Kadirgamar: Outstanding Foreign Minister

The second death anniversary of one of our greatest statesmen Lakshman Kadirgamar falls today. We reproduce here, two articles published in our columns shortly after his assassination.

Lakshman Kadirgamar, who was assassinated at his home in Colombo on Friday evening, had as profound a grasp of the threat posed by terrorist violence as any political leader in the world today. He had known for almost a decade that he was a high-priority target for assassination by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) whose forces control an area around Jaffna in the north of Sri Lanka. While the head of the political wing of the Tigers has denied responsibility, the Sri Lankan government does not accept the denial. The existence of different factions within the armed Tamil secessionist movement complicates the picture.
Kadirgamar had a near-miss on December 18, 1999, when a suicide bomber attempted to kill President Chandrika Kumaratunga of Sri Lanka at an election rally. Five men were killed, the president was injured but survived, and Kadirgamar, who had been due to accompany her to that meeting, escaped because he was unwell that day and didn’t go. He knew that the LTTE had him, as well as other ministers, in their sights, and was under 24-hour military protection. As he said in a speech in September 2000, “For us who have to live with terrorism, when we leave home in the morning there is no guarantee that we will come back at the end of the day, absolutely none whatever.” Ironically it was at his private residence, where he had gone for a swim, that he was shot. Earlier on the day of his death, he had realised a lifetime’s dream when he launched a new academic journal, International Relations in a Globalising World, which was a key part of his long-term plan to raise the level of Sri Lanka’s contribution to international diplomacy.

Lakshman Kadirgamar

Kadirgamar began his turbulent political career at the age of 62, when other people are thinking of retiring. It was in 1994 that he entered Parliament for the first time, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs until 2001 and since 2004. Warm, outgoing, hard-working, and with a subtle and powerful intellect, he was outstandingly effective in that role. He maintained a level of co-operation with the governments that mattered most to Sri Lanka — especially India, China, the United States and the UK — that had sometimes eluded his predecessors. His role in developing South Asian co-operation was perhaps his proudest single achievement.

Already when he entered politics, the Tamil Tiger terrorist campaign was a threat to Sri Lanka’s long democratic traditions. As Foreign Minister, notwithstanding his impeccable liberal record, he called for tough action against terrorists, not just within Sri Lanka, but also internationally. Sri Lanka was a strong supporter of, and on his instructions the very first country to sign, the 1997 International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings. Long before September 11, 2001, he warned Americans of the need to get tough on the terrorist financing that was going on in their midst.

In London in 1998, at a meeting at Chatham House, he reminded his hosts that they, like the Americans, were turning a Nelsonian blind eye to organisations raising money for terrorist causes abroad. A toughening of UK and US law against assisting terrorist campaigns was at last beginning to happen. In 1997 the LTTE was belatedly listed by the US government as a terrorist organisation. With typical realism, he attributed these changes more to the terrorist outrages of the 1990s than to his advocacy, coming as it did from a country that, he said, is “small, relatively weak, and relatively lacking in political clout”.

Lakshman Kadirgamar was born in Jaffna in 1932. A Tamil and a Christian, he came to be regarded as a renegade by the LTTE zealots who now control the town of his birth, but he pointed out, with impeccable logic, that the Tamils are not arranged tidily, but are intermingled with Sinhalese, Muslims and others on the map of Sri Lanka — so the attempt to set up a separatist state by force is a threat to them as much as to the other communities.

In speech after speech, he emphasized the need to maintain civil liberties while also acting decisively; the importance of understanding the political context in which terrorism arises; and the need to focus on the wrongfulness of terrorist acts. As he put it, with characteristic clarity:

Terrorism is a method - a particularly heinous one - rather than a set of adversaries or the causes they pursue. Terrorism is a problem of what people (or groups or states) do, rather than who they are or what they are trying to achieve. As a young man growing up in post-independence Sri Lanka, he excelled at cricket, rugby and athletics. Coming to Balliol College, Oxford for graduate studies in law, he became President of the Oxford Union in 1959, and obtained a B.Litt in 1960 for a thesis on “Strict Liability in English and Roman-Dutch Law”.

In 2004 his connection with Oxford was renewed when he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Balliol, and earlier this year he spoke at the Oxford Union with characteristic elegance at the unveiling of a portrait showing him addressing that equally significant debating chamber, the UN General Assembly, which he did at least eight times.

