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Encountering LTTE – near and far 

11 Apr 2021

By M.R. Narayan Swamy    “I am calling from the LTTE office in Chennai. Kittu Anna told us to speak to you,” the young male voice on the phone made contact with me while I stayed for a long period at Hotel Taprobane in Colombo at one time when the Indian military was deployed in Sri Lanka.  Kittu, the former LTTE Jaffna Commander, suggested my name? I wondered why. And how did they get my hotel details? I was curious.  The young man explained. AFP, for whom I worked then, had put out a picture of an LTTE leader, Dinesh, releasing an Indian soldier to the IPKF in Vavuniya. It was prominently displayed in the Indian media. Would AFP mail four copies of that photograph to them, please? They were ready to pay.  The LTTE caller, who gave his name as Kannan, said they got my details from EROS Leader V. Balakumar in Chennai.  After getting the go ahead from Kate Webb, the then AFP South Asia Bureau’s Deputy Chief, we mailed four copies to a Chennai address. The LTTE called again a few days later to convey their thanks for the photograph and to request four more copies.  Kate, a legendary journalist whose abduction by the Vietcong had led UPI to put out her obituary thinking she had been killed, was not happy. “But, what the hell,” she reacted. “Give it to them. But tell them we won’t give them any more photos or copies.”  I conveyed that to the LTTE in polite language. I added that since I was to fly to Chennai on my way to Delhi soon, would they pick up the photos from me at Hotel Connemara? No, we did not want money but I would accept LTTE literature to read.  Two young men from the LTTE office in Chennai met me at the hotel. They had two envelopes bulging with literature. It was a bizarre situation. The LTTE was fighting the Indian Army in Sri Lanka but ran an office in Chennai. On paper, the LTTE cadres in that office were under detention – but with the DMK in power in Tamil Nadu, this was a farce, as the visit to my hotel proved.  We made small talk. It was well past midnight but the two visitors showed no eagerness to leave. I was desperate to catch a few hours’ sleep before catching an early morning flight to Delhi. Finally, one of them spoke while slowly gliding his hand into his pant pocket. “Sir, these photographs... How much do we owe you?”  I reiterated AFP’s no-no to money. We charge money from subscribers. Because you send us press releases, this is a one-time gratis exchange. Once the ruling was firmly reiterated, the Tigers left.  Years down the lane, a Tamil Nadu police officer explained that what the LTTE offered was a hook. They were used to paying off people in Tamil Nadu – left, right and centre – and would have been happy if I had taken the money. Once you took favours, you came under their thumb.  Over the long years I covered the Sri Lanka story until the military crushed the LTTE in 2009, I encountered its leaders and cadres on many occasions, at times from afar and elsewhere from hand-shaking distance. Each meeting, however fleeting, taught me something about a group that ballooned from a rag-tag outfit to a formidable army, bleeding Sri Lanka.  For all the claims that the LTTE represented the Tamil aspirations, I always sensed a fear of the seemingly all-knowing group among Sri Lankan Tamils except those who were in awe of them. A Tamil man in his 40s spoke to me so softly at his house in Vavuniya town that I could barely hear him. He moved closer to me, looked back at a closed door, and then whispered: “You see, my cousin is visiting us. He is in the LTTE. He should not hear what I am telling you. Else I will face danger.”  Support for the LTTE was evident among Tamils who had suffered at the hands of security forces. Having brutally crushed all other Tamil voices, the Tigers could not be trifled with. After Eelam War II started in June 1990, I was walking through a patch of Batticaloa amid crowds fleeing fighting on the outskirts of the eastern city. A middle-aged man carrying a young but visibly ailing boy on his shoulders asked if I had medicines to curb fever. I gave him Disprin tablets. He beamed with joy. But the happiness on his face died the moment he saw a van packed with armed LTTE guerrillas coming the opposite way. Suddenly, he cut short his sentence and walked away. He did not want the perennially suspicious Tigers to quiz him about a stranger in their midst.  Although then LTTE Chief Velupillai Prabhakaran’s parents lived in Madurai in Tamil Nadu, I met the father at KK Nagar in Chennai, courtesy an Indian journalist. Initially reluctant to talk, Velupillai soon opened up. I was amazed when he asked: “All this writing is fine. But what are you doing for the Tamil cause?”  Very few know why the LTTE suddenly moved Prabhakaran’s parents out of Tamil Nadu. A Sri Lankan Tamil journalist whose ties to the LTTE was known, once told an Indian diplomat in Colombo that the Tigers were keeping a close watch on him and his family. The diplomat, who worked for RAW, responded without mincing words: “Kindly tell your masters in the LTTE that if anything were to happen to me or my family, Prabhakaran’s parents would be the first casualty.” Within a fortnight of this conversation, the LTTE Chief had his parents relocated from India.  Having always been based in New Delhi, I met Prabhakaran only twice – once in 1985 and in 2002. The first meeting took place at Hotel Diplomat in Delhi when he came with other Tamil leaders ahead of talks with the Sri Lankan Government in Bhutan. The LTTE Chief was minus his trademark moustache and was one of many players on the Tamil side – a script he would soon rewrite at the barrel of a gun.  