I should like to begin by referring to the fact that
the Kanthasamy Commemoration Committee has included at
the end of its memorial volume my poem "Waiting for the
Soldier". The reason for its inclusion apparently is
that a friend sent it to him in Jaffna shortly before
his tragic end.
The poem was written towards the end of 1987 at a time
when the hopes of peace kindled by the Indo - Sri Lankan Accord were
glittering low as violence swept the country again.
What the poem expresses is a sense of impotence to
influence the public world - a feeling that one could
only withdraw into one's intellectual interests, while
being aware that one's private life might at any moment
be overwhelmed by the disorder and violence outside,
Why I refer to the subject of the poem here is that
Kanthasamy's life offered an example of a very
different response to the dark time through which we
are living. Here was a man to whom it was open to
devote his outstanding talents and abundant energies
wholly to his professional vocation, and to enjoy the
satisfaction and success to be derived from it.
He chose instead to dedicate himself to the cause of
fighting injustice and succouring the victims, of
tirelessly striving against the erosion of humanity and
reason in our society: and for that dedication he paid
with his life. No. The only thing that Kanthasamy's
death has in common with that of Archimedes is the
triumph of brute force over the civilised virtues, and
"Waiting for the Soldier" therefore can't really be an
epitaph for him. Perhaps I may offer instead these
lines of the English poet W.H.Auden as an expression of
my own feelings about his life and death. The modest
arid muted tones of Auden's lines seem to me
appropriate to this man who did so much quietly and
unassumingly and shunned heroics and rhetoric:
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,
of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.
When I had the honour of being invited by the
Kanthasamy Commemoration Committee to deliver this
lecture, I chose "Violence and Human Rights" as my
subject. I selected it as being best fitted to
commemorate a man who lived to protect the rights of
his fellow human beings and who died by violence in
doing so. But I chose it also because no subject can be
of more pressing concern to us at a time when the most
fundamental of human rights - the right to exist - is
violated each day in our country. The form of this
lecture is determined by the very nature of the
situation we confront.
Human rights are violated today by the agents of the
State in the name of democracy or of the protection of
the security and integrity of the county. They are
violated also by militant groups in the name of
national or social liberation. It would be evasive and
dishonest to deal with one and not with the other. My
lecture therefore will fall naturally into two parts.
in which I discuss first State violence, and secondly,
militant violence. But before I proceed to deal with
this dual nature of the violence in our society, there
are some preliminary considerations I wish to
present.
It is possible, in looking at the phenomenon of
violence in Sri Lanka. to examine its larger social
causes - to analyse the struggle of different ethnic
groups and economic classes for distribution of power
and resources, for social mobility and for control of
the State. I don't question either the validity or the
necessity for such analyses. But this is not my way in
which I shall be looking at the phenomenon of violence.
The underlying social causes making for division and
conflict in our society are very real. But there is no
fatality about the way in which these conditions, and
the issues arising out of them, translate themselves
into widespread and continuing violence.
The transition from conflict to violence of that nature
is dependent on decisions made by the choice and will
of leaders - of the in control of the apparatus of the
State as well as those contending against it. it is
dependent on judgments made by the former about what is
legitimate in maintaining the security of the State and
by the latter about what is justified in opposing or in
subverting it Often the decisions in this respect by
one of these forces evoke a countervailing reaction
from the other, as we have seen in the cycles of State
violence and anti-State violence in recent times. It is
this area where conscious decisions, which can raise or
reduce the level of violence in our society, are made
by political actors that I am concerned with in this
lecture.
When I say 'conscious decisions". I am not claiming
that the decisive agent - the head of a government, the
leader of a militant group. or any other - is always
aware of the ultimate consequences of his actions. His
decisions are often motivated by considerations of
immediate expediency. But it is all the more important.
therefore, to bring into focus the wider and long term
consequences of such decisions.
Let us consider, for instance, the fateful day in 1956,
when the Official Language Act was introduced in
Parliament. The adoption of the Sinhala only policy was
itself one of those momentous decisions that have
changed the course of Sri Lanka's history.
Some of us may wish that S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike had
possessed the courage and consistency of his liberal
principles that Jawaharlal Nehru showed when he
desisted from imposing Hindi on the South. But it isn't
this aspect of the events of 1956 I want to discuss but
another which has a more direct bearing on the question
of violence.
