Vellupilai Prabhakaran genuinely believed in the cause he espoused. He may have been a murderous gangster, but he was a TAMIL murderous gangster and he loved his people and his country. The problem was that he loved himself more. The other problem was that his education and background prevented him from successfully managing the liberation of his people, yet his incredible charisma, ruthlessness and natural talent inexorably thrust him to the top of the Tamil hierarchy and concentrated total power in his hands.
With constant war sweeping back and forth across the country, no serious industries or even large-scale agricultural enterprises could ever be established by private entrepreneurs and the Tigers themselves failed to establish any kind of serious defense industry. Educated Tamils left for India or the West. The Tigers had no way to retain them by providing them with good jobs at home, nor did they make any real effort to replace them. Instead, the Tigers demanded bribes in exchange for permission to emigrate. The funds not spent to make life more comfortable for the Tiger upper echelon were spent to buy foreign-made arms on the international black market.
Built upon Marxist gangsterism, the rule of the Tigers proved to be corrupt and oppressive.. while the Sinhalese population was getting larger, the Tamil population was all but stagnating. Worse still was the proportion of young men of military age. In 1985, some 22% of Ceylonese Tamil men were aged 15-24. By 2003, this metric had declined to below 17%, passing below the Sinhalese youth percentage and trending downward as if it had fallen off a cliff. In the meantime, the percentage of Sinhalese males in this critical age bracket had bottomed out at 17% around 2000 and was now trending moderately upward. The Sinhalese had let their boys grow up and marry instead of drafting them into the army at 10 or 14. They had left their women at home to make babies instead of using them as cannon fodder. Their power was growing, while the power of Tamil Eelam, for all the incredible bravery, skill, ruthlessness and inhuman brutality of the Tigers, was waning. In his seminal book “The Clash of Civilizations”, Samuel Huntington used the demographics of the two populations to predict defeat for the Tamils and an end to the conflict sometime early in the first quarter of the 21-st century. He was spot on. Beneath the facade, Tamil Eelam was crumbling.
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