The idealist I once knew became the Tamils' Pol Pot

This paranoid tyrant has led his people to disaster – but once I believed he could shape a future for them within Sri Lanka

The bloody end came in a sliver of nondescript coastline near the fallen garrison town of Mullaitivu in Sri Lanka's north-east. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder and ­supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam – one of the world's most feared extremist organisations – had made a last stand that had pointlessness writ all over it. The charismatic 54-year-old perished along with his senior commanders and hundreds of fighters – including his elder son – with hardly anyone able to figure out what the final strategy was. Prabhakaran's war of "national liberation" for a separate, Pol Pot-ist state of Tamil Eelam was over. Belying conventional wisdom, the Sri Lankan state had found a military solution to what used to be regarded as an intractable secessionist and terrorist challenge.

There has been justifiable international concern over the humanitarian crisis that came to the fore during the endgame. The civilian toll has by no means been light, and the challenge of dealing humanely and justly with nearly 300,000 displaced Tamils, including those who supported the LTTE – willingly or under duress – faces Sri Lanka. The task of relief, de-mining, rehabilitation and reconciliation is daunting. The situation cries out for massive external assistance to Sri Lanka – but also for an approach that looks sympathetically ahead instead of obsessively going over what went wrong.

In my opinion, the international – and especially west European – response has got it wrong on two counts. There has been a tendency to mechanically balance responsibility for the crisis, and therefore to equate the desperate, last-ditch actions of an extremist organisation – banned or designated as terrorist by some 30 countries including India – with the responses of a legitimate government. Second, justice has not been done to Mahinda Rajapaksa's government for its astonishing feat of rescuing by military means close to 275,000 civilians who were, in the view of the whole world, confined by the Tigers for use as a human shield.

But as I watched the images of terrified men, women and children fleeing their "protectors" across the lagoon, I reflected on how it might have all been so different.

If only the organisation that started out in the 1970s with some kind of emancipatory political vision, and even idealism, had not turned Pol Pot-ist in its horrific disregard for human life and welfare. If only its leader, a military and organisational genius – whom I interviewed in Chennai in the mid-1980s and met one last time, at his request, in Jaffna in August 1987 – had not turned into a tyrannical practitioner of the end justifying the means.

The circumstances in which I got to know Prabhakaran in the mid-80s seem a world apart from last month's poignant scenes. The July 1983 pogrom against Sri Lankan Tamils generated in India, and especially in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a tremendous amount of emotional sympathy, practical solidarity – and clouded judgment. Re-reading my interviews I am struck by how clouded the assumptions behind India's post-1983 policy were, and how tragic the effects on the ground.

On the one hand, the basic political objective of India's activist policy was moderate and constructive. It was to help win security, justice and a decent measure of self-administering opportunities for the Tamils living in the north-east, within the framework of Sri Lanka's unity and territorial integrity. On the other hand, the policy worked on the assumption that in order to put pressure on the Sri Lankan government, it was necessary to build up the armed militant groups, and above all the LTTE, in various controlled ways. Among other things, it involved the old-fashioned dilemma of ends versus means.

But it was not just a case of official policy gone wrong. Along with many journalists and intellectuals in south India, I shared these assumptions. We believed that Prabhakaran, despite contra-indications, would work with India to shape a future for his people based on equality, democratic and human rights, and devolution or autonomy along ­federal lines within a united Sri Lanka.

Subsequent events demonstrated that for this man there would be no alternative. As the years went by and several opportunities for a negotiated political solution fell by the wayside, the one thing that remained constant was the LTTE's uncompromising secessionism and militarism. Along with this came a rising graph of terrorist crimes.

Most insurgent leaders, you would think, would have seized the opportunity offered by the ceasefire agreement of February 2002, which was criticised for being overly generous to the LTTE. Tragically, Prabhakaran – seeing it mainly as an opportunity to re-arm his organisation and strengthen its parallel state structure in the territory it controlled – did everything conceivable to make the peace process falter and fail.

"It was worse than a crime, a ­blunder" is a saying of the Napoleonic era, attributed to Talleyrand. If the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by an LTTE squad dispatched by ­Prabhakaran made a permanent enemy of India; if his paranoiac suspiciousness and intolerance of dissent triggered a revolt in 2004 by his powerful military ­commander, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan – aka Colonel Karuna – and fractured the organisation; if all this was the case, then the boycott enforced in LTTE-controlled areas during the 2005 ­presidential election – which facilitated Rajapaksa's victory over the ceasefire architect, Ranil Wickremasinghe – was an akratic act that defied all rational explanation. It proved to be the blunder of a lifetime.