None can help Prabhakaran now -Karuna

"Neither God not man can help Prabhakaran now. He is a mental patient. He can never be reformed, although some people hope in vain that he will change.''

TMVP Leader Vinayagamoorthy Muralidaran alias Karuna Amman made this observation during an interview with the Derana television channel last week (Thursday, Jan. 25). The interview was conducted in Tamil and translated into Sinhala.

According to Karuna not one in the Eastern Province today supported the Tigers and soon they would be isolated in the North too, since people there are waiting to escape from Prabhakaran's clutches. LTTE is on the decline, he emphasized.

The TMVP leader said that within five years the LTTE had fallen from the much publicized Tamil people's sole representative status to the level of no representative of the Tamils. He stressed that the Tigers today had absolutely no right to represent Tamils.

The TMVP leader said that Ranil Wickremesinghe had a misplaced faith in Prabhakaran and tried to reach an understanding with him in the hope of securing the support of the Tamil people. However, said Karuna, Prabhakaran hated Wickremesinghe since the LTTE Chief believed that the UNP leader was planning to trap the Tigers in an international net. This perhaps was the reason why the Tamil people in the Wanni were not allowed to cast their vote, since Prabhakaran feared that Tamil votes would tilt the Presidential election results in Ranil's favour.

Karuna accused the Prabhakaran's Intelligence Chief Pottu Amman for engineering the horrifying atrocities that the LTTE committed during the past several decades. Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman derived a morbid pleasure from discussing the civilian massacres, according to Karuna, who has expressed his strong displeasure over such brutalities. But if he had persisted in his opposition to the crimes, he would have met the same tragic fate that Prabhakaran's one-time close associate `Mahattaya' met. The only alternative was to severe all ties with the Tiger Chief.

Asked whether he preferred federalism to a unitary system as a solution to the current problems, Karuna said that he could not care less whether the country was going to be federal or unitary as long as the socio-economic, health and educational and other needs of his people are adequately met. His primary concern was the development of the Eastern Province where the quality of life had suffered very much since the conflict began. The East was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious region and consequently the concept of a Tamil Eelam there was totally out of the question.

He assured that his combat units will be disbanded as soon as the Wanni Tigers are completely defeated. He further said that neither he nor the Sri Lanka Army needed child soldiers since both had sufficient military strength to meet the LTTE threat. He invited those who accuse him of abducting children for combat purposes to visit his camps. He had already clarified this matter to the relevant United Nations authorities.