> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Sivajilingam Told Sinhala Viewers Prabhakaran Was a Hero, and the LTTE Made Mistakes
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/sivajilingam-told-sinhala-viewers-prabhakaran-was-a-hero-and-the-ltte-made-mistakes/
- Published: 2026-11-15T10:46:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-15T10:46:41.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: November 2026

**JAFFNA:** M.K. Sivajilingam, the Tamil nationalist politician who died late Saturday, told a Sinhala-language interviewer in 2020 that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, was a hero of the Tamil people. In the same interview, he said he did not accept everything the Tigers had done.

Mr. Sivajilingam, who served two terms in Parliament for Jaffna District and chaired the Valvettithurai Urban Council, died at his home in Valvettithurai. A kidney transplant he received in June had failed, and he had been taken home after doctors at Point Pedro Base Hospital concluded they could do no more. He was 69.

He made the remarks in a 46-minute interview on the programme Truth with Chamuditha, hosted by Chamuditha Samarawickrama and recorded in Wellawatte, Colombo, in July 2020\. Mr. Samarawickrama disputed nearly every answer, accused him of lying several times, and ended by asking whether he was a traitor. Mr. Sivajilingam answered mostly in Sinhala and switched to Tamil several times to repeat his sharpest statements.

In the interview, he also explained why he refused to accept that Mr. Prabhakaran was dead, described carrying an LTTE message to Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2005 and set out his case for Tamil self-rule within a united Sri Lanka.

At the time, he was general secretary of the Tamil National Party, which N. Srikantha leads, and part of a five-party alliance led by C.V. Wigneswaran, a former chief minister of the Northern Province. He had resigned from the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization, or TELO, months earlier, after the party opposed his 2019 presidential candidacy. Quotations in this article have been translated from Sinhala and Tamil.

## **“A hero of the Tamil people”**

When Mr. Samarawickrama called Mr. Prabhakaran the country’s main terrorist leader, Mr. Sivajilingam objected. “Calling him a terrorist leader is wrong,” he said. “We look at him as a leader who fought for the rights and liberation of the Tamil people.”

Told that the world regarded Mr. Prabhakaran as a terrorist, he said, first in Tamil and then in Sinhala, that Tamils saw him as their hero. When the host said no one else held that view, Mr. Sivajilingam said the question could be put to Tamils in a referendum.

He described Mr. Prabhakaran as his *massina*, a relative by marriage. The two men were distant relatives through Mr. Prabhakaran’s mother’s family and grew up about 100 yards apart in Valvettithurai. Mr. Sivajilingam said he joined TELO in 1973 at 16, when Mr. Prabhakaran was also a member. Mr. Prabhakaran broke away the next year to form the group that became the LTTE, he said.

Mr. Sivajilingam said he was never an LTTE member. He said that after a 1981 bank robbery and the arrest of the TELO leaders Kuttimani and Thangathurai, he arranged a house and a boat so Mr. Prabhakaran could escape to India.

## **Not everything the Tigers did**

The host asked how he could call Mr. Prabhakaran a hero when the LTTE had killed TELO’s leader, Sri Sabaratnam, in 1986\. “You can’t say someone is 100 percent wrong or right based on one thing,” Mr. Sivajilingam said. He called the killing part of a “fratricidal war.” He said he had stepped away from TELO two months before it because of internal disputes, and that TELO still marks Mr. Sabaratnam’s death every year.

“I’m not saying they haven’t done anything,” he said, when the host asked whether the LTTE had done no wrong. He acknowledged that the LTTE killed the Tamil United Liberation Front leaders A. Amirthalingam and V. Yogeswaran in Colombo on July 13, 1989\. He said that in 2004 he publicly garlanded their portraits, knowing it would anger the Tigers. “I did it deliberately so they would know we don’t accept everything they say and do,” he said.

He said the LTTE was held responsible for the killings of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and the lawmaker Neelan Tiruchelvam. He described its execution of its former deputy leader, Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah, known as Mahattaya, as an internal matter.

He said he publicly condemned the LTTE’s 1998 bombing of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy in a statement to Jaffna newspapers the next day. He said the same statement urged the government not to ban the LTTE, so that the way to peace talks would stay open.

On civilian deaths, he said, “If the government side does it, it is wrong; if the Tamil side does it, that is also wrong.” He added, “I am not saying 100 percent that the LTTE committed no war crimes.” He said the LTTE’s crimes should be investigated but could not be equated with the state’s. Comparing them, he said, was like comparing an elephant with flies.

He said war crimes and genocide had been committed against Tamils and that more than 100,000 civilians died in the war. He cited a 2011 panel appointed by the UN secretary-general, which reported credible estimates of as many as 40,000 civilian deaths in the war’s final months. He also cited a later UN review that he said put the number killed or missing above 70,000\. Successive Sri Lankan governments have rejected the genocide allegation and disputed the UN estimates.

