Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror

Lakshman Kadirgamar on the Foundations of International Order

Adam Roberts, Adam Roberts

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857732668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'For those of us who have to live with terrorism, when we leave home in the morning there is no guarantee that we will come back.' Thus Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister, foreshadowed his own assassination in 2005. He was an astute and brave thinker and practitioner on many key issues in international politics. Long before 9/11 he warned Western democracies that they were too passive about the activities on their soil of foreign terrorist movements and their front organizations. He was a strong advocate of democracy and human rights, conducting the first-ever Amnesty investigation into the problems of a particular country - Vietnam. He was uniquely effective in countering the propaganda campaigns of the separatist Tamil Tigers in his native Sri Lanka - the movement which ultimately took his life. This definitive work explores the continuing relevance of his ideas for the modern world. Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror presents Kadirgamar's distinctive voice in his major speeches. It also offers a convincing picture, by those who knew him, of a scholar-statesman who was both a realist and an idealist.
He showed that these approaches can be combined in both thought and action.

PART I

Appraisals

CHAPTER 1

‘Dare the Deepening Tide’

Lakshman Kadirgamar on the Revolution of our Times

Adam Roberts

The life of Lakshman Kadirgamar is symbolic of the great revolution of our times – the end of the old European colonial empires. Born in Ceylon under British colonial rule, he exemplified the hopes, the difficulties, the successes and the tragedies of the decolonization process. He had unusually clear views about the many difficult issues – both domestic and international – faced by post-colonial states: their changing constitutional arrangements, their economic development, the relations of their different communities, their vulnerability to corruption and political violence, their search for friends and allies, and their need for a strong framework of international norms and institutions.

Lakshman was just 15 years old when, on 4 February 1948, the state of Ceylon (since 1972, Sri Lanka) achieved its independence in a ceremony in Torrington Square, Colombo – subsequently renamed Independence Square. In the years that followed, as a brilliant athlete and as a representative of the country’s Tamil minority, he took part in at least one prominent relay-running ceremony celebrating the country’s independence and the unity of its peoples. Some accounts of this participation are probably myth.¹ However, the factual record is remarkable enough to need no embellishment. On 23 February 1952, the opening day of the Colombo Exhibition, Lakshman was one of four celebrated athletes who, at the final stage of four long relay runs from distant parts of Sri Lanka, carried respectively scrolls in Sinhala, Tamil, Arabic and English to four young ladies representing the major communities of the country.² This exhibition was closely tied to the ambitious economic development aims that had been proclaimed in 1950 in the Colombo Plan.³ Lakshman’s run was at once symbolic of his role as a Tamil, his commitment to inter-communal solidarity and his faith in the alluring prospect of an international wave of development of which his newly-independent country would be part. In short, this run by young athletes was a symbol of the hopes of a new and better post-colonial order.

Over half a century later, on 15 August 2005, it was again in Colombo, in Independence Square, that the assassinated minister was cremated. He was a victim of the political failures, communal divisions and systematic terrorism which he had consistently sought to tackle, showing extraordinary intellectual and physical courage as he did so. His journey from celebrations so symbolic of Sri Lanka’s unity to a cremation so symbolic of its subsequent troubles is an exploration of the problems of the post-colonial age – not just those of his country and his times, but also those of our world and our times in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Lakshman Kadirgamar is most widely remembered as a remarkably successful foreign minister of Sri Lanka in 1994–2001 and from 2004 until his assassination on 12 August 2005. He worked skilfully and steadfastly to achieve three inter-related objectives. The first was to secure good, even close, relations simultaneously with a range of countries that mattered deeply, if in very different ways, to Sri Lanka: these included China, India, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The second was to engage Sri Lanka in support of international organizations and international norms: he was especially concerned to ensure that his country could stand tall in international fora, and could be clearly identified as supporting the rule of law, human rights and prohibition of the use of child soldiers. The third was securing the international isolation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), usually known simply as the Tamil Tigers, with which the government of Sri Lanka had been in conflict since 1983. None of these three objectives was wholly new for Sri Lanka, and he never claimed that they were. However, in his periods of office the governments of which he was a member achieved more on all three fronts than their predecessors.

