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Leader of Sri Lanka’s rebel Tamil Tigers, Vellupillai Prabhakaran was killed by the country’s special forces today May 18. According to the reports citing an unnamed Sri Lanka defence official, Velupillai Prabhakaran was shot dead on Monday while trying to flee in an ambulance. Prabhakaran, born in 1954, founded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, in 1970 in an aim to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka for the ethnic Tamil minority. Vellupillai Prabhakaran started a bloody civil war which claimed more than 70,000 person’s life against the Sri Lanka government since 1983. How did Prabhakaran’s once fearsome Tamil Tigers fall? Excerpts from Globe & Mail:

But the Tigers themselves are also victims of a changing world. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami struck the Tamil heartland hard, killing tens of thousands of people, a great many of them children who were being raised in orphanages to serve in the LTTE’s forces. It also destroyed the entire fleet of the Sea Tigers, the LTTE’s once-formidable navy. The Tigers once had support in India and other countries, but this dissolved fast in the 1990s after LTTE squads assassinated Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa. Tamil-speaking Muslims, once a core community in the LTTE-controlled east, broke with the separatist movement and became targets of Tiger attacks, further alienating potential supporters.

A top LTTE commander, Colonel Karuna, defected in 2004, taking a sizable part of the Tiger military command with him. His faction, supportive of the Sri Lankan government, helped turn the country’s south-eastern coast into a largely government-loyal region.

In his 2005 election campaign, Mr. Rajapaksa put aside years of delicate peace negotiations, many of them negotiated by Canadians (Bob Rae, the current Liberal foreign-affairs critic, had been a negotiator), ended efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to offer the Tamils a Quebec-style semi-autonomous status, and vowed in his election campaign to put an end to the Tiger problem forever.

He soon ended the ceasefire that had allowed the island’s economy to return to a tentative normality in the first half of this decade. With a tsunami-weakened LTTE and a government bolstered by international aid, a total war was launched.

With heavy arms and aircraft provided by China, missiles made in Slovakia and tactics learned from U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (the United States suspended military aid in 2007 amidst human-rights concerns), the Sri Lankan army launched its fourth and deadliest major campaign against the Tigers starting in January this year.

The putative capital of Tamil Eelam, the inland city of Kilinochchi, was quickly overwhelmed, and the Tigers retreated to their beach hideout on a thin strip of land north of the coastal city of Mullaitivu, an area that was almost totally destroyed in the tsunami. They took tens of thousands of civilians with them, reportedly force-marching them along the highways of the north.

The climax of the war was reached late yesterday, when the LTTE announced the surrender on its website. “This battle has reached its bitter end,” LTTE official Selvarajah Pathmanathan said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. “It is our people who are dying now from bombs, shells, illness and hunger. We cannot permit any more harm to befall them. We remain with one last choice – to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns.”

Vellupillai Prabhakaran Pictures (Collected from the Internet)
Sources: Vellupillai Prabhakaran Wikipedia; Obituary: Velupillai Prabhakaran; In pictures: Tigers’ bloody war; After 70,000 dead, Tigers surrender in war-weary Sri Lanka