Velupillai Prabhakaran

Considered the heart of Tamil culture and literature in Sri Lanka, Jaffna was concentrated with growing Tamil nationalism, which called for autonomy for Tamils to protest the discrimination against them by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka government and Sinhalese civilians since the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948.

Velupillai Prabhakaran (வேலுப்பிள்ளை பிரபாகரன்; ; 26 November 1954 – 18 May 2009) was an Eelam Tamil revolutionary.

Prabhakaran was a major figure of Tamil nationalism, and the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The LTTE was a militant organization that sought to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka in reaction to the oppression of the country's Tamil population by the Sri Lankan government.

Under his direction, the LTTE undertook a military campaign against the Sri Lankan government for more than 25 years.

Prabhakaran was the youngest of four children, born in Valvettithurai, on Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula's northern coast.

Velupillai Prabhakaran was born in the northern coastal town of Valvettithurai on 26 November 1954, the youngest of four children, His parents, Thiruvenkadam Velupillai and Vallipuram Parvathy, belonged to the Karaiyar community.

Thiruvenkadam Velupillai was the District Land Officer in the Ceylon Government.

He came from an influential and wealthy family who owned and managed the major Hindu temples in Valvettithurai.

Angered by the discrimination and violent persecution against Tamil people by successive Sri Lankan governments, Prabhakaran joined the student group Tamil Youth Front (TYF) during the standardisation debates.

In the early 1970s, United Front government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike introduced the policy of standardisation which made the criteria for university admission lower for the Sinhalese than for the Tamils.

Several organizations to counter this act was formed by Tamil students.

Prabhakaran, aged 15, dropped out of school and got associated with the Kuttimani-Thangathurai group (which evolved later into TELO) formed by Selvarajah Yogachandran (known as Kuttimani) and Nadarajah Thangathurai who both also hailed from Valvettithurai.

Prabhakaran along with Kuttimani, Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran and other prominent rebels joined the Tamil Manavar Peravai formed by a student named Satiyaseelan in 1970.

This group comprised Tamil youth who advocated the rights of students to have fair enrollment.

In 1972, he founded the Tamil New Tigers (TNT), a successor to many earlier organizations that protested against the post-colonial political direction of the country, in which the minority Sri Lankan Tamils were pitted against the majority Sinhalese people.

In 1973, Prabhakaran teamed up with Chetti Thanabalasingam and with a fraction of the Tamil Manavar Peravai to form the Tamil New Tigers (TNT).

Their first notable attack was held at the Duraiappa stadium in Jaffna placing a bomb in an attempt to murder the Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiappah.

A member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party who was loyal to Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Duraiappah was seen as a traitor by the Tamil masses.

The assassination was in response to the killings of Tamils in the 1974 Tamil conference incident, for which Duraiappah was blamed due to having backed the then-ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

In 1975, after becoming heavily involved in the Tamil movement, he carried out the first major political assassination by a Tamil group, shooting Alfred Duraiappah, the mayor of Jaffna, at point-blank range in front of the Hindu temple at Ponnaalai.

Failing the attempt, Prabhakaran managed to shoot and kill Duraiappah who was on a visit at a Hindu temple at Ponnalai on 27 July 1975.

Founded in 1976, the LTTE came to prominence in 1983 after it ambushed a patrol of the Sri Lanka Army outside Jaffna, resulting in the deaths of 13 soldiers.

This ambush, along with the subsequent pogrom that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Tamil civilians, is generally considered the start of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

On 5 May 1976, the TNT was renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.

The LTTE by the 1980s operated in more attacks against police and military forces.

On 23 July 1983, the LTTE ambushed an army patrol and killed 13 Sri Lankan soldiers in Thirunelveli, Sri Lanka.

As a response to this were one of the worst government sponsored anti-Tamil riots held (the event known as Black July) resulting in the destruction of Tamil houses and shops and death of hundreds of Tamils and making over 150 000 Tamils homeless.

Prabhakaran himself argued that he chose military means only after observing that nonviolent means were ineffectual and obsolete, especially after the Tamil Eelam revolutionary Thileepan's fatal hunger strike in 1987 had no effect.

Influenced by prominent Indian nationalists Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, who fought the British Empire, Prabhakaran declared that his goal was 'revolutionary socialism and the creation of an egalitarian society'.

After years of fighting, including the intervention of the Indian Army (IPKF), the conflict was halted after international mediation in 2001.

By then, the LTTE, which came to be known as the Tamil Tigers, controlled large swathes of land in the north and east of the country, running a de facto state with Prabhakaran as its leader.

Peace talks eventually broke down, and the Sri Lanka Army launched a military campaign to defeat the LTTE in 2006.

Prabhakaran, who had said, "I would prefer to die in honour rather than being caught alive by the enemy", was killed in a firefight with the Sri Lankan Army in May 2009.

Charles Anthony, his eldest son, was also killed.

Additionally, the bodies of his wife and daughter were reportedly found by the Sri Lankan army; the Sri Lankan government later denied the report.

His 12-year-old second son was executed a short time later.

Prabhakaran's reported death and the subsequent ceasefire announcement by Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers' chief of international relations, brought an end to the armed conflict.

A significant figure of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism, Prabhakaran is often seen as a martyr by Sri Lankan Tamils.

However, he is acknowledged to have created one of the most ruthless and sophisticated insurgencies of the modern era, with many of the tactics he pioneered influencing political militant groups globally.