For moderate Tamils, priority is to stay alive

Take the EPRLF’s Varadaraja Perumal, for instance. He is back here after a long self-imposed exile in India, but no one knows where. He lives in hiding and prefers to contact people rather than the other way round and ventures out occasionally in great secrecy.

Perumal came back to pursue a political career, but is hamstrung by the risk to his life. When the immediate priority is only to remain alive, it is just not the average politician’s life.

Similarly, DouglasDevananda, MP and leader of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party. He is just one of two Tamil leaders to have escaped an attempt by the LTTE on his life, not once or twice but three times. Once, LTTE gunmen broke into his office-cum-home in the Sri Lankan capital, but Devananda, a former militant himself, scaled the wall behind and fled. He was lucky to escape with just loss of vision in one eye in another attack. Now he hardly stirs out, except to go to Parliament or to keep very special appointments.His office-cum-home is a virtual military camp, bristling with weapons, and his visitors are led through labyrinthine corridors to a room that has no windows, where Devananda sits, fully armed and always with his back to the wall.

“We have neither a private nor a public life, and we have no routines,” said PLOTE leader and MP Dharmalingam Sidhathan, who always keeps the door and windows in sight while in a room. Like many of the others, he has nothing called a “family life”. His activities are undertakenat random. Changing vehicles and routes are standard operating procedures. Sidhathan faces the ultimate double-whammy: death threats from the LTTE and from rival leaders in his own ex-militant group. He has not visited Vavuniya, his constituency, in months, and gives out his frequently-changing telephone numbers and addresses to only a handful of trusted friends.

Not putting much faith in the abilities of the police security provided to parliamentarians, Sidhathan prefers to be protected by “boys” from PLOTE loyal to him. “Unlike police constables, these boys are battle-hardened and will be prepared to die protecting me,” Sidhathan said.

An Indian journalist, M.R. Narayan Swamy, related how while travelling with the MP once, an aide instructed the driver to make a sudden right turn, explaining to Sidhathan that he had seen a motorcyclist waiting down the road and it was better not to take a chance.

Having watched the LTTE from up close, Tamils in public life, especially of the former militantgroups, know that Velupillai Prabhakaran has a long memory and that they are living on borrowed time.

Three years ago, a young woman approached Suresh Premachandran of the EPRLF, seeking his help to go abroad. Premachandran’s instinct told him she was a LTTE intelligence operative and he immediately shifted out of his office. “I am tired and frustrated, especially considering that the Tamil people never open their mouths against the LTTE’s atrocities. Is it worth taking all the risk for a community like ours that still gives room to a blood-thirsty organisation like the LTTE?” he asked.

Such a tight grip does the LTTE have on the minds of the minority community that even after everything, many influential Tamils of Sri Lanka, especially of the media, sing praises to the group while spitting contempt on the others that have joined the mainstream.

Members of the University Teachers’ Human Rights of Jaffna (UTHRJ), the only group of Tamil activists strongly critical of the LTTE, also live in fear oftheir lives after one of them, Rajini Thiranagama, was killed.

This group of academics moved out of Jaffna in 1990 and now live in the Sri Lankan capital, taking extreme precautions to stay alive. With their vast network of contacts in the north, they are still able to put together a regular report on the LTTE’s activities. But some others, fatigued and unable to sustain the constant dodging and ducking, and who do not have the arms and the infrastructure of the former militant groups to protect themselves, have simply caved in.

Last month, the LTTE warned three TULF MPs in Batticaloa to withdraw from public life. Shaken, the MPs decided that discretion was the better part of valour and went abroad. They returned last week, just as tragedy struck their party.