We hadn't seen the leader of the Tamil Tigers, Prabhakaran, since 1989 when we watched him at a Jaffna football field addressing a large crowd euphoric about impending peace. The Indian Peace-keeping Force had just arrived, and we remember Prabhakaran being a small man dwarfed by his swarthy bodyguards, giving a speech in a squeaky voice. One of the world's most ruthless militant leaders was not the most charismatic.
As it turned out, Prabhakaran soon turned his claymore mines on the IPKF, causing such heavy casualties and forcing the Indian Army to retreat ignominously. But Prabhakaran was a man harbouring long-term grudges, and it wasn't over for him. By 1993 he had sent a Tigress suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi, the architect of the IPKF.
Last month we watched Prabhakaran in a safari suit signing the Norwegian brokered MOU which had earlier been signed separately by the country's new prime minister, Ranil Wickremasinghe. Except for his jowls, Prabhakaran looked none the worse for a decade of jungle living.
Wonder what was going through his head, if anything, as he signed the document. Were the 75,000 Sri Lankans killed (many of them by his forces in terrorist attacks) worth it if he was willing to give up his demand for a separate Tamil homeland anyway? Ultimately, what was the sense of the suffering of the families of those ripped apart in bus bombs in Central Colombo, novice monks gunned down in a bus in Anuradhapura, the thousands of rival Tamil militants who the Tigers tortured and killed in an even more gruesome manner than they killed their Sinhalese enemies?