On Monday, an article in the Guardian illustrated perfectly the wisdom of Paulo Freires's description of leadership behaviours that de-humanised their followers and their causes. The subject of the article by Narasimhan Ram, the editor of The Hindu, was Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who led a separatist movement for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. Ram describes him as a former idealist who became the Tamils' Pol Pot, 'a paranoid tyrant who led his people to disaster'.
For those who would be revolutionary leaders, Freire tells us that there is no place for-
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'Massification’, forcing men to behave as machines.
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Prefabricated, technocratic approaches. Narrowly-defined, prescriptive, formulaic, once-for-all solutions to complex problems that reinforce the oppressive status quo.
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Ideology and Sectarianism of either the left or the right.
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Monologue in all its forms: slogans: communiqués, strongly emotional communications: polemics vs dialogue.
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Manoevering people via propaganda to win them over to “our side” and support our goals without question.
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The idea that ‘the leaders' are the thinkers, 'the people' are the doers.
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The oversimplification of problems.
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A naïve nostalgia for the past.
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A taste for fanciful, magical, illogical, irrational explanations.
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Underestimating the people.
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Despotism. Huge imbalances of power.
Last week, the ironically-named, Velupillai Prabhakaran's 'Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam' made a suicidal last stand against the Sri Lankan army. He, his senior commanders and hundreds of fighters – including his elder son – were killed.
When Prabhakaran became leader of the LTTE in the early 1970s, the Tamils were being brutally repressed by the Sri Lankan government, but he and his co-leaders failed to heed Freire's warning that those who are oppressed must at all costs avoid 'internalising the oppressor'. Instead, over the years, a resistance movement that espoused liberation and emancipation, turned into a murderous tyranny with little or no regard for human life and welfare.
The Indian government must take some responsibility for supporting a conversion of Sri Lanka's Tamil liberation movements into a variety of armed militant groups such as Prabhakaran's LTTE. At the time, Narasimhan Ram and many other Tamil journalists and intellectuals in south India, believed that Prabhakaran, wanted to shape a future for his people based on equality, democracy and human rights,within a united Sri Lanka.
However, over the years, Prabhakaran spurned many opportunities to negotiate a political solution, and instead pursued a policy of secessionism, militarism and, increasingly, terrorism.
When in 1991 an LTTE squad assassinated the Indian politician, Rajiv Gandhi, Prabhakaran turned India from a friend to an enemy. Subsequently, as hundreds of innocent people in India and Sri Lanka died in the LTTE's terrorist outrages, and the transition from idealist to tyrant became irreversible. The only way to wrest the Tamil communities from his tyrannical regime, became a ruthless military one, and the Sri Lankan army duly obliged. Even so, 250,000, Tamils fled from Prabhakaran's tyranny to the questionable protection of a - notionally - enemy army.
Prabhakaran is an extreme illustration of the consequences of would-be revolutionary-leaders 'internalising the oppressor'. But it is an example that should serve as a tragic warning to all of those who imagine that they can flout Freire's advice with impunity.
