Interview with Siddharthan Dharmalingham,
Co-founder of LTTE, Current leader of PLOT
Thursday April 03, 2003
Note: While explaining the book to Siddharthan, he pointed out to me a famous quote by Ronald Reagan: “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” It wasn’t an official part of the interview, but it seemed germaine.
MSM: What’s a Tamil? If you guys are fighting for Tamil Independence, and I can’t even tell how they’re different from a Sinhalese… please spell it out for me.
SD: The Tamils are mixed in among the Indians, mixed in among the Sinhalese and mixed in with other nations as well. But the line is political. The line around Tamils is political. Language, yes, the influence is there but ..
[pauses for 4 or 5 seconds]
… the whole struggle is unwarranted and unnecessary. Perhaps it is just because I am growing old that I see this. Personally I think it is all unnecessary. If you ask a Tamil he will tell you that a Sinhalese man is the better man. If you ask a Sinhalese man he will tell you that a Tamil is the better man. So it’s all political.
The culture of the Tamils is different from the Sinhalese by language, behavior mannerism, and, I guess, the curries are different. Yes, the curries are definitely different. [laughs]
The difference between the Sinhalese and Muslims is much bigger. We would kidnap Sinhalese and people would say, "Oh he was kidnapped." but when we would kidnap a Muslim man, people would say, "a MUSLIM was kidnapped." and everyone would get really upset.
So the defense minister started recruiting Muslim boys in 1985.
MSM: How did you get involved in this?
SD: I became involved because of my father. He was with the federal party, which was the fore-runner to the struggle for the Tamils. Because of the Sinhala-only act we started defacing license plates, spraying out the SRI. At that time the new president wanted to implement her husband's policy.
In 1961 I joined my father and others, on several occasions in front of the "Kachere" [federal courthouse] and following Gandhi's lead we would have peaceful sitting demonstrations. We would block the gates and sit and at that time it was stopped when the police started using batons, just as the British had. They inherited the majority mentality. These were just chauvinistic feelings.
They did this simply because they thought it would be a shortcut to power. Most people see violence as a shortcut to power.
The Buddhist clergy had a great say in affairs. Bikhus have a considerable influence over people so they [we?] would not antagonize the monks, but the monks did start some of the problems. The monks wanted the power among the Sinhalese. Monks have always wanted to wield power but these monks wanted Buddhism as a Sinhala power. They believed it was different here in Sri Lanka. But Buddhism belongs to the whole world. Let’s face it there is not a lot of difference between Japanese Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, Indian Buddhism. I can’t see a lot of difference. But if you go to a Buddhist temple today you see a lot of Hinduism mixed in with the Buddhism. There is even the Roman Catholic influences. It’s lots of little differences. None of them matter.
Consider my name, Siddharthan. I am Hindu, and Siddhartha [Gateman] was a Hindu. But because of the wrongdoings of the Buddhist monks there was some discord started among the Tamils ..in any Buddhist temple you go you can see Tamil ghosts there.
Anyway, I was there with my father and after 1970 and many of us young people felt the discrimination and they saw the inequality in education possibilities. You couldn’t enter the university if you were Tamil, for example.
There was a bikhu that was living at my father’s house who was teaching us all Sinhalese. When the government said that you must now speak Sinhalese, in 1956 when all the problems started, the bikhu had to leave and we knew there was some problem. The Tamil-Sinhalese relations were good, and even after the riots there was no real problem.
After 1970, at the beginning, it was individual killings, especially of collaborators and just individual officers. It was the people that were killing other civilians.
The first man I would identify as a Tamil militant was Sivakumaran. The ASP was singled out for killing 9 Tamils at the conference
[note/
five friends met during the fall of 1969 at a college professor’s house in Velvettiturai, the coastal village that Prabhakaran was born in. Prabhakaran was one of these five as were a couple of registered criminal, a radio operator, and one man in particular named Ponnudarai Sivakumaran. These five founded what is regarded as the first Tamil Militant movement which they dubbed the TLO - Tamil Liberation Organization. They made no bones about it and went straight into militant philosophies.
Sivakumaran was known as, in American terms, a scholar and an athlete. He was respected and loved by many people and was infamous for his late-night discussions at Jaffna university, espousing the necessity of armed resistance. He was more than a talkative student.
