The Tamil Tiger cult

The Tamil Tigers were always a cult. Initially it was the cult of Prabhakaran, who founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and named it. Later it evolved into a suicide cult, still devoted to the "Leader" and his inner circle.

I recently had a phone conversation with Dr Victor Rajakulandran, the Sydney representative of the Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations. He told me that the Tamils had been subjected to genocide by the Government of Sri Lanka and defended the use of cyanide by the Tamil Tigers. He argued that the admittedly painful self-ingestion of cyanide would not be as bad as inevitable torture by the Sri Lankan army. I disagreed, pointing to the successful repatriation of thousands of Tamil Tiger fighters and the closure of the camps that held internally displaced Tamil people. Dr Rajakulendran wouldn't have a bar of it. Neither would  he countenance my argument that the truly indigenous people of Sri Lanka were not Tamil or Singhalese - they were Veddahs (also known as Veddas or Wanniyala-Aeto). As for the idea that the Tamil Tigers had perpetrated genocide themselves, Dr Rajakulendran thought such a suggestion preposterous.

Realising that I was not winning Dr Rajakulendran's heart and mind by speaking against the Tamil Tigers (not all of whom were Tamil, by the way) I tried another tack. I tried to discuss my research into genocide. I was encouraged to do this when Dr Rajekulendran told me that his doctorate was in entomology rather than medicine. He seemed the perfect choice to discuss my theory that HIV was spread in malarial areas by using mosquitoes as a vector.

Dr Rajakulendran was taken aback but had to agree that it was likely that mosquitoes could be bred to spread HIV. This is contrary to what the US and UK-based AIDS industry claims. I also told Dr Rajakulendran that my research indicated that people throughout the Third World were subjected to genocide during the 1980s and 1990s and that this genocide was continuing to the present. He told me he had to go out, and terminated the conversation at that point.

Just before I spoke to Dr Victor Rajakulendran in Sydney I spoke to Professor Selva Selvanathan, the AFTA spokesman for Queensland. Our conversation was enlightening and amicable. Though I didn't agree with his perspective on Sri Lanka. Especially his view that a trilingual policy has been tried and failed to create a harmonious, equitable society in Sri Lanka.

Professor Selvanathan, who told me he is an economist, said that there was little support for the Tamil Tigers until after the 1983 massacre of Tamils. He told me that his own mother, who had earlier advised him against supporting militants, had changed in her opinion after 1983, believing that violence needed to be countered by violence. I didn't directly ask him when he began supporting the Tigers - I didn't want to make him paranoid. I was trying to create a mutually beneficial dialogue, not investigate his links with the Tigers. I was also trying to de-radicalise him. It remains to be seen as to whether I was successful. Though our discussion was amicable, he refused to believe that the north of Sri Lanka has enjoyed 20 per cent economic growth. I was not foolish enough to argue the point - I have no idea whether this is true, or in fact, what such a figure means.

One thing I do know about is medicine. My knowledge of medical science has equipped me well to analyse genocide and mass murder. Especially when the means of killing is medical - biological warfare and chemical, in other words. My investigations since 1995 have supported the claim that certain groups of Tamils of Sri Lanka were subjected to attempted genocide during the 1980s and 1990s. So were numerous other populations in the Third World. This genocide was not engineered by the Government of Sri Lanka, or any other Third World government. It was engineered by doctors and scientists in the First World. The Tamil Tiger cult was just one of many players in the "wars" and "ethnic conflicts" that fed the coffers of warmongers in the First World, especially the nations that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which together supply most of the weapons that infest the world. The Tamil Tiger cult does, however, provide a profound insight into the manifold evils of Cold War conflicts.



Formation and Evolution of the Tamil Tiger Cult


Some years ago my father gave me a copy of a book titled "Tamil Eelam Freedom Struggle (an inside story)" by S.A.David. Only 1200 copies of this book were printed by the 'World Tamil Readers Trust' based in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India. Tamil Nadu is home to tens of millions of Tamil-speaking people who identify themselves as "Tamils". Tamil Nadu armed and trained the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka during the 1980s, and remained closely connected with the LTTE as the latter grew into a ruthless terrorist organization that employed both conventional and unconventional weapons in their fight for a mono-ethnic, mono-lingual "Tamil Homeland" that would be ruled with an iron fist by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and its dictatorial leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

This book, published in 2004, provides an insight into the LTTE's view of itself - at least the view of itself that it wanted to promote to what it imagined was the International Community. They called this nebulous entity the IC, and the book is written in the language of the the IC - English. Broken English at times, and with lots of spelling and grammatical errors but unmistakably in English. Also, unmistakably propaganda rather than a candid, self-critical view of the Tamil Tigers and the Freedom Struggle they claimed to be waging.