On that same day when the Bill was introduced Tamil
opponents of the Bill staged a peaceful satyagraha on
Galle Face green, and were assaulted by thugs who had been
transported there. The head of the government not only
permitted this to happen but ordered the police away when of their
own volition they had arrived to keep the peace. This
was the first of a series of occasions in the fifties and sixties when peaceful protest by Tamil
political groups would be met with violence. The long
term consequences of this response would become
apparent in the seventies and eighties when a younger
and more militant Tamil generation emerged to
pursue their struggle by other means.
Let me compare these events with others which took
place in the area not of ethnic but of socio-economic
conflict. In 1978 and 1979 there were several cases
where striking and picketing workers and demonstrating
students on the university campuses were attacked by
thugs, sometimes with extreme brutality. The right to
picket and the right peacefully to demonstrate had
until then been regarded as normal democratic rights.
They were now met with violence.
What was the thinking behind those in power when they
dealt in this manner with minority satyagrahis, workers
and students? Perhaps they said to themselves, "We'll
teach them a lesson they won't forget!" But the lesson
learnt was was different from the one intended. The
leadership of the Tamil political
movement and of the working class and student
movements had been drawn from parties and organisations
which worked within the constitutional and democratic
framework. The effect of the violence used against them
was to undermine their credibility. By crushing
democratic and peaceful opposition. it promoted the
belief that the only effective weapon against a State
ready to resort to violence was counter-violence.
The notorious referendum of 1982, with the
widespread violence unleashed on the Government side,
extended this conviction into a far-reaching scepticsm
about the main mechanism of democracy - the electoral
process itself. Thus, in both North and South. State
violence actually promoted extremism and strengthened
those whose methods of dissent were the AK-47 and the
T-56.
Once the State was faced with armed insurgency, a
different rationale was adopted to justify the resort
to unrestrained violence. The very survival of the
State was threatened: therefore all methods were
permissible against those who sought to subvert it.
"There are no rules in war": one often heard this
self-justifying maxim from those who held the power of
life and death over the people. On this basis, torture, arbitrary killings, use of
terror against non-combatants, could all be
legitimised as necessary when the State had to fight
for its existence.
There is in fact a deadly symmetry between this logic
of ruling powers and the logic of militant groups
engaged in mortal combat with them. Both believe that
the end justifies the means. In the one case. it is the
end of preserving democracy. restoring law and order,
protecting national integrity: in the other case, it is
the end of national liberation or social liberation. In
either case, the lives of individual human beings are
considered to be a small price to exact for the
cherished end.
What makes this logic unacceptable are not just humane
considerations, which some people will dismiss as
sentimental moral squeamishness. It is the fact that
the means you use determine the end you reach. As the
German
socialist Lasalle wrote in the last century:
Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too.
Each different path brings other ends in view.
I shall deal later with the practice of militant
groups, but first, the insane logic of preserving
democracy by undemocratic methods and upholding law and
order by breaking the law must be questioned. An
elected government has certainly the right to defend
itself against attempts to overthrow it by force. But a
democratic state cannot use illegitimate methods even
in fighting terrorism and insurgency without becoming
indistinguishable from what it is fighting.
Consequently. in resorting to such methods it alienates
the sympathy and co-operation of those whom it claims
to be defending.
Civil wars are won not merely by guns but by the
support of the people. In that political battle every
victim of torture, every person arbitrarily executed,
every village terrorised, is (whatever the short-term
effects) a gain for the other side in the long run.
That was fully demonstrated in the North and East: it
has since been confirmed in other parts of the
country.
I must now confront the logic of militant groups whose
chosen method of political struggle is violence. The
issues which arise here are different, in certain
important respects, from those which relate to State
violence. Governments which are elected within the
parliamentary democratic framework claim to adhere to
political principles that exclude arbitrary violence.
When they resort to illegal terror, one may argue with
them on the basis of their professed principles. But
militant groups make no secret of the fact that
violence is their means, and that they hold this to be
the necessary way of changing society.
Militant groups in fact present themselves in the aura
of a historical tradition of revolution as an act of
liberation. Next month, France and the world will
commemorate the bi-centenary of a great revolution, and
the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and yet others
after them, all make the same appeal to our faith in
the right of people to overthrow unjust and oppressive
rulers.
Whether everything that happened in those revolutions
was desirable can be questioned. But, with whatever
qualifications, the liberating character of the great
revolutions has to be recognised - not least, in their
capacity to reassert and regenerate themselves after
periods of reaction. How then can we take the position
that violence in all forms and in all circumstances is
to be condemned? Or must we, on the other hand, concede
the claim of militant groups that whenever violence is
committed in the name of liberation, it has to be
accepted as justified?
