The Island Editorial

If wishes were Tigers ...

31 December 2016

 

UNP MP Vijayakala Maheswaran has stirred up a hornets’ nest by saying at a recent public meeting that if LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran had been alive he would have been fit to be the Prime Minister. If wishes were Tigers some politicians like Vijayakala would ride them!

Robert Knox famously said the Sinhala farmer was fit enough to be the king after mud was washed off him. Opinion is divided on what Knox really meant. This saying is popularly thought to be a glowing tribute he paid to the ancient farming community, but some historians argue that it was a snide remark Knox cleverly used to deride the king by contemptuously claiming that anyone, even a farmer, could replace the monarch. We don’t know whether UNP MP Maheswaran also sought to scorn the incumbent PM cum her party leader by claiming that even a school dropout turned terrorist could have done his job!

It may be recalled that the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa, when he was the Prime Minister in the JRJ government, sought to ridicule the then Finance Minister Ronnie de Mel, on whom he used to heap scorn at every turn by claiming that even a taxi driver could present a budget in Parliament. Some people, especially politicians, cast put-downs and ridicule their colleagues and superiors as if to the manner born. So, the UNP had better ask its MP Maheswaran whether she has sought to lionize the dead Tiger chief or to ridicule her political boss or to do both.

Vijayakala has come in for severe flak for crying up the dead terrorist leader. But, time was when Prabhakaran was treated like a Prime Minister to all intents and purposes. At a media briefing in the Vanni, the late LTTE spokesman Anton Balasingham, in answer to a query, declared that Prabhakaran was both President and Prime Minister in the areas under LTTE control at that time. The then UNP-led UNF government also treated Prabhakaran as if he had been the leader of a parallel government and many a western diplomat used to tug his forelock to the Tiger leader at their clandestine meetings in the Vanni jungles. The Norwegians audaciously addressed LTTE leaders respectfully as ‘your excellencies’ in public.

It is being claimed in some quarters that Prabhakaran, because of his heinous crimes, would never have been able to come out of the jungle even if he had succeeded in carving out a separate state. But, in reality, he had no such problem. President Chandrika Kumaratunga offered him the entire Northern Province for a period of ten years without elections! He never lacked international recognition either in spite of bans on his outfit in some countries. India used its military muscle to save him in 1987 while the Sri Lanka army was zeroing in on him. Western diplomats were falling over themselves to press the flesh with him in the Vanni. Former Indian Foreign Secretary, Shivshankar Menon, tells us in his book, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, that the US was planning to rescue Prabhakaran towards the final stages of the Vanni offensive. The UK and France rushed their foreign ministers David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner respectively all the way here in a bid to save him but in vain. Sweden also sought to send its foreign minister, but he was denied a visa.

Had Prabhakaran succeeded in establishing Eelam and handed over the Trincomalee harbour to a western power, he would have been not only recognised but also protected by the western bloc, which unflinchingly pampered homicidal maniacs such as Idi Amin, Bokassa and Papa Doc until those savages became too embarrassing for it to defend.

The TNA, whose leaders are now championing human rights, had no qualms about declaring Prabhakaran, who did not have representation even in a local government institution, the sole representative of the Tamils. Had the Norwegian crafted ceasefire (backed by the US, the UK and other EU states) between the UNP-led UNF government and the LTTE lasted a few more years it would have led to the division of this country the way the Machakos Protocol (with the US, the UK and Norway as observer states) facilitated the secession of South Sudan.

Anyone who commemorates dead terrorists and/or wishes Prabhakaran were alive as the Prime Minister has no moral right to protest against human rights violations such as violent suppression of dissent, political killings, high-profile assassinations, massacres, child abductions, extortion and forced labour.