In September of 1970 Sivakumaran made assassination attempts on a Sri Lankan Deputy Minister, Somaweera Chandrasiri. He tried to kill Alfred Driappah, Jaffna’s Mayor, a few months later. By 1974 he had a warrant out for his arrest and a group of followers that were arranged much as the TLO had been arranged. But Sivakumaran knew about the methods of police torture in those days and, at the tender age of 17, decided that death was preferable to capture.
One soummer evening in 1975 he was busily robbing a bank when several police trapped him. He took a necklace out, removed a cyanide pill, and swallowed it, dying on the spot.
This was the birth of Tamil Cyanide Culture. The LTTE’s troops now all wear cyanide pills and many - perhaps hundreds - have died through this choice.
/end note]
In 1974 the TNT (Tamil New Tigers) was headed by Chetti Thanabalasingham, not Prabhakaran. I'm going to tell you the truth. I don’t think Prabhakaran was a Tamil nationalist. He was a criminal. At the beginning of the Tamil problem, mainly what happened was that the militants got used.
People like him were used by the politically motivated people. You understand? He was used. He was a criminal. For him it was an adventure. I think Sivakumaran was not a nationalist but a Tamil chauvinist.
Now, remember; Prabhakaran is committed to a separate state. He is clearly committed and his dedication is unquestionable. His first criminal action was the assassnation of Durriappah, the mayor of Jaffna.
In 1977, TNT was renamed as LTTE and our late leader Momagessaran was elected as its chairman. There were only 15 or 20 people. In 1980 there was a split between Momagessaran and Prabhakaran. There was no ideological difference. He was unhappy that he was not in the limelight at that time. So Prabhakaran said that Momagessaran was having a relationship with another LTTE member.
Prabhakaran was very unhappy at that time. At the same time Prabhakaran said that no member of LTTE can break the code of conduct. To break the code is unacceptable. Now Prabhakaran is married and he has children, but at the time he told me he was very upset.
In 1981 or 82 there were only 4 or 5 groups: PLOT, LTTE, EPRLF, EROS, and TELO. All in all it was only about 100 or 120 people. Nobody knew it, but in Tamil Nadu, after 1983, things started to change. In 1984 there were about 600 in LTTE. He [Prabhakaran] would train them and then send them back. His success was his slow, steady approach. And his mystery. Tamils love a good mystery and Prabhakaran was just that.
Now one year later there were 4,500.
Nobody knows this, but Prabhakaran left the LTTE - Kuddamani [unintelligible] takes the LTTE back and that's when the killing started. He started eliminating members of other groups. You don’t know what its like there. Today all you hear about are child conscriptions, extortion, but LTTE doesn’t care. They know how to do one thing well.
Prabhakaran has a very good horoscope. He's protected. Always protected by someone else. He is always being given room to escape. People support them because they are powerful, but Prabhakaran also has a good horoscope. Take this thing with the bombing of the boat, just this week. The government has said "oh it must not be LTTE because LTTE denied they did it."
In the 1980s we were the biggest and so India supported us with materiel. All organizations were given small arms, rocket launchers, handguns, mortars, but only about 100-200 rounds.
MSM: When you ran out of bullets, did you have to make your own ammo?
SD: We didn’t make our own ammunition, no, but we were making grenades and mines and things like that. Small explosives. But they only gave us a little ammunition. They wanted to ensure we had limited power.
Tamil Nadu had a lot of weapons from all of us. They collected all the weapons and I later found out they gave them all to LTTE. There were strange things going on. India said that it had paid us some money, and one officer even showed me a receipt, but I know the money never got to our pockets. I think it just went to LTTE and someone had to cover the books.
Corruption lives in the system. Politicians become corrupt because they're the only ones that can get access to the money. And if the top level is corrupt then everyone is corrupt. And think of this: Prabhakaran and most of LTTE came from a smuggling background. Everyone in Prabhakaran's hometown are seamen and smugglers.*
If you have a few rupees and you go to India you can buy whatever you want. And with a little secrecy you know who to buy, and who to eliminate. Prabhakaran came from a poor town and while caste has something to do with it, Prabhakaran is a born survivor. He is a born survivor.
MSM: Your father was assassinated, correct?
SD: Yes, at the time there were four ex-MPs, only, working in Jaffna he was one of them. Arasinghaman was killed and even though they were not doing much their mere presence in Jaffna was a symbol.
I think this killing, I don’t know, was done by LTTE. By TELO. They were not against him personally. He was very close to Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran used to visit our home to eat and he got friendly with my father. So he had a good record.
MSM: Was the killing of your father a kind of symbol?