The book is "respectfully dedicated to the sacred memory of Thanthai Chelva and Tamil Eelam Martyrs". There is a full-page photo of S.J.V Chelvanayagam, the Tamil lawyer and politician who had openly declared, as leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) his support for a "free, sovereign, secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam" in 1976. The link below is the current Wikipedia entry for Chelvanayagam, who died in 1977, not long after he declared his support for the goal the Tamil Tigers claimed to be fighting for. It is an example of the blatant propaganda that the LTTE-supporters produced that the only other full-page portrait in the book is a photograph of Vellupillai Prabakaran. One in which the LTTE leader looks more like an Indian movie star than the ugly thug he was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._V._Chelvanayakam

This is the Wikipedia entry for Prabhakaran:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velupillai_Prabhakaran

S.A.David's perspective of Vellupillai Prabhakaran is rather different from the collective, retrospective perspective that is expressed in Wikipedia. This is his take on Prabhakaran's clumsy press conference of 2002:

"After seclusion and silence for twelve years, Prabakaran spoke to nearly 500 reporters from around the world on 10.4.02 at Kilinocchi. He looked rather tensed [sic] at the start but gradually became relaxed, then in the end he was laughing and joking. Balasingham is a seasoned speaker. He always allowed Prabakaran to have his say and only helped him when necessary. The questions were tough and at some points openly hostile. Yet Prabakaran was cool and calm."

S.A. David goes on to summarise Prabhakaran's answers to selected questions. These do not indicate a intelligent, let alone a visionary leader. Even S.A.David admits that Prabhakaran needed assistance from Anton Balasingham, the English and Tamil speaking political adviser and strategist for the Tigers. When Balasingham died in 2006, Prabhakaran was left with no-one to translate his mumbles and ravings into English, and the political leadership was entrusted to the monolingual Tamilchelvan, who was annointed with the honourific of "Brigadier". Tamilchelvan (Tamilselvan) was killed in a targetted bombing by the Sri Lankan airforce in 2007. This was the beginning of the end for the Tigers and a signal for the Tamil "diaspora" as it calls itself, to launch into overdrive in its campaign to promote the idea that the Tamil people of Sri Lanka are being subjected to "genocide".

This misleading claim was already being made when Tamil Eelam Freedom Struggle was published in 2004. Appendix 1 is titled "Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka". Interestingly, this appendix is dated 1982. This suggests that the LTTE were making spurious claims of genocide even before the 1983 massacre of Tamils in Colombo.  

...to be continued....

 

The Tamil Tiger Cult

I grew up under the influence of the Tamil Tiger Cult. Not as much as my parents, but nevertheless clouded in my judgement about Sri Lanka and its history.

Through most of my life, the providers of my perspective on the history of Sri Lanka were my parents. Both regarded the Tamil Tigers as "freedom fighters" rather than terrorists. My publicly father argued that the Tigers were the "military arm" of the Tamil people, and that they were the only thing standing between the Tamil People and the "genocidal" Sri Lankan armed forces. This is, of course, propaganda straight from the Tiger's mouth(piece).

Since the defeat of the military wing of the Tamil Tigers and the propaganda and political arms of the Tamil Tigers have undergone yet another transformation. Already globalised, the propaganda machine expanded on its spurious accusations of "genocide" by what they called the GoSL - Government of Sri Lanka, which they continued to claim was a "Sinhalese" government that did not represent the "legitimate needs" of the Tamil people in what they continued to call the "Tamil North and East". The political leadership created what they called the "Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam" headed by the American Tamil lawyer Visvanathan Rudrakumaran. Rudrakumaran insisted on calling himself "Prime Minister" of the TGTE, much to the amusement of anyone who knew he was a legal adviser to Anton Balasingham whose Australian-born wife Adele handed out cyanide capsules to young Tamil girls.

I have discussed all this with my mother but not my father. Today I tried again. I rang my parents' home in Mt Gravatt. My mother answered the phone. After saying hello, I asked if she had heard of the Sri Lankan poltician I had watched on You Tube last night. His name is Professor Rajiva Wijesinha and I had been very impressed by what I had seen and read about him and by him.

Professor Wijesinha is a Sri Lankan and British-educated academic who headed one of the universities in southern Sri Lanka before abandoning academia for politics. He has done an amazing job in his role as head of the government's reconciliation efforts. I urge readers to stop reading this after the next paragraph and watch the You Tube videos of Rajiva Wijesinha. His is fluently bilingual in Sinhalese and English. I do not know how much Tamil he understands, but I'm sure it is more than that possessed by me or my father. Maybe more than my mother, too, though she regards herself as "Tamil". She used to call herself a "Ceylon Tamil" but reluctantly took to identifying herself as a "Sri Lankan Tamil" after the change in the country's name in 1972. That was when Sri Lanka took the first steps to becoming "democratic" and "socialist" - The Democratic, Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

When I was a child in England my older sister and I were told that, unlike the "English" children, we "came from Ceylon" and were of "mixed race". These two races were, I was later told, the "Singhalese" and the "Tamils". The Singhalese and Tamils were of fundamentally different races and, I learnt, were "Aryan" and "Dravidian" respectively. The Aryans came from North India and the Dravidians from South India. This was the view of history, simplified, that is presented in the book A Concise History of Ceylon, which I have borrowed from my mother's library. Reading this book, which was published by the Ceylon University Press (Colombo) in 1961 has given me a new perspective on the mind-set of the Tamil Tiger cult.

I'll explain what I have discovered in my next blog....