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Democracy Continues, Sri Lanka Style...
De Constructing Lakshman Kadirgamar
“the best foreign minister the country ever had.”
J. S. Tissainayagam
Northeastern Monthly - September 1, 2005
"..Kadirgamar was not a tortured soul
uncomfortable with Sinhala hegemony as well as Tiger
militarism and wracked by shades of intellectual doubt
as to where he belonged. He pitched his camp firmly
among the forces interested in debilitating the
self-respect and power-base of Tamils, hoping perhaps
that eventually a rump Tamil leadership could come to
some sort of accommodation with the Sinhalese. This is
why after his death the Venerable Ellawela Medananda
thero can call him “the best foreign minister the
country ever had.”
“The LTTE has wreaked havoc so many times
and now killed the best foreign minister this country ever
had. It was he who changed the international opinion of this
Island, which was hitherto referred to as a land of
barbarians.”
These are the words of Venerable Ellawela Medananda thero of
the Jathinka Hela Urumaya (JHU) spoken during the debate on
August 18 to extend the state of emergency. What was it that
prompted this Buddhist monk, well known for his virulent
anti-Tamil positions disguised as patriotic utterances, to
say these words about late Foreign Minister Lakshman
Kadirgamar, who was popularly regarded as a Tamil?
Even a cursory glance at the rhetoric that has been
emanating from the south following the assassination of
Kadirgamar shows how he had become a construct, which
anti-Tamil forces could exploit for their own purposes. At
the time of his death he symbolised the Sri Lankan state as
the extreme sections of the Sinhalese community envisaged
it. As such, the construct was very carefully built,
including what Sinhala nationalism wanted to project and
rejecting what it wished excluded.
This construct was used by Sinhala nationalists in the south
as a weapon to undermine the Tamil struggle to win their
rights and establish their identity in this country. It
helped the Sinhala ruling class both against the LTTE’s war
for a separate state, as well as to block demands by the
liberal sections of the Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim
communities, to reform the existing state structure and make
it more inclusive and pluralistic.
The construct had a number of elements that were interwoven
with each element complementing and helping to reinforce the
other. These elements were articulated either singly or in a
bundle to create the impression that the nationalist
sections of the Sinhala ruling class and their
constituencies required, both during Kadirgamar’s political
life, as well as at his death.
The most important element that went into this construct was
that he was known as a Tamil. By making him the foreign
minister, he became a Tamil who represented the Sri Lankan
state in its relations with other states in the comity of
nations. His position as a Tamil representing the Sri Lankan
state in its dealings with the international community, at a
time when others in the Tamil community were fighting for
self-determination alleging Sri Lanka was discriminating
against that community, went a long way in undermining the
rebel cause. Kadirgamar’s high profile position as foreign
minister (the United States used / uses General Colin Powell
/ Dr. Condoleeza Rice, both blacks, for the same reason) was
therefore strategic.
Having made Kadirgamar an important minister in PA/UPFA
cabinet, southern politicians angled their rhetoric cleverly
to show that he was beyond parochialism and small
mindedness. By doing this they automatically portrayed
Tamils fighting for self-determination because their ethnic
identity was inadequately reflected in the composition of
the Sri Lankan state, as narrow-minded and intolerant, and
thereby a lesser breed. This strategy also fed neatly into
the well-know stereotype of Tamils favouring their own kind
– the ‘nammada aal’ phenomenon.
How Sri Lanka’s ruling class manipulated this for its own
ends is best seen
from a statement made by that great upholder of liberality
and tolerance – JVP’s Wimal Weerawansa. “The late
foreign minister was a leader of rare calibre. He was a
person who thought beyond his community to project a Sri
Lankan identity,” said Weerawansa, at the joint party
leaders meeting after Kadirgamar’s assassination.
But while portraying him as a staunch defender of the Sri
Lankan state, the south has also tried to show him as a
greater lover of the Tamils. Deputy Defence Minister
Ratnasiri Wickramanayake said, “He was a genuine friend of
the Tamils…” Kadirgamar’s ‘love’ for the Tamils is described
differently in a curious piece appearing in a Sunday
newspaper soon after his death, where the author claims that
when Jaffna was under siege by the LTTE in 2000, it was
Kadirgamar who ‘saved’ the city. Less said about such views
the better!
The second element of the carefully cultivated construct was
Kadirgamar’s Buddhist leanings. The most vocal exposition of
this was his request at the United Nations that Vesak be
made an international holiday. The publicity given to this
was enormous. Even if that was a brief that Kadirgamar
undertook for the country, his very public profession of at
least the ritual aspects of Buddhism was obvious from his
meeting the mayanayakes and other members of the Buddhist
hierarchy on personal matters, and offering flowers when was
sworn in as foreign minister.
Kadirgamar was laid to rest according to Buddhist rites, a
ceremony that the south gave as much publicity to as it
could. As of now, nobody is aware as to whether he wanted to
be buried according to Buddhist rites or not and the claims
his family has raised about his Christian roots further
muddies the question. However, it does not gainsay the fact
the south used Kadirgamar’s public participation in Buddhist
rituals as liberally as it exploited his Tamilness for its
own cynical purposes.
The third element in the construct contains two parts: he
was an ‘educated’ man, and was associated with many icons of
excellence both internationally and nationally. His
formidable achievements in studies and sports as well as his
career at Trinity College, Kandy, the universities of
Peradeniya and Oxford, training in the law both at the Law
College, Colombo and the Inns of Court in England, and a
distinguished professional career were listed by the media
in great detail.