There is a strong tradition that ‘the Head of Government in Sri Lanka has had his or her personal style and personal influence on foreign policy decision-making.’⁴ Since the time of J. R. Jayewardene, Sri Lanka’s first Executive President (1978–89), it has been the president, not the prime minister, who as head of government has the main executive authority.⁵ Lakshman worked closely with Chandrika Kumaratunga, President of Sri Lanka from November 1994 to November 2005. However, as foreign minister he was more involved in actually making foreign policy than most of his predecessors had been; and in a difficult period for Sri Lanka, riven by internal conflict, he greatly improved the country’s international position. On 12 August 2005 he was killed by the Tamil Tigers, as he was pretty sure he would be, but his achievements did not die with him. The diplomatic isolation of the Tamil Tigers, that he had worked so skilfully to achieve, helped to pave the way for their eventual, and controversy-ridden, military defeat in 2009.

On the central issue facing the government of Sri Lanka in his time and subsequently, he had a distinctive and clear view. He came to realize, more than many of his colleagues in Sri Lankan public life, that achieving peace with the Tamil Tigers was almost impossible. At the same time, he placed great emphasis on the need to wage the struggle in a manner acceptable to international opinion and consistent with the laws of war. And in the aftermath of the conflict he would certainly have worked to help achieve a magnanimous settlement taking into account the rights of minorities.

His was a remarkable record by any standard, and especially for a man who first became a member of parliament, and foreign minister, at the late age of 62, having previously had a very different career as a lawyer and as a senior official of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. The chapters in this book by people who knew him bear impressive witness to the extraordinary effectiveness of his public service from 1994 to 2005, and to the personal qualities and principles that were a key part of his achievement.

Yet this book is not written to bolster claims about Lakshman’s success. This is not only for the obvious reason – that there were inevitably failures as well as successes – but also because, especially in politics, success is always a great deceiver. The events in which he was involved – deeply controversial anyway – may come to be viewed differently as times change and history moves on. Rather this book seeks to present Lakshman’s thought as part of a coherent world-view that has strong claims on our attention today.

As foreign minister, he was deeply concerned with advancing a well thought-out view of that series of complex and often contradictory processes that constitute the international relations of our times. He attached great importance to his speeches on the subject, putting much personal work into their preparation. However, his work was not confined to his own speeches, nor to the usual duties of a foreign minister – extensive and intensive as these were. He felt that with its rich heritage Sri Lanka should give the world, as he put it, ‘something more than just tea, tourism and terrorism’. He had extraordinarily wide interests, not least in the music, theatre and arts of both East and West. It was typical of him that he chaired a committee to assist in the preparation and publication of a stunning work about a fine Sri Lankan artist, Stanley Kirinde, spending much time coaxing potential donors and encouraging its author.⁶ The book was launched in Colombo on 18 August 2005, just six days after Lakshman’s assassination, amid many tributes to his role in the project.

He also made strenuous efforts to develop Sri Lankan expertise in international relations. He took steps to ensure that recruits for Sri Lanka’s diplomatic service were chosen purely on merit, and he improved their training. His stint as foreign minister is considered a golden era, in which a previously disparate and ineffective group of diplomats was given punch and purpose – and were at last able to put up considerable resistance to LTTE propaganda work.

These efforts continued to the very end of his life. By a tragic irony, the day of Kadirgamar’s assassination was also the day on which he fulfilled a long-held ambition by launching a new journal, International Relations in a Globalising World, of which he was editor-in-chief.⁷ He had discussed the project with me at his official residence in Colombo earlier that year, inveigling me into writing an article for it. He told me how he saw the journal as central to his ambition to develop Sri Lanka’s depth of expertise in world politics. In launching the journal at a ceremony in Colombo on 12 August 2005 he said: ‘It is a great day of joy and achievement.’ He indicated that the discipline of international relations had expanded to such levels that any conceivable topic had bearing on it. He said the journal was his dream and he decided to take a plunge into the deep end when some had raised doubts as to the viability of the project.⁸ Within a few hours of this moment of joy and achievement he was assassinated. Although the LTTE issued a statement denying its involvement, it is widely believed that it was responsible.⁹ As with many murders attributed to the LTTE, the investigators at the time were unable to capture the assassins, who were believed to have fled to LTTE-controlled areas. In 2008 six persons were indicted in connection with his killing. The first name on the list was Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the LTTE. He, along with three of the others indicted, was subsequently killed in the conflict. The two remaining indicted persons were held in custody and then tried in 2009–12 in connection with the assassination.