SD: Definitely..definitely. It was a message.
These boys came in a car with Alasanginhaman and they asked for my father. So my mother said "come in and have a seat." He didn’t talk or anything, he just sat there so she sent a cousin of mine to get my father. He had gone out up the street. My father came on a bicycle down the road toward my house and they pushed him off the bicycle, and threw him in the car. His body was found in Thavili. This was the first killing of a moderate leader.
They weren’t sending a message to us, to my family. They wanted the message to the TULF to be "TULF presence in the region will not be tolerated."
Prabhakaran is a fascist. His message, like George Bush, is "either you are with me or you are my enemy." As far as Prabhakaran is concerned, accepting anybody else's [view] is a hindrance to his cause. This is why so many Tamils have been eliminated. In fact there is not a single Tamil leader that has been killed by Sinhala forces!
[laughs]
He [Prabhakaran] got this idea from the TULF and the Tamil community itself. The TULF said they were the only representatives of the Tamil people. Prabhakaran got his elimination methods from the Tamil TULF. They used to say "Traitors must not die natural deaths." They initiated all the militants.
These techniques have all been inherited. But the threat of LTTE is still there. LTTE used to go to the families and say to the wives of opposing militants things like "Do you want to be wearing a white sari?"*
*[the white sari is a symbol of widowhood]
In one year there were 20 informants killed. That's only the informants, remember. Prabhakaran can’t put his gun down. He has no other choice because India will never allow him to own the Northeast.
MSM: Can you tell me a little about the interaction between Tamil militants and the PLO? I understand there were training links?
SD: In 1977 Ratnasabapathy, through EROS, trained under the Fatah. Patmanaba Mahauthaman, who was with the EPRF, but had worked with the PFLP helped us. After 1982 the PFLP was ready to accept any number of cadres, any number of people. So we started sending people over.
I visited the PFLP in Damascus several times. It generally worked like this:
We only paid passage to Damascus. What happened was that we bought a ticket from Delhi to Damascus, Damascus to London. We would arrive in Damascus for the transfer, but instead of going on to London we walked over the reception area and left. We could buy a visa for $4 or $5 there, and then the PFLP would meet us and take us to their camp in Lebanon. Back then it was easy and we worked in small, very secret groups.
Once our men got to the camp they were trained in a variety of military skills as draftees. Explosives, intelligence, munitions, battlefront skills, etc.. This was because the war was going on at the time and so they were put on the front lines.
When they came back these men had a great feeling of power. Maybe they even felt superior. They became natural leaders. But we selected these boys before they left, and it was an honor to go, so maybe they had these skills before they left, too. I don’t know.
MSM: What’s the difference between a freedom fighter, a terrorist, and a politician? Consider JVP - they were butchering people in the south for years and then made a smooth slide into politics. How can these things be resolved?
SD: JVP is in a class struggle which makes it difficult to capture power. They are being driven by pride and emotion. That is the main reason. Second is because all other means have been exhausted. Militancy requires militancy. There is no other answer.
Militant means have to be resorted to when there is no other way to get what you want. The only way to move the elephant is to prick it with something small. You cant move it. You have to make it feel something.
Terrorism is simply targeting innocent people. It is targeting people that have nothing to do with your struggle. This is regardless of whether it is by an individual a group or a state. Everything else fails. You cannot convince them to join you and you cannot convince the government to change. We decided that Sinhalese people had to understand our suffering. When we bring the war to Colombo we are hitting economic targets. We are weakening the economy and making it feel our struggle. And we gain the attention we need.
September 11 didn't have a great impact here. People believe that Prabhakaran affected the ceasefire because he was afraid of the United States [Terrorist List]. September 11 just created an increased interest in these sorts of things among the US administration. In Sri Lanka also, but more in the US. But India is sensitive to the ceasefire now, and they'll try to scuttle the peace talks as a result.
America has a foothold in Sri Lanka, and by influencing LTTE they can influence the Tamils and work towards destabilizing India. The argument has already been resolved.
The US is not hated here, but politically active people are having their problems with Iraq right now. This is an unnecessary war. It will affect us very badly. I don’t know who is right and whether Saddam has these weapons or not, but what does it have to do with the US? There are dictators everywhere. And many of them have big weapons. Perhaps Bush should look at the United States and start with the problems there. Washington seems to have a dictator with big weapons.
But maybe America will bring peace to Sri Lanka, too. Its hard to say.
It’s clear that the ruling party, here, will not.