The Prabhakaran Saga: The Rise and Fall of an Eelam Warrior by S Murari

Author:S Murari [Murari, S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788132116783
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2012-06-12T18:30:00+00:00

Once the Mullaitivu operation got under way, the passage to the south through Thandikulam remained effectively closed. Patients injured by army shelling whom the Red Cross attempted to take to Vavuniya were stopped by the army. Several such patients were later taken to Vavuniya by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Medicine Sans Frontier through the Madu road. Military spokesmen, however, claimed that they ‘believed that the LTTE had closed the border crossing’, adding that 120 food trucks were waiting to move to the north. This response was after the LTTE had claimed that the Thandikulam barrier had been closed by the army and all shipments of food had been stopped for two weeks.

These minute details of the ground situation in the aftermath of the Mullaitivu operation are culled out from a UTHR report. However, a larger picture emerges from Minister of State for Defence Aniruddha Ratwatte’s statement made in Parliament in August that the army, after consolidating its position in the Jaffna peninsula by May, had planned to push the Tigers deeper into the jungles by mounting a major offensive in Killinochi with reinforcements from Elephant Pass, Pooneryn and Mullaitivu. The Tigers blunted the edge of the campaign by overrunning the Mullaitivu camp.

What the minister overlooked was the fact that the Tigers, after putting up stiff resistance in the Jaffna battle, retreated in strength to the Vanni mainland by December 1995. The Mullaitivu camp was isolated and in a Tiger-dominated area. But since the brigade headquarters had 1,400 soldiers, the minister reckoned that the Tigers would need twice that number of fighters to mount a conventional attack and they would not be able to mobilize such a large number of fighters, more so after the Jaffna debacle. This assessment proved to be a costly blunder.

Colombo-based former Tamil militant groups were aware of the Tiger plan to overrun Mullaitivu. In fact, Thinamurasu, a mouthpiece of EPDP had, while reporting on an LTTE conclave, quoted Prabhakaran as having vetoed a guerilla attack and opted for a spectacular strike, saying ‘I don’t mind even if it means losing 1,000 boys’. In fact, operatives of the RAW based in Chennai (then Madras) were aware of the impending operation and rumours had it that the EPDP even alerted the military. Yet the camp was left defenceless and its commander was in Colombo when the Tigers launched the lightning strike.

Retired Air Vice Marshal Harry Goonatilake commented that the operation to capture Killinochi was launched within a fortnight of the fall of the Mullaitivu camp mainly to save the face of the government.

But Ratwatte had a grandiose plan of capturing Killinochi and then linking Jaffna with Vavuniya up north, thus freeing the entire north from LTTE control. He reckoned that just as the people of Jaffna returned once the battle ended, though in favour of the army, the displaced people of the Vanni region too would go back after the guns fell silent. It did not happen until the war was finally won by the armed forces in May 2009.

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