Prabhakaran’s death squads yesterday blasted a
busload of civilians at Kebilithigollewa, killing over 60 of
them including 15 children and two Buddhist monks. Besides the
LTTE’s desperate efforts to provoke a backlash in the South to
regain sympathy overseas, the dastardly blast was its reaction
to the EU ban. Remember it vowed to unleash hell if the EU
didn’t change its mind. The EU refused to be cowed and the LTTE
is carrying out its threat. All indications are that it will
step up terror attacks on soft targets like the peasants who
perished on Thursday, in time to come.
How could those criminals bring themselves to
target a bus packed to the gunwales with poor villagers who
posed no threat to anyone? Is this Prabhakaran’s liberation? The
LTTE leaders have laid bare their true faces yet another time.
It was only the other day that Prabhakran reportedly celebrated
his daughter’s birthday on a grand scale. Before going to Geneva
in April, Tamilchelvam was seen cuddling his little son. But
yesterday the same ‘fathers’ ordered a mine attack on civilians
including children. Last month, in Gomrankadawala, they got six
civilians massacred together with two children; in Batticaloa,
they ordered the killing of a twelve-year-old boy who had
escaped from an LTTE camp, where abducted children are trained
as combatants. Two weeks ago, Prabharakaran’s cadres massacred
twelve workers at Welikande. Those crimes are the latest in a
series of over 200 massacres committed at Prabhakaran’s behest.
That the LTTE commits such heinous crimes should
come as no surprise to anyone. Killing is its raison d’etre:
It exists to kill and kills to exist. What is puzzling is how it
has become ‘more equal’ than other terror outfits in the world
and is in a position to dish out so much of humble pie to the
all powerful international community. The US-led forces pursued
and killed an Al Queda leader in Iraq last week and Taliban
terrorists are running for their dear lives in Afghanistan.
Besides, the deposed President of Iraq Saddam Hussein is facing
a trial over a massacre. Recently, the former Yugoslavian leader
Milosovic, who was charged with massacres, died in his cell in
the Hague. Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) chief Joseph Konny has
caved in under international pressure vis-`E0-vis the
arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC)
on him and three other leaders. He is willing to lay down arms
and negotiate a settlement with the Ugandan government! But the
LTTE is still going great guns. Last week its leaders had high
level talks with Norwegian politicians in Oslo, having turned
their backs on the Sri Lankan delegation. They went to
Switzerland as if to mock the neighbouring EU, where it stands
banned. The world powers are of the considered opinion that the
LTTE is not the sole representatives of Tamils, whose cause it
has hijacked. But they insist that the Sri Lanka government
negotiate with it. We simply cannot understand their logic!
One may argue what’s there to be negotiated with
such brutes, who are massacring innocent men, women and
children. If the feat of weaning the megalomaniac Prabhakaran
away from terror is attainable, then we can turn vampires into
vegans with ease! Talks with an outfit led by such a
terror-worshipping leader, we are afraid, don’t have a
snowball’s chance in hell. How many more busloads of children,
men and women should be blasted: how many more children should
be abducted and how many more political leaders should be
assassinated before the world stops paying lip service to
battling terrorism and helps Sri Lanka remove the scourge of
terror once and for all?
Meanwhile, BBC has done it again! It reports the
Kebilithigollewa incident and says, "The Tamil Tigers have
denied and condemned the attack." Well and good! BBC should
report the LTTE version, too. But the ‘spin’ is in the tail: BBC
adds in the next paragraph, "The ancient city of Anuradhapura
suffered an attack allegedly (sic) by the Tamil Tigers in May
1985, in which 250 men, women and children were gunned down`85.
The Tigers never denied responsibility for the attack."
(Emphasis added). The implication is that the LTTE doesn’t deny
attacks which it is responsible for such as the Anuradhapura
massacre; the attacks that it denies shouldn’t be attributed to
it and, therefore, yesterday’s blast shouldn’t be blamed on the
LTTE. Pro-LTTE propaganda at its best!
Finally, we have serious doubts about
Prabhakaran’s and his confederates’ proclaimed gender: we don’t
consider them men—we mean it! For, no men worth that name will
ever harm children, women or unarmed men. Any gender-confused
bloke can hide behind a bush and detonate a claymore mine from a
safe distance when a bus passes by or descend on a sleeping
village in the dead of night. If a collective of such criminal
elements were to be called a liberation outfit, then by the same
token all homicidal gender-benders would be liberators, too.
Shame on you, Prabhakaran!