By the time a horde of us journalists came face to face with him again, the man had grown too big. His April 2002 press conference at Kilinochchi was a media spectacle. The LTTE was paranoid about his security. In contrast to the ordinary pants and shirt he was in at Hotel Diplomat, Prabhakaran wore a safari suit at the presser as Anton Balasingham addressed him as the “President and Prime Minister” of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE Leader could not even have guessed that he had only seven more years to live.  It was in 1998 that the LTTE sought to give me a scoop – an advance copy of Prabhakaran’s annual November speech. A contact from London said I could put out stories based on it ahead of others. But our AFP Chief in Colombo, Amal Jayasinghe, made it clear that they were giving the speech to me only to slight him. That was a revelation. A scoop was fine but not at the cost of friendship and professional ethics. The LTTE contact was shocked when I gave a “no” to the scoop offer, saying the rules demanded that it should be given to AFP Colombo. That, of course, did not happen.  Once during a visit to Prabhakaran’s hometown Valvettithurai (VVT) during the IPKF deployment, I was amazed to see a group of three or four LTTE boys run towards the beach with what looked like a rocket launcher and some rifles. One of them turned back and smiled. A Tamil contact showing me around was embarrassed because he had claimed moments earlier that there was no LTTE presence there. As I came out of VVT, I met a group of Indian troops walking to the coastal town.  When AFP photographer R. Ravindran and I forayed into LTTE territory in Batticaloa during Eelam War II, we had to cross a Sri Lankan military post called Cobra Point. We were in a hired taxi whose Tamil driver acted dumb while in Sri Lankan Army territory but spoke virtually non-stop once we were in the LTTE zone. After driving for a while in what looked like no-man’s land, an unarmed LTTE teenager got into our car. When he learnt we were Indians, he became effusive. Further down the road, our taxi was halted by armed LTTE fighters, one of whom took the boy aside for a pep talk. After that, the boy clammed up, not even answering our mundane queries. Even the taxi driver suddenly went quiet.  I missed another scoop by not going to Batticaloa when the LTTE Eastern Wing broke away. Knowing that trouble was brewing in the Tigers, I was urged in Colombo to proceed to Batticaloa. But when I did not get anyone to accompany me, I dropped the idea. Much later, I realised that a Sri Lankan journalist I knew well, made it to Batticaloa and met rebel leader Karuna. He was probably the last journalist to meet him before Karuna went underground.  Even in Western countries, the LTTE kept the Tamil community on a tight leash. A contact in London promised to give some rare photographs of Prabhakaran. Those never came my way after the LTTE ordered the contact not to help me. The scene was no different in Toronto where a pro-LTTE man agreed to talk about the group’s history. But he stopped even taking my phone calls after being told by the LTTE to keep me at bay.  The LTTE always lived in the thought that it was a cut above the rest. It gave the group certain arrogance – and a ruthlessness to match it. It had no compunction in killing anyone it felt was a hindrance to its goal. Each time I visited Colombo, I would delete from my diary the names of someone or the other killed by the LTTE. After Karuna’s split, with the local Tamils’ loyalty in doubt, the LTTE became even more ruthless. A human rights activist in Batticaloa would lucidly explain how the Tigers controlled the population, how the young were forcibly snatched from families to fight, and how audiences in LTTE events often mechanically clapped – North Korea style – every time on cue from a guerrilla.  Under the LTTE shadow, some otherwise sensible Tamils became disdainful. A Tamil journalist met me at Colombo’s Holiday Inn in 2006 on his request. He had the temerity to ask: “Who is paying for your stay here?” I told him that I have stayed in virtually all five-star hotels in Colombo. Holiday Inn was not even in the same league. In any case, who was he to ask me this? Our breakfast meeting ended on a sour note.  It was in January 2008 that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the then Defence Secretary and now the President of Sri Lanka, told me over telephone how he planned to wipe out the LTTE. He sounded so confident that I did not believe him. This was the third scoop I lost. Believe it or not, starting from ousting the LTTE from Kilinochchi to its very end in May 2009, the events unfolded exactly the way he predicted.  Meeting two LTTE women fighters in Chennai after Prabhakaran’s death proved a tragic postscript to the blood-soaked saga. While one kept breaking down, the other moaned how the Tamils were now on their knees – after a quarter century of war. The two, having escaped to India, had become so numb after the end stages of the brutal fighting that they switched off their television if it showed any warfare anywhere. “We had something to look forward to when it all began in 1983,” one explained. “Now there is nothing.”    (The writer is a historian and journalist who reported from Sri Lanka for many years)


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