Spring 2002

A strange thing happened as we were putting the final touches on this story in the editing room. For the first time in 12 years, Velupillai Prabharakan, the reclusive leader of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), emerged from the jungle to meet the international press.

Depending on whom you ask, Prabharakan is either a disciplined and visionary revolutionary for Tamil independence, or a cult leader. He and about six thousand of his cadres wear cyanide around their neck in case of capture. The military accomplishment that he is most proud of is the perfection of the "live" weapon: the suicide bomber. Over the last 20 years, Prabharakan has trained and dispatched hundreds of the suicide bombers he calls "Black Tigers."

But Prabharakan was not at the press conference to brag about live weapons. He was there to talk about the prospects for the Norwegian-mediated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. And he was there to make his case for the legalization of the Tigers within Sri Lankan society, so they can enter the political process.

The most chilling part of Prabharakan's press conference occurred when he was queried about the suicide killer he dispatched to assassinate India's Rajiv Ghandi, the former leader of the world's largest democracy, in 1991. Ghandi's murder was revenge for his role in sending Indian peacekeepers to try and quell the violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s.

At the time of his assassination, Ghandi, who once was considered an elitist, was undergoing a transformation. He had sworn off bodyguards and had reinvented himself as a man of the people. It may have been just slick campaigning, but in the BBC footage shot the day before he died, he seemed to exude a genuine sense of joy in being swamped by the Indian masses.

Prabharakan has never publicly acknowledged ordering Ghandi's murder, and the Indian press gathered at his news conference, surly after being strip-searched and kept waiting for 12 hours, pressed him with questions about the killing.

"You are raising an issue that has happened 10 years ago; let's not dig up the past," Prabharakan told one reporter.

Imagine Sirhan Sirhan trying to make that case about his 1968 assassination of Bobby Kennedy. "So what if I murdered a presidential candidate and altered the course of U.S. history, that was years ago."

But Sirhan was a lone gunman. Prabharakan has thousands of followers and an army of Black Tigers at his back. Nevertheless, while negotiating with the Tigers may be distasteful, many people in Sri Lanka feel it is the only way out of a 20-year-long civil war.

By way of contrast, I can't help but think about the day I spent with Sithy Tiruchelvam, the widow of the Tamil human rights leader Neelan Tiruchelvam.

Rather than suicide bombers, Tiruchelvam favored a constitutional solution to Sri Lanka's ethnic divide. Those beliefs were a threat to Prabharakan's jungle dreams of a separate Tamil state. In 1999, he dispatched one of his live weapons to eliminate Tiruchelvam.

On the day I spent with Sithy, a human rights lawyer herself, she took me to the very corner where her husband met his violent end. But she didn't talk about Prabharakan, the man who ordered her husband's killing. Dressed in a lovely sari, she laughed about her husband's weathered attire and poor fashion sense. "He had only two pairs of shoes, and the second had to be forced on him."

When the interview was over, Sithy bit her lower lip and said, "Thank you so much for coming," in the definitive way that I knew meant there would be no afternoon tea. My visit was over. Earlier in the day, she had privately told me how her husband's murder had inflicted shrapnel-like psychological wounds on her entire family. The camera off, I could see that she was overcome by darker thoughts.

Months later, 9,000 miles from Colombo and writing from the comfort of a San Francisco cafe, I'm wary of being sanctimonious when it comes to discussion of making peace with the Tamil Tigers. As Rwandans can tell you, civil wars, and their subsequent peace processes, are messy affairs.

As nasty as the Tamil Tigers have been, the majority-supported Sinhalese Buddhist government in Sri Lanka hasn't exactly lived up to the peaceful image of Buddhism either. Anyone who has worked the human rights beat in Sri Lanka will tell you that the government has been behind numerous massacres and disappearances.

But even in a less than ideal world, one would think that the price for committing crimes such as recruiting thousands of child soldiers, dispatching hundreds of suicide bombers, and killing the likes of Rajiv Ghandi and Tiruchelvam would be a jail cell for Prabharakan, perhaps next to Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague.

Instead, as it stands now, Prabharakan may wind up being president of some kind of Tamil state. If this story casts a skeptical light on that prospect, it's probably warranted.

As bleak as the political landscape can appear in Sri Lanka, it's certainly not a place without hope. With a melange of ancient and rich cultures and an astounding physical beauty, Sri Lanka at times feels like an island paradise.

I met some remarkable, gutsy people in Sri Lanka, clinging to ideals of democracy and ethnic tolerance. I hope they can hold some sway in the coming negotiations, so that a troubled island can start living up to its scenic beauty.

For updates detailing recent political developments in Sri Lanka, visit our links section.

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