The Sri Lankan government is far more concerned about Prabhakaran’s talents as a military strategist. He is leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, one of the world’s most brutal–and most successful–guerrilla movements. Prabhakaran not only demands total loyalty from his fellow rebels. In recent weeks his army of about 10,000 fighters has launched an assault that has thrown the Sri Lankan Army on the defensive. Last week the Tigers were closing in on the northeastern city of Jaffna, their cultural capital, threatening to cut off about 40,000 government troops from their supplies. After heavy shelling, the rebels captured a garrison town just three kilometers from the city. Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who was blinded in one eye last December when Tamil Tiger suicide bombers attacked her at a Colombo election rally, vowed to defeat the rebels. “Let us learn the lessons from our recent setbacks and march forward to wipe out Tiger terrorism completely,” she declared.
How has Prabhakaran, 46, a soft-spoken fan of Clint Eastwood movies who likes to quote the thoughts of Mao Zedong, outmaneuvered the Sri Lankan forces? He seems to hold almost cultlike powers over his followers. Prabhakaran founded the Tamil Tigers in 1976 when he was 22, in response to government discrimination against the country’s Tamil minority. His rebels have been fighting a full-fledged war with Colombo for 17 years; about 60,000 people have been killed. Prabhakaran, a socialist who has said he is inspired by such disparate leaders as Hitler, Napoleon and Che Guevara, gets funding for and weapons from the Tamil diaspora. The United States has named the Tigers a terrorist organization. “It’s a very efficient killing machine,” says Dayan Jayatilleka, director of Colombo’s Premadasa Center, a think tank. “They’re a secular Taliban.”
Born into the fisherman’s caste, Prabhakaran grew up in the postcolonial years, when the country’s Buddhist Sinhalese majority started curbing the powers of the Hindu Tamils. The new government declared Sinhala the sole official language, effectively barring Tamils, who make up 12.5 percent of the population, from government. The government required Tamils to get better grades than Sinhalese to win university spots. Communal violence erupted.
To many impoverished Tamils in the northeast, Prabhakaran is a savior. The families of recruits get $40 a month and food rations. Young Tamils are sometimes forced to join, according to the Colombo-based University Teachers for Human Rights. “One day you will have to die,” recruiters told a group of youths recently, according to a report by the group. “If you die fighting, it will be a hero’s death. But if you die a natural death it will be a coward’s death.” Recruits watch action movies like “Rambo.”
Some of Prabhakaran’s bloodiest ideas seem to come from the movies. Tamil suicide bombers, called Black Tigers, wear explosive-packed jackets that Prabhakaran devised after seeing “Death Wish II.” (In the film, a woman blows herself up killing a world leader.) A female Tamil bomber killed former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, in revenge for India’s support for Colombo. Each fighter carries a cyanide vial to commit suicide if captured.
The Tigers’ terror reaches far beyond the battlefield. Three Jaffna mayors are among many politicians murdered in recent years. Two years ago, Tiger prison inmates stabbed Devananda, the former rebel, with spikes and bricks wrapped in cloth–blinding him in one eye. Whether the Tigers win Jaffna or not, there is more bloodshed to come.
