutality first hand as cadres shot at civilians trying to flee, for Meena Kumari to realize that Prabhakaran was not a god, but a liar.

The deification that has been going on for over two decades perhaps explains the frenzied efforts of the LTTE’s overseas operators to deny that Prabhakaran was ever killed. Among the more crude attempts to keep the believers believing was the release of doctored photographs, showing a smiling Prabhakaran looking at a TV screen airing a Rupavahini news telecast announcing his death. The screen has been photographed as it ‘showed’ Prabhakaran’s corpse. Neat. Except that it was soon found that this was a cut and paste job using an old picture of the terrorist in conversation with the late Anton Balasingham.

Prabhakaran’s point man overseas, K. Pathmanathan (KP) who a known arms-dealer wanted by Interpol for a myriad of crimes, quickly moved into damage-control mode. He issued a statement saying that ‘the leader was live and well’. At that point, the body of the LTTE leader had not been identified. It is now known that KP’s statement had spurred the troops to launch an intensified search for the terrorist. Apparently this is when he was found along with his bodyguards and killed.

As D.B.S. Jeyaraj points out in his column in the Daily Mirror of May 23, 2009, the onus is on KP to refute the evidence pertaining to the fact that Prabhakaran’s mortality has been established.

While the ordinary deity-worshipper is naturally demoralized it is important for the Eelamists to give Prabhakaran a decent afterlife. This is what we see happening now. Jeyaraj’s piece is a case in point. He is not officially pro-LTTE. His views regarding the LTTE, if one were to peruse the archives, are directly related to the fortunes of that movement. When the LTTE was on the ascent, Jeyaraj has been careful not to be critical. When it is down, he feels safer to fire some missiles their way. Through all this, Jeyaraj has been a staunch Eelamists. He probably understands that the LTTE is dead, but he is clearly astute enough to recognize that an afterlife for Prabhakaran can be useful in the Eelam struggle.

Jeyaraj throws in a lot of information with appropriate caveats of course regarding reliability. He knows how conjecture can quickly turn into fact. He knows that the LTTE’s propaganda machine did not die with Prabhakaran. He knows that it is important for Eelamism to make Prabhkaran’s death as heroic as possible. Thus we have Jeyaraj describing a dramatic Hollywood-style escape attempt by the terrorist chief.

Prabhakaran, a man who forced his cadres to wear a cyanide capsule and insisted that they take a bite if capture cannot be avoided, a man who employed little children in suicide attacks, did not die a glorious death. He did not, like Salvador Allende, die in a shower of bullets even as he fired back. He did not bite his cyanide capsule. He did not have one to bite! It was an inglorious death and one that is quite at odds with the image of invincibility and heroism that the LTTE carefully constructed for him over many years. It is a death unbecoming of a deity-to-be.

Now this could be an alternative ‘story’, a fabrication by the Sri Lankan Army, for example. However, given that Jeyaraj cannot substantiate his story, he could at least be honest in acknowledging that this story is as plausible as any he can offer and that moreover this story is consistent with Prabhakaran’s history.

The Tamil Diaspora, upon whose shoulders the Eelam dream has come to rest, need to understand certain things. First of all, inflation of reality is only possible if reality exists. The ground is cleared now. There is no LTTE and therefore fantastic extrapolation is not possible any longer. The LTTE has to be taken to ethereal realms to help buttress the Eelam-wish and this is why Prabhakan has to be re-deified and what Jeyaraj and others are trying to lay the foundation for.

The young, second and third generations of the Tamil Diaspora who are supposed to have been suddenly radicalized during the last days of Prabhakaran will soon find out that no genocide happened, that there was no bloodbath as such and more than all this that the Tamil people once living in areas controlled by Prabharakan have given up on Eelam, understand that Prabhakaran was mortal, and prefer to live in a real, touchable Sri Lanka than ever again inhabit a dream world called Eelam.

It is easy to indulge in fantasy. It is convenient to believe in gods, but it is harder when gods turn out to be mortals whose record of delivery is abysmal. The Tamil Diaspora must adapt to the reality that they will not determine the future of Tamil people living in Sri Lanka and that it would be arrogant and self-defeating of them to prescribe for their brethren from abroad, especially since they’ve not sent one tablet of Panadol to those who fled the LTTE and were temporarily sent to IDP camps. They were only concerned about civilians under LTTE control. The Tamils living in Sri Lanka, especially those in the North and East are aware of this. The Tamil Diaspora would do well to understand that the Government will not make the same mistake twice and that everything will be done to alleviate their discomfort in the short term, resettle them as quickly as possible, usher in democracy, obtain the true dimensions of grievance and resolve for the same.

My prediction: the Tamils living in Sri Lanka will be the biggest obstacle to any sections of the Tamil Diaspora that still entertains dreams of carving a separate state in Sri Lanka. So, while we can legitimately expect a concerted effort to re-deify Prabhakaran and give him a decent afterlife, it will amount to little more than clutching at straws. The likes of Jeyaraj could surely do better, I believe. Mortals die. That’s natural for mortals. Corpses decay. Some personalities can be elevated to divine status. Some cannot. Some simply are too heavy with hatred, inflated sense of self-importance, penchant for lying and too addicted to the by-any-means ethic. So, no afterlife for Prabhakaran. He didn’t die a death deserving of otherworldly elevation. He didn’t live a life worthy of any afterlife worth talking about, really.

- Asian Tribune -