Military Training in the German Nazi Mould amidst Internal Dissension in the early LTTE, late 1970s

Ganeshan Iyer, trans by Parames Blacker

PREAMBLE by Michael Roberts: This is chapter 14 in the serialized memoirs in Tamil by Ganeshan Iyer found in http://inioru.com/?p=12399 (whose work has now appeared in book form). The strict translation of this chapter would be “Fighters opposing Prabakaran – My records on the Eelam warfare,” but I have chosen to highlight the central motifs in this segment.

  Pics by Shyam Tekwani 

I also have Gobinath Ponnuthurai;’s translation of this chapter; while Dayan Jayatilleka has provided a somewhat different translation of key sentences in this document relating to Hitler and Mein Kampf. All the versions are broadly in agreement re the threads of content.

Ganeshan Iyer became the Treasurer of the LTTE when it was initially formed in May 1976. Iyer is from the Brahmin caste, a numerically minute body of people in the Jaffna Peninsula who serve as temple priests and are dependent on the Vellālar caste. Nourished in the Vellālar village of Punallaikatuvan, Iyer came to know Pirapāharan when the latter hid there under the auspices of Chinniah Rajeshkumar, alias Rāgavan, in the early-mid 1970s. An atheist and reformer with Leftist leanings, Iyer joined the LTTE’s hard-core guerrilla ranks in the 1970s. When the LTTE divided into two factions Iyer joined the faction led by Uma Maheshwaran that opposed Pirapāharan. This faction later evolved into the militant organisation known as PLOTE. Subsequently Iyer became critical of PLOTE and associated with a dissident faction named Theepory which hived off from PLOTE. Finally he became associated with the NLFT, a faction identical to Naxalites. Thereafter he sought refuge in Europe and seems to have ended up in Germany though other information indicates that he is in India.

Arun Ambalavanar is the person who first brought Iyer’s writings to my attention and provided the reference to his serialized memoirs in Tamil within Inioru.com. Ambalavanar makes this point emphatically: “though his Marxist thinking is very much evident in his memoirs on the LTTE days, the recollections provide genuine reportage and information on the history of the LTTE.” Michael Roberts. SEE bibliography attached at end.

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Ganeshan Iyer: “Fighters opposing Prabakaran – My records on the Eelam warfare,” Chapter 14 trans by Parames Blacker

 The dream of the Thamil Eelam Tigers was to establish a powerful army. We believed that the basis of this could be started with the making of a disciplined training camp. Prabakaran comes forward with the full plan for this. As planned the training camp was set up in Mankulam. We trained towards this at every opportunity, with small army activities like pistol shooting practices.

Debating Sinhala Only Language Policy and Burgher Out-Migration from Ceylon – A Spin-Off from “Tropical Amsterdam”

Preamble: In September 2010 I was invited to participate in a three-cornered discussion on ABC Radio on the remaining Burgher community  in Sri Lanka seen in historical perspective. This short discussion was mediated gently by Philip Adams and involved Alexa Schulz in California, Stephen Labrooy in Sri Lanka and yours truly in Adelaide. It arose out of the film documentary Tropical Amsterdam created by the German American chronicler Alexa Schulz. I had not seen the film at that point and I presume that my participation arose from my central hand in the text and visual imagery in People Inbetween: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790s-1960s (Ratmalana, Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha Publications, 1989). Since my name leads many people to mistake me as a Burgher let me note here that I am not Burgher, but “Kāberi” (Black, Kaffir) on my patrilineal side and an achcharu liquorice all sorts in bloodlines in ways that render me eminently thuppahi (mixed and thus low and alien to the native soil).