In his long and distinguished legal career, he became a noted expert on intellectual property law, and for 12 years (1976-88) worked in Geneva in senior positions in the World Intellectual Property Organization. His most notable achievement as a lawyer, however, is much less well known. When in 1963 he was asked to investigate the treatment of Buddhists in South Vietnam, he became the first person to conduct a formal investigation in a country on behalf of Amnesty International. His report, which I obtained from him at the time, was unashamedly sympathetic to the Buddhists: “I feel that the memory of their achievements cannot be allowed to fade without it being brought to the notice of the world that men of such calibre and integrity are still amongst us.” Over 40 years later, the same might well be said about him.

By Adam Roberts. Professor of International Relations at Balliol College, Oxford (Reprinted by permission from The Independent, London. This obituary was published on August 15).

Our debt to the past

An essay written by Lakshman Kadirgamar to the 1949 Trinity College Magazine when he was a 17-year-old student there.

How often we revolt against the past. How often we question the purpose of learning history. To many the past is dead. The knowledge of it is drudgery. But to the imaginative observer the past presents a fascinating spectacle of human fortunes. We realise our debt to the past when we see the thread of continuity that runs through the ages, from the dawn of history, linking up, and giving significance to the efforts of humanity.

If the past is viewed objectively we see it as one continuous, ‘living’ period of development. Every minute slips into the past and as civilisation grows in age, the past is growing too.

We form new ideas of the past, our interpretation changes. We can never shelve the past. Every moment of our lives, we hark back to the past. Often we are overtaken by tragedies, shattering events like war, momentous publications like “Das Capital” and “Origin of the Species”- that give us a new orientation of the past. The point to remember is that the past lives and grows. It never dies.

The past is very tolerant. It has witnessed man’s first attempts at civilisation. It has blessed the beginnings of culture and given to the crudest achievements the sanctity of age.

The past has witnessed man’s ceaseless struggle with nature. How can we disregard the civilising process? We must know something of the Ur and Mohenjadaro civilisations and the Chinese and Middle-Eastern cultures; of the beginnings of literature and philosophy in the Vedas; of primitive drawings on cave walls; of crude sculpture — for, the knowledge of these is essential to a better understanding of modern civilisation.

We have much to learn from the past. The ancient Sinhalese engineers were the best in the world. Apart from inventing the sluice gate, they developed tank construction to such a pitch of excellence that it has excited the wonder and admiration of all ages.

We learn not only from the triumphs of the past but also from its mistakes. The past is a faithful record — failures, disasters, tragedies, are clearly imprinted on the page of History.

An analysis of the causes of wars gives us valuable information about the reactions of individuals and nations to certain events. The failures of the past have inspired us on to greater effort. One generation failed to perfect the aeroplane; the next invented the turbo-jet engine, while there is little doubt that the succeeding century will be the realisation of inter-planetary travel.

The history of international diplomacy gives us vital clues to the understanding of a country’s traditional foreign policy. For instance we know that from the nineteenth century Britain has been suspicious of Russian intentions in the Mediterranean. This will always be a keynote of British policy. A. L. Rowse goes as far as to say that if Chamberlain had a sounder knowledge of German history, he could have averted the catastrophe of 1939.
The past is prophetic. Growing impulses and tendencies of one age find expression in another. The Russian revolution had its seeds far back in history. Oppression and discontent gathered through the ages and burst with startling violence in 1917.

A good knowledge of past conditions is a valuable guide for the future. We can see the beginnings of movements. We know exactly how they sprang; we get some idea of how they might develop and end. We also look to the past for ratification and confirmation of many of our actions.

In many countries custom and tradition is part and parcel of the law. When constitutions are to be amended or new ones created we look for historical precedent, because we have confidence in decisions of the past — that have received the assent of time. The past, as a whole, plays an important role in shaping the future. It is difficult to break with the past. It should be our aim to reconcile ourselves with the past. Not exactly to fall in line, but to realise, to learn, to benefit from our heritage. The aim of history is:

“To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild-flower
To hold infinity in the palm of our hand
And eternity in an hour.”

- L. Kadirgamar, U. E. Arts (Essay submitted at an examination)

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