by Dayan Jayatilleka

"What’s going on?

What’s going on?

What’s going on? "

- Marvin Gaye

After decades of service to the cause, Dr. Balasingham has received a promotion — and far be it from me to say that it is not well deserved. For many years he was Velupillai Prabhakaran’s make-up artist. In the early 1980s, he made-up the LTTE to look like a Marxist-oriented national liberation movement. Prabhakaran told him to knock it off after a while, when it was dysfunctional. But he was so good that even the stiff-necked ideologues of the Marxist-Leninist EPRLF wanted to stay within the ENLF (the united front formation dominated by the LTTE and minus the left-wing PLOTE), in order to strengthen "socialist elements like Anton Balasingham"! The EPRLF stayed on, through the Anuradhapura massacre of Sinhala civilians and despite the appeals of its besieged Sinhala revolutionary allies, until Prabhakaran dissolved the partnership murderously.

For fifteen years, from Thimpu, Balasingham was doing yet another make-up job, far more pertinent to his Oscar-winning performance at Sattahip the other day : he was drawing a distinction between ‘separatism’ and ‘secession’; a distinction that was so specious that it had not even a semantic basis. Separatism somehow sounded negative, therefore Balasingham took pains to say that ‘ we are not a separatist movement’, much as he is doing now.

In Thailand though, Dr. Balasingham graduated from make-up man to conjurer, or, to put it rather crudely, con-artist. And he made a good job of it. So this is what the great con-man Emil Savundara — Dr. Emil Saundranayagam — would have sounded like to the fire insurance policyholders that he diddled. Anton Balasingham is the Emil Savundara of Eelam.

So let’s not be damn silly about this shall we? It’s embarrassing. No, the LTTE has not renounced Thamil Eelam. No, Dr. Anton Balasingham did not say that the LTTE has renounced Thamil Eelam. And what he did say is full of contradictions. What is more important, what he said is totally at variance with what the LTTE is doing in the North-East. It’s a good old fashioned conjurer’s trick. Smoke and mirrors.

Balasingham says the LTTE does not operate with the concept of a separate state. He says they operate with different concepts and categories. The LTTE operates with the concept and category of a Tamil homeland and the Right of self-determination. Yeah, right. The LTTE did not operate with the category of ‘murder’ while they assassinated Amirthalingam, Premadasa, Rajiv Gandhi and Neelan Tiruchelvam — to name just four. They operated with the category of ‘national liberation’. The LTTE did not operate with the category of ‘terrorism’. It operated with the category of ‘armed struggle’, when it blew up the Central Bank building, killing many employees and blinding others, blew up pedestrians in Pettah and Maradana, hacked to death Buddhist monks in Arantalawa and bus-passengers in Habarana.

One concept and category that the LTTE does operate with - and is fully justified in doing so — is that of the ‘Sinhala sucker’, one of who is born every minute.

If the LTTE is for regional autonomy and self-government and not for a separate state of Thamileelam, it would have accepted the Indo-Lanka Accord and the Interim administration of October 1987. Or it would have sustained the dŽtente with Premadasa. Or discussed Chandrika’s ‘union of regions’ quasi-federal draft.

But has there been a change of heart on the part of Prabhakaran, a Pauline paradigm shift, post-9/11? If one wants to know whether the LTTE has abandoned the notion of Thamil Eelam as a separate state, one only has to travel to the north-east or check out the pictorial evidence coming in from there. The map of Thamileelam is up there for all to see, on street-corners and highways. And these aren’t faded old maps, they are graphics that are put up every day. If some fellow-traveller wants us to believe that Thamileelam denotes but an autonomous northern and eastern province, one only has to note that the area denoted , aptly enough, in blood-red, far exceeds those two provinces.

Nor is the evidence pure art or a nostalgic ‘blast from the past’. On the ground, the institutions proliferate; the Thamil Eelam courts, where the judges sit with portraits of a camouflage-clad Prabhakaran behind them, and practise ‘traditional Thamil law’, as an interviewee told the BBC’s Frances Harrison. There is the Thamil Eelam Police force, an armed militia, with its own IGP, who takes the salute at passing out parades with the huge Thamileelam map looming behind him (and in front of us). Frances Harrison’s own narrative for BBC’s Asia Today special segments accompanying the Thai talks, used the phrases ‘would-be state’ ‘parallel administration’, and ‘all the trappings of nationhood’, while the newscaster herself used the term ‘separate administration’ in her introductory remarks.

There is a separate Army and Navy, a separate (armed) law enforcement apparatus, a separate legal system, even a separate transport board. The Americans say, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. As with ducks, so with (separate) states.

The pedagogical/propaganda efforts undertaken everyday in the North-East, indoctrinate the masses, especially and most insidiously the school-children, in the glorious destiny of an independent Thamileelam, and uses as the favourite teaching tool, the videos of Tiger assaults on army camps and Katunayake airport; snuff-videos which make the Al Quaeda training videos look like a Walt Disney production. Our American friends must remember that these Tiger videos are distributed and shown all over the world, and the LTTE’s non-Islamic character is as irrelevant to any terrorist viewer/learner, as the religious affiliations of one scientist would be to another when studying , absorbing and being inspired by the other’s work!

So do we believe Anton Balasingham — who was even dressed for the press conference as a used car salesman — or the evidence of our own eyes? And do we believe Anton Balasingham or Velupillai Prabhakaran, who warmly and unhesitatingly re-affirmed to Nirupama Subramanian at the Kilinochchi press conference that his famous statement that he should be executed by his followers if he deviates from the goal of Thamileelam, still stands. Anita Pratap says - and she should know shouldn’t she? — that an independent Thamileelam is a religion to Prabhakaran. About such sacred things, the Sun God doesn’t lie.

What the Tigers are striving for in Thailand is very clear: to create the objective and subjective conditions i.e. gain international legitimacy (Balasingham used the very phrase repeatedly at the press conference), space, time and resources (money, lots of money — including that which eventual Western deproscription will enable it to amass), for the transition to Thamileelam. This includes the purchase of the latest weapons.

India may find itself in a pincer, a Tamil Sparta on its southern doorstep, armed with a stockpile of ‘suitcase bombs’ bought or assembled from materials from the former Soviet Union. The Tigers have the network, the (Diasporic) scientific-technical expertise and the ruthlessness needed for aquisition/assembly. ‘Weapons of mass destruction’, anyone?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. The UNF administration is hardly likely to catch-up with the world record-breaking character of its partner in peace, Mr. Prabhakaran’s Tamil Tigers, but in its own quiet way, it isn’t doing too badly. Nowhere in the world has a government indicted its own Army commander and top-brass, (and not on human rights offences) while it legalises (‘unilaterally de-proscribed’ were the PM’s words in his UN General Assembly address) a terrorist organisation which murdered its own President and leaders.

But this precisely what Mr. Wickremesinghe did within 48hrs, and he’s going for the hat-trick with the move against a nationally-elected Executive President. The Sri Lankan state is cannibalising itself.

I’m not sure about the Nobel Peace Prize, but if there is any fairness in this world there are some elected Sinhala politicians who should be on Mr. Prabhakaran’s Great Heroes Day (Nov. 26th) or Black Tiger Day (July 5th) Honours list, because they have done far more than any of his suicide-bombers or Maha Veeras, to roll back the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. They are suicide-bombing Sri Lanka itself.