Velupillai Prabhakaran
Velupillai Prabhakaran led the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for three decades and fought one of the longest insurgencies in modern Asia. Born in Valvettithurai in northern Ceylon in 1954, the youngest child of a civil servant, he grew up hearing accounts of the anti-Tamil riots of 1958, and was radicalised by successive Sinhalese-majority policies — the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which removed Tamil from official use, and university admission quotas that cut Tamil entry sharply. He founded the Tamil New Tigers in 1972 and renamed it the LTTE in 1976. His first significant act was the assassination of the mayor of Jaffna in 1975, which he carried out himself. The war began in earnest after Black July in 1983, when anti-Tamil pogroms killed thousands following an LTTE ambush. He built the LTTE into something closer to a state than a guerrilla movement, with a conventional army, an air wing with light aircraft, and the Sea Tigers, and it administered territory in the north and east with its own courts, police and taxation. It also pioneered the modern suicide bomber, through the Black Tigers, who carried out around three hundred attacks. Its victims included the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993. The organisation recruited children, expelled the Muslim population of the north in 1990, and killed rival Tamil leaders, and was proscribed as terrorist by more than thirty countries. The 2002 ceasefire collapsed, and a final offensive from 2006 destroyed the movement with very heavy civilian casualties. He was killed in May 2009.
- Lived: 1954 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: rebel_leader, military_leader