## **“I do not accept that Prabhakaran died”**

Asked whether he accepted that Mr. Prabhakaran had died, Mr. Sivajilingam said, “No, I do not accept that Prabhakaran died.”

The Sri Lankan Army displayed Mr. Prabhakaran’s body in May 2009\. Within a week, the LTTE’s international head at the time, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, confirmed his death.

Mr. Sivajilingam said the government had never produced a DNA test. He said a sample could be matched against Mr. Prabhakaran’s sisters or against the ashes of his parents, portions of which he said were held by the Tamil Nadu politicians Pazha Nedumaran, Vaiko and Seeman. He also dismissed the identification of the body by two former Tiger figures: Karuna Amman, the LTTE’s eastern commander who defected in 2004, and Daya Master, the group’s former media spokesman. He asked why no death certificate had been issued, and he said official accounts differed on whether the body was cremated or buried.

Mr. Samarawickrama accused him of spreading claims that Mr. Prabhakaran was alive. “Why would I need to say he is alive?” Mr. Sivajilingam replied. He said there was stronger reason to believe that Mr. Prabhakaran’s two sons had been killed, and that the fate of his wife and daughter remained unknown.

He said he remained in contact with Mr. Prabhakaran’s surviving siblings, who live in Denmark, Chennai and Canada. Mr. Prabhakaran’s father, Thiruvenkadam Velupillai, died in army custody in January 2010, and Mr. Sivajilingam received the body and arranged the funeral. He then took on the care of Mr. Prabhakaran’s mother, Parvathy Ammal. In March 2010, he escorted her to Singapore, from where relatives planned to take her to her daughter in Canada, but the plan fell through. In April, India refused her entry when she flew to Chennai for treatment.

## **The TNA and the 2005 boycott**

Mr. Sivajilingam said the LTTE “helped create” the Tamil National Alliance in 2001 and that he attended its first meetings. He accused the alliance’s leaders, the late R. Sampanthan and M.A. Sumanthiran, of telling “blatant lies” by denying this. He called Mr. Sumanthiran, then a TNA lawmaker, “a traitor to the Tamil people,” and said Mr. Sampanthan led the alliance only “in name.”

He confirmed that he carried a message from the LTTE to Mr. Wickremesinghe before the 2005 presidential election, which the Tigers had ordered Tamils to boycott. He said that at a meeting in Kilinochchi, the LTTE political head, S.P. Tamilselvan, offered to lift the boycott if Mr. Wickremesinghe gave a written assurance, sent through Norway, that he would negotiate on the group’s proposal for an interim self-governing authority. Mr. Sivajilingam said he delivered the request to Mr. Wickremesinghe’s private secretary in Parliament and never received a reply. Mahinda Rajapaksa won the election narrowly.

## **The end of the war**

Mr. Sivajilingam said the LTTE announced in May 2009 that it was silencing its guns and told its fighters to surrender. He said some who came forward carrying white flags were killed, and that about 6,000 who surrendered were still missing.

He also said that in the war’s final weeks, the United States and Canada pursued a proposal to halt the fighting, working through Bob Rae, a former premier of Ontario. He said the LTTE accepted it. According to Mr. Sivajilingam, the LTTE’s political head, B. Nadesan, sent the proposal to Mr. Sampanthan, who did not act on it. Mr. Nadesan was among the LTTE leaders killed in the final days of the war.

## **Self-rule in “one country”**

Mr. Sivajilingam said he wanted self-rule for Tamil-majority areas within “one country,” with “one President, one Army.” He cited the federal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia and Belgium, and Scotland’s parliament. He rejected the Sinhala word ekiya, or unitary, as a “fake word.”

He compared the right to self-rule with a married couple’s right to divorce. “Not everyone uses divorce,” he said.

He said Tamils had no appetite for another armed struggle because people were tired of war. He warned, however, that armed groups could emerge within four or five years if the government kept “squeezing our necks.” He compared that prospect with the JVP’s second uprising in 1988-89.

He received 9,662 votes in the 2010 presidential election and 12,256 in 2019\. He said he ran to put demands for an international war crimes investigation on record and had never expected to win.

Asked at the end of the interview whether he was a traitor, he said, “I am a Sri Lankan citizen.” He said the country would break apart only if a small group of extremists was allowed to act unchecked. He added that 95 to 98 percent of Sinhala Buddhists were good people.

Mr. Sivajilingam was elected to Parliament on the Tamil National Alliance ticket in 2001 and 2004, won a seat on the Northern Provincial Council in 2013 and became chairman of the Valvettithurai Urban Council in November 2025.

Funeral rites will be held at his home in Nediyakadu, Valvettithurai, at 10 a.m. on Monday. His body will then be placed at Valvettithurai Junction for the public to pay their respects, before cremation at the Ooranie Hindu cemetery.