What is interesting in Kadirgamar’s signal personal
achievements is that they were attained outside the
northeast of Sri Lanka. In the hands of the southern
nationalists these went to reinforce the image of a man who
had been trained and equipped to achieve what he did, not in
the Tamil-majority northeast, but in the Sinhala-dominated
south and of course, overseas. It put Kadirgmar firmly as
part of Sri Lanka’s bourgeoisie and thereby in a different
social class from the leadership of the LTTE and the vast
majority of its supporters.
The importance the south paid to Kadirgamar as an elite
product of Sri Lankan society is best seen in the
newspapers, which ran his list of achievements and the
encomiums he received from the high and mighty, juxtaposed
to scathing editorials against his killers. It was as if the
Tamils were unable to appreciate his greatness and had, like
the base Indian, thrown the pearl away.
Finally, the construct represented him as a man who
valiantly strove to preserve the unity, sovereignty and
territorial integrity of his country by pursuing a
relentless war against LTTE ‘terrorism.’ The venerable thero
quoted above and others called him Sri Lanka’s “best foreign
minister” because he helped to ban the LTTE in the U.S and
elsewhere and while the Sri Lankan military pursued a bloody
‘war for peace’ against the Tamils, defended the Sri Lankan
state at international fora and with world leaders.
In the address to the nation following her foreign
minister’s death, President Chandrika Kumaratunga said,
“Minister Kadirgamar spoke against terrorism and convinced
the international community that terrorism is not a freedom
struggle. He was instrumental in getting the international
community to recognise the LTTE for what it is.”
These elements form the main pillars that went into the
construction of Kadirgamar’s public image. The
image-building was assiduously pursued by the Sinhala and
English media as well as Sinhala politicians and
opinion-makers so that Kadirgamar appeared to personify the
Sri Lankan state to make it appear that he and the state
were one in the war against the LTTE.
But how far does this construct, which is a product of the
south, seem relevant to the Tamils? For them, Kadirgamar’s
aloofness from their fears and hopes meant he was far
removed from the concerns of their community. It was made
worse by his actions to strengthen the Sri Lankan state,
which the Tamils regard as a Sinhala-dominated entity. The
result was a deliberate and systematic undermining of the
Tamil struggle for equality and justice.
We have to understand that Kadirgamar’s career with the
government spanning almost a decade should have convinced
him that a solution to the conflict would necessarily depend
on how power is configured between the stake-holding ethnic
and religious communities on the island. As a government
minister he would have been engaging in the conflict (or
conflict resolution as his southern admirers see it) having
conceptualised how he would like to see power distributed
among those stakeholders.
There are basically three ways in which this could be done:
1) Sri Lanka could split into two sovereign entities, one
governed by the Sri Lankan state and the other by the LTTE,
2) There could be a sharing of power between the southern
political forces and the LTTE and 3) Sri Lanka could be
governed by Colombo as the sole repository of power.
To this writer it is fairly clear which of these three
options Kadirgamar chose – the last. One can understand his
hesitation to work towards the fulfilment of the first
option. After all, there are other Tamils too who think in
the same way. But there are a number of Tamils who have
pursued the second option. For instance, Tamils admire late
Minister S. Thondaman, who despite being a leader who
represented the Upcountry Tamils and functioning entirely
within the Sri Lankan system, worked towards creating
structures for a political resolution of the ethnic war,
which included authorship of the
Thondaman Proposals in the early 1990s, which for that
time were very progressive.
But Kadirgamar forsook the second option for the third. His
admirers however say he worked for the second option albeit
silently. How such a thing is tenable is quite puzzling.
What Sri Lankans with even a modicum of intelligence have
come to acknowledge today is that the Tamils
have
cause to be disgruntled with the Sri Lankan state and
Sinhala hegemony. The peace process is transforming that
disgruntlement expressed through arms, to bargaining through
dialogue.
Where does Kadirgamar stand in this process? While being at
the forefront of violence during the
‘war for peace’
(1995-2001) and
deliberately lying about military excesses, he
stridently opposed every move that was made to share
power with the Tigers from the CFA to the ISGA proposals,
and most recently the P-TOMS.
What is more, he was at the forefront of moves to rearm the
state to pursue the military option against the LTTE by
advocating closer military ties with India and undermining
the CFA by encouraging the Karuna group and the likes of
Douglas Devananda, whose EPDP works closely with the army.
Kadirgamar’s actions against the Tamils and moderate,
accommodative politics do not stop there. Little before his
death he was known to have been conspiring with the JVP (the
party whose democratic credentials he once openly defended
in Britain) on how the more racist sections of the SLFP,
hand in hand with the JVP, could wrest power from the
moderate elements in that party.
So from the actions of Kadirgamar one could deduce that he
would have favoured the third option, and worked towards a
Sri Lanka governed by the Sinhala elite, with an utterly
debilitated Tamil leadership of mostly the anti-LTTE parties
thrown scraps as part of the deal for peace.
Therefore Kadirgmar was not a tortured soul uncomfortable
with Sinhala hegemony as well as Tiger militarism and
wracked by shades of intellectual doubt as to where he
belonged. He pitched his camp firmly among the forces
interested in debilitating the self-respect and power-base
of Tamils, hoping perhaps that eventually a rump Tamil
leadership could come to some sort of accommodation with the
Sinhalese. This is why after his death the Venerable
Ellawela Medananda thero can call him “the best foreign
minister the country ever had.”
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