I am not one of those who regard Marxist theory as a
body of sacred scriptures whose canonical authority
can't be questioned. In fact, I don't like today even
to hang a label round my neck and call myself a
"Marxist". But on this specific question of violence, I
think there is a great deal that is valid and useful in
the thinking of the classical Marxists, and that can
guide us in making a judgment about the violence of
militant groups today.
The classical Marxists made a clear distinction between
popular revolutions in which the broad masses intervene
to overthrow the existing state, and all forms of
coups, putsches and conspiracies in which an organised
minority acts to take control of the state into its own
hands.
They also distinguished between the methods used in one
and the other form of overthrowing the state. Mass
agitation. demonstrations and other actions involving
popular participation, the mass uprising, are
revolutionary forms: terrorist acts, such as explosions
of bombs in public places, sabotage and assassination
of individuals, are the work of groups seeking to
substitute themselves for the people as the agents of
change.
This doesn't mean that in popular revolutions people
acted with pure spontaneity: they were always organised
and led. But people in the mass don't rise unless it is
clear to them that they have no other means of changing
their condition. This is the moral justification of the
violence of a popular revolution when it occurs: that
the masses. by their action, have shown that they have
no other way out.
But when a minority, determined and ruthless as it may
be, seeks by its own terror and violence to change
society, with the people as onlookers, then we must ask
not only, "Does the end justify the means?" but also,
in terms of Lassalle's question, "Do the means lead to
the end?
If the end is liberation - which if anything must
signify a freer, more just and humane society - can
this be achieved by planting bombs regardless of whom
they may kill, by massacring defenceless and innocent
civilians because they speak a different language, or
by eliminating those who are in a different political
camp, and even wiping out their families?
The practice of this indiscriminate and unrestrained
violence coarsens and brutalises those who participate
in it, those who order it and those who carry it out,
and if they come to power, it will leave its stamp on
the society they create. What kind of society can that
be except a regimented one, run by a political
leadership freed of popular control in which all
dissent will be ruthlessly stamped out? To call that
"liberation" is possible only in accordance with the
linguistic practice of
Lewis Carrolls Humpty-Dumpty for whom words meant
just what he chose to make them mean.
I should like to dwell a little on the subject of
individual assassinations because it is relevant to the
fate of the man we are commemorating today. I think
everything we have gone through in the last decade
confirms the wisdom of those who ruled out
assassination as a legitimate method of pursuing
liberation of any kind.
You may start by killing unpopular politicians or
oppressive agents of the State, and claim that their
killing is just retribution for their crimes, and
perhaps few people will shed tears for the victims. But
once you have started on this slippery slope. there is
no possibility of stopping anywhere. You will go on to
eliminating police informants and feel justified again.
But you won't stop there because you have already
convinced yourself that the sacred end of liberation
justifies the killing of anybody who is an obstacle in
the way. And you are also certain that you and your
group possess the only right formula for achieving
liberation.
The combination of complete certainty of your
infallibility and total ruthlessness with regard to
your means is a terrifying thing. So, armed with this
logic, you will go on to kill even members of other
parties or groups who claim to be working for the same
ends but are doing so (according to you) by the wrong
methods. But you won't stop there either. Because by
the same logic, even those who disagree with you in
your own group are traitors to the cause and must
therefore be eliminated. And there is no reason to
suppose that this process will end with the seizure of
power. What it prepares the way for is a society of
permanent purges, torture chambers and execution
camps.
In this light we can see why Kandiah Kanthasamy had to die. He
believed in the freedom of the individual conscience
and judgment, arid was not prepared to subordinate it
to any political group or leader. In reading the
memorial volume, I have been particularly struck by
some passages from his own hand, which I could not have
read earlier, and which state precisely and
forthrightly his commitment to independent and
unfettered thought and activity. One is his admirable
memorandum arid project proposal for the founding of
Saturday Review. In the course of it he wrote:
This is not intended to be a political paper, nor
a partisan one. it will be a forum for all opinions
so far as they concern Tamil rights and race
relations In this country, but yet not parochial In
content...While the style of Journalism will be
individualistic, the approach will be liberal and
catholic.
Later he said in a letter:
We should take extreme care to preserve the
freedom of the press which is achieved more by
publishing conflicting views rather than suppressing
any.
And three weeks before his abduction, already facing
threats to his life, he wrote regarding the TRRO:
If we cannot carry on as a free organisation, we
should close it down.
It isn't difficult to see that the very existence of
such a man was a challenge to any group which was
seeking to enforce a coerced uniformity of opinion.
Kanthasamy can rightly be honoured as a martyr in a
cause which too few people are prepared to defend today
in this country.
