21 August 2005

Loss of a man of dignity and profound knowledge

By Dr. Abdulla Al-Madani

On the sidelines of the September 2000 International Conference on War-Affected Children in Winnipeg, Canada, I had a chance to meet Sri Lanka’s foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, who was recently assassinated by unidentified snipers. It was surprising for him to learn that someone from the Gulf has been interested in Sri Lankan affairs and sympathetic to his country. He jokingly said that he thought Gulf nationals’ concerns about his country did not go beyond the recruitment of Sri Lankan housemaids. The minister was more surprised to learn that I was the one who had led a campaign against a disgusting commercial advertisement insulting Sri Lankan housemaids. Several years ago, a supermarket in Lebanon had tried to promote its business by offering shoppers several prizes, the first of which was “a Sri Lankan housemaid”.

Addressing the conference, Kadirgamar presented facts and figures on the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Elam (LTTE) rebels’ involvement in kidnapping and forcibly conscripting children for battle against the Sri Lankan Army and also in blackmailing their families. He said the reason why the LTTE tended to reach out to children was because children were less able to defend themselves and run away. He added that a more cynical reason was that “children, because they are innocent, can be moulded into the most unquestioning, ruthless tools of warfare, into suicide commandos, into committing the worst atrocities”.

It was such a sharp rhetoric against the LTTE that made him a target of the Tigers, who began fighting in 1983 for a separate state in Sri Lanka’s northeast for ethnic Tamils, claiming discrimination by the majority Sinhalese. Kadirgamar had led an international campaign to ban the LTTE, an effort that resulted in the addition of the group to America and other countries’ lists of foreign terrorist organizations. He had also been a key figure in President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government and the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and a staunch supporter of their policies, despite being an ethnic Tamil from Jaffna, the LTTE’s strong hold. This, in particular, served against the Tigers’ claim that the whole minority Tamil community was for an independent state, making them often describe Kadirgamar as traitor or “the darling of the Sinhalese chauvinists”.

Following the 2002 Norwegian-arranged settlement to the country’s civil war, Kadirgamar became a strong supporter of the peace process. However, with rising violence threatening the truce, he hardly missed out an opportunity to claim that a lasting solution was impossible until the LTTE was fully decommissioned. In early August, for example, he told a function held to mark the launch of President Kumaratunga’s biography that the LTTE must learn from the Irish Republic Army (IRA), referring to a recent landmark decision by the IRA guerillas to fully lay down arms.

Sri Lankan officials and observers, therefore, have many reasons to believe the LTTE’s involvement in assassinating Kadirgamar, especially with the group’s dark record of carrying out such odious crimes in the past. The Tigers were behind the killing of India’s former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993. They were also behind the December 1999 brutal attempt to assassinate President Kumaratunga, in which she lost her right eye.

Other reasons to accuse the Tigers include a radio message sent by the LTTE Intelligence Unit’s leader to his second in command saying “Kadirgamar is no more. We finished him off” and an article published in Eelanathan, the official organ of the Tigers, titled “A letter from Jaffna to the enemy in the South” and saying “Kadirgamar, a stalwart of the Sinhalese government, need not live anymore”.

The Tigers have denied involvement in the killing and accused forces within the government of carrying it out in order to sabotage the peace process. But as long as the killers are unidentified, fingers will only be pointed to the LTTE rebels.

The disappearance of Kadirgamar is a great loss not only for Sri Lanka but also for South Asian countries, given his profound knowledge and wide experience. Born in 1932 in Manipay, Jaffna, and educated at Trinity College, Kandy, he obtained a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ceylon in 1953 and earned a degree in Literature from Oxford University where he was president of the Oxford Union. He practiced law at the Ceylon Bar and in London until 1974, when he became a consultant to the International Labour Organization in Geneva. Apart from being foreign minister from 1994 to 2005, barring a short period between 2001 and 2003, he was appointed in 2001 as special adviser to President Kumaratunga and was, in 2003, his country’s candidate for the position of secretary-general of the Commonwealth.

Kadirgamar, a Tamil but Christian – an unusual combination in Sri Lanka dominated by Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus, is survived by his wife Suganthie and two children from his first wife Angela. He wrote few books and conducted a number of studies, the last of which titled “The world order after Iraq”. In that study, Kadirgamar wrote:

“The community of democratic states must always remain in dialogue with American government and the people of America, so that America will never be allowed to feel abandoned, isolated and lonely. When we differ from American policy our criticism should be tempered with understanding. A giant should not be left friendless, bereft of honest counsel, lest it be tempted to use its enormous strength in irrational and harmful ways”.

He added: “In the struggle against terrorism, which America must perforce lead, the democratic community must stand together; otherwise, democracy will not survive. The great liberal democracies must wake up to the fact that it is their duty to come to the aid of a democracy in peril in practical ways, with moral support yes, but also by a demonstration of political will that sends a message to the terrorists of the world that their days are numbered”.

Dr. Abdulla Al-Madani

Academic researcher and lecturer in Asian affairs

Date: August 21, 2005

E-mail: elmadani@batelco.com.bh

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