Prabhakaran may pose a problem if captured alive

Any exodus of the Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka, voluntary or otherwise, would be inimical to the long-term interests of the Sri Lankan Tamils and India - it would mean the end of the Sri Lankan Tamils as a historical community of Sri Lanka

CJ: Narendra Ch

Tue, May 12, 2009 17:05:32 IST

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Sri Lanka News :

PROMINENT HUMAN rights activist Ravi Nair has cautioned the Indian government that Prabhakaran, if captured alive, could pose a major problem for the country. In fact, the Sri Lankans, advised by their Chinese and Pakistani friends, are considering capturing Prabhakaran alive and handing him over to the Indians. Nair, the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre’s Executive Director, in a special feature on the Sri Lankan Tamils’ humanitarian crisis, released the first of its three parts. He said the Rajapakse brothers were devious and farsighted.

According to him, this would stir up trouble in Tamil Nadu. It would also have implications for India’s war on terror and the domestic political scene. India would not benefit in any way if Prabhakaran was captured alive. He could not be imprisoned in Sri Lanka without India making a formal request for extradition given the judgment in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

The Sri Lankans do not merely desire the military defeat of the Tigers; they want to write the final chapter of the Mahavamsa, which will conclude that the Sinhalese finally settled the 2000-year struggle with the Tamils under the Rajapakse brothers by sending the Tamils back in boats to where they originally came from.

With the Sri Lankan victory, neutral humanitarian intervention from India, either official or unofficial, will become even more difficult as the Sri Lankan state will be presenting a fait accompli to the rest of the world. All other states, including India, while being critical, will come to terms with the new diplomatic reality even if they do not like it. All humanitarian relief will now have to be channelled through the Sri Lankan government.

In the post-conflict situation, the Sri Lankans will ensure that the conditions in the camps are barely liveable, without going to extremes. They will, through their subtle propaganda, actively encourage the displaced people to leave Sri Lanka for India or join the Tamil Diaspora elsewhere and in a sense, depopulate a part of the north of that island. They will then, in the long term, seek to implant Sinhalese settlers in that area over a period of time, as they did successfully in the east where there is now a sizeable Sinhalese population in what was once a predominantly Tamil area.

The present ‘IDP camps’ are a euphemism for open prisons and in any event, given the security cordon erected by the Sri Lankan and Indian navies, none of the IDPs will be able to cross over to India. Now that the Tiger resistance is part of history, the Sri Lankan government’s attitude towards the camps will see a change after they complete the process of ‘screening’ the IDPs to isolate the residual LTTE cadres, if any. Their naval blockade will disappear and they may even pointedly provide a number of small boats to encourage the screened IDPs to flee to India.

Well-meaning Tamil politicians on the Indian side will be well advised not to attempt to bring the IDPs to India. If they do, they will be playing into the hands of the Sri Lankan government. If they come to India, they will not go back to Sri Lanka and that will be a double victory for the Sri Lankan government. Having won the military campaign, the Sri Lankan government will also have won political peace, albeit for a decade or two.

Any exodus of the Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka, voluntary or otherwise, to India, would be inimical to the long-term interests of both the Sri Lankan Tamils and India – it will mean the end of the Sri Lankan Tamils as a historical community, a community deeply rooted in the island nation, as Sinhalese.

Nair said that it was only a matter of time before the last redoubt of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fell. Armed resistance in the conventional sense of positional warfare would soon come to an end. For all the triumphalism of the Sri Lankan army, it would be instructive to remember that since the fall of Killinochchi in October 2008, a small band of 2000-plus LTTE cadres held out against three divisions of the Sri Lankan army for over eight months - an army, armed by China and Pakistan, helped by radars from India, manned by Indian personnel and armed with weapons, euphemistically called, “non-offensive,” by India and half-a-dozen other countries.

Trained by the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis and the Chinese, even as the LTTE was blockaded by the Sri Lankan Navy and the Indian Navy, it was tracked by spy satellites from a few other countries, which were passing on this information to Colombo.

He recalled that the Sri Lankan government statement, on the basis of which the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi called off his fast, was another brilliant smokescreen. It merely said that it had stopped using heavy weapons. In further dissimulation, it claimed that the security forces would confine their attempts “to rescuing civilians who are held hostage….” Clearly this did not preclude the use of weapons such as mortars, anti-tank weapons, bazookas and rocket-propelled grenade launchers along with heavy machine guns firing tracers which in any case were the only weapons that could be used in combat of such close proximity as they found themselves in the second half of April 2009. This was no concession at all. If the Sri Lankans had not gone in for a major push until late April 2009, into the encircled area, he felt it was only because such close combat would have resulted in major casualties on the Sri Lankan side. This would be a liability for the Rajapakse brothers when they do their victory lap on the Galle Face Green.

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