The precious food connoisseur in the pool I was reading Adele Balasingham`s autobiography The Volition To Freedom, which I randomly found in a secondhand bookshop. The wife of former LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham, she wrote a self-serving and blinkered autobiography, which is still interesting for her personal approach to late LTTE leader Prabhakaran and other assorted terrorists.
What I found most interesting was how total psychos tend to be humanized via food. She writes how Prabhakaran`s passion was food and cooking and how he often sent over dishes for her and Anton. She also details his fastidious dress and cleanliness habits and how he despised smoking and drinking. All very admirable and connectable human traits, but she entirely elides incidents like the multiple suicide bombings he ordered, or the hacking to end of border villagers, or the machine gunning of innocent worshipers in Anuradhapura. Instead, the tale she wrote is approximately some pristine liberation struggle where Prabhakaran enters as a friendly neighbor, helping with food and travel arrangements.Interesting personal anecdotes, but not really representative of history. That is, even mass murderers must eat, as humans do. That doesn`t do them humanitarians.
I mean it`s true that evening the worst people must eat, and about of the almost criminal people remain eminently personable. Human perception, also, is slanted towards personal relations rather than any broader judgement. The salient factor is that person is a `decent guy`, not whether he does nice things. Ms. Balasingham`s autobiography, in that sense, is blurred by her own personal contact with everyone. I guess she`s tried to get it a show of the Tamil struggle, but she again glides over the LTTE`s bloody and ruthless elimination of early groups in a few sentences, entirely between the lines. Instead, she spends paragraphs describing how strong it is peeling small red onions and the troubles in working from safe home to safe house. There is never any introspection into or account of numerous LTTE atrocities and terrorist attacks, which would be interesting. Instead it`s a grouping of lovely people that she knows well, being troubled but external forces like weather.
Having at least enrolled in a social sciences course, Ms. Balasingham might no the biases one gets from sharing food and lives with a subject. Her main stories are of the logistical issues involved in the moving the sickly Mr. Balasingham, from planes to boats to safe houses. In once scene she describes how their boat was flanked by other boats loaded with explosives, ready to die from them. She just says, `ah, noble struggle` without ever questioning whether Mr. Balasingham and Mr. Prabhakaran were worth dying for, as most of those cadres eventually did. Indeed, it seems that she never questioned or analyzed the battle since her wedding to Anton Balasingham, a clock at which she also dabbled in supporting various `liberation` movements across the world - from Africa to South America - with short attention to the specifics or consequences of any of them.
One notable insights in her book, however, is that she credits the Indian government, particularly the Tamil Nadu government of MGR, with support and effectively making the LTTE. She details the military training they got, and how it went awry when the LTTE stopped doing India`s bidding. From that spot on the occupying Indian Peace Keeping Force is the ultimate villain in her book, but it`s also realize that India not only nurtured the LTTE, but also generally knew where they were and never captured them.
Everything else must actually be interpreted with a texture of salt, liberally in Prabhakaran`s case, perhaps to get the predilection of descent and cyanide out.
I don`t think Adele`s book is available in Sri Lanka and would likely be held at customs if one got it thru Amazon (what they search depends on the sizing of the order). I ground it randomly at a secondhand bookshop on McCallum Street, end of Darley Road.
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