Twenty-first Century International Order

This chapter embarks upon, and the rest of the book continues, an exploration of Lakshman’s understanding of international relations. As he was only too well aware, international order today rests on foundations which, while not wholly new, contain some new elements. The problems with which he grappled continuously as foreign minister were problems that are all too typical of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular:

1. It is conflict within states, not war between them, that poses the greatest problems in the everyday lives of millions of people, and in the conduct of international relations. Such conflict – which has taken many forms, from coups d’ètat to civil wars – is a reflection of difficulties inherent in the process of creating, in the wake of empires of various kinds, states with legitimate governments, borders, constitutional arrangements and strategies for development. Ethnic and regional divisions within states often contribute to these difficulties.
2. Largely because of such difficulties, post-colonial states of the Third World have had to recognize that the threats faced by contemporary international society lie as much in their midst as they do in distant great powers and power blocks. In these circumstances the rhetoric of non-alignment, while by no means abandoned, is of reduced relevance.
3. Widespread unemployment and emigration exacerbate tendencies to view the state as illegitimate, and provide a basis for insurgencies and other challenges to the state. Diaspora communities sometimes become militantly opposed to the state from which they fled, thus contributing to its difficulties in establishing its legitimacy.
4. The capacity of outside powers to understand, and to take action regarding, conflicts within post-colonial states is distinctly limited, with ambitious attempts often resulting in humiliation.
5. Terrorism and the international struggle against it have become central preoccupations of many states. This has created new pressures for close cooperation between states. However, it has also raised difficult questions about whether, in pursuing the cause of countering terrorism, it is justifiable to invade and occupy sovereign states, and also to violate certain basic human rights, including freedom from torture.
6. The body of international law inherited from the last century is under pressure, and questions constantly arise about whether its fundamental rules, including the sovereignty of states, the laws of armed conflicts, and human rights rules, are capable of being implemented effectively today, especially in the context of internal conflicts and international terrorism.
7. Global international organizations, especially the United Nations, play a more important role in international politics than ever before, and are essential if global problems are to be tackled effectively. Yet their role is unavoidably limited, leaving a range of problems to be addressed at the level of individual states, or by other international bodies.
8. Regional groupings of states have sought to overcome some of the many problems – relating above all to economic issues and international security – resulting from the division of the world into sovereign states. Such groupings have made most progress in Europe, with the development of the European Union (EU), but are much less developed in other regions, including South Asia. Everywhere they have run into problems about the extent to which they can modify or even transcend the role of states.
9. Religions have a larger role in international politics than many advocates of secularism and modernization had anticipated: religious beliefs and organizations have been critically important in many positive developments, such as the civil resistance of the Buddhists in South Vietnam in 1963, as well as in exacerbating certain armed conflicts and terrorist campaigns.
10. New powers are emerging, raising the critical question of whether such a process can happen peacefully or must, as so often in the past, lead to war.
11. Multiparty democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights are now the most widely accepted principles for the organization of human societies, yet they are far from being universally accepted or respected, and are hard to establish in some societies. Sometimes it is necessary for democratic states to have dealings, or even establish close relationships, with non-democratic regimes of various kinds.

In many speeches, especially in the years from 1994 to 2005, Kadirgamar addressed all of these enduring issues in international politics, and he did so in ways that were clear-sighted and articulate. Yet his position was not free of what critics would call contradictions, and others would more respectfully call creative tensions. He was a lifelong advocate of democracy, but at the same time consistently sought to maintain good relations with certain non-democratic states. He was a human rights advocate, and the first person in the world to conduct an Amnesty investigation in a country, but vigorously defended his own country despite many problems in its human rights record. He was a particularly strong and committed opponent of terrorism, but at the same time a critic of the idea that the cause of counter-terrorism justified military interventions in states and foreign occupations. He was a strong believer in the role of international organizations, but was concerned to keep the UN at arm’s length from involvement in Sri Lanka’s internal conflict. And he was a passionate believer in diplomatic solutions, but became the foremost critic of the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement – negotiated with Norwegian help, between the Sri Lanka government and the LTTE – because of specific flaws which he exposed forensically. The list could be extended, but its underlying core is clear: he embodied many of the apparent contradictions that any able and conscientious person must face when dealing with international politics. To put it all more simply, he was both an idealist and a realist, both a thinker and a man of action, and therefore much more interesting than those who can be tidily classified in only one of these categories.

All the chapters and documents in this book shed light on these key issues and on Kadirgamar’s responses to them. In this introductory survey I address four basic questions that arise from my knowledge of him and his work over a long period:

1. What were the personal beliefs and political convictions that sustained him in his career? And in particular, how did he see the role of religion and ethnic issues in public life?
2. How did his experience of school and university, in Sri Lanka and at Oxford, shape his world outlook?
3. How did his international calling evolve?
4. How coherent were his views on key issues in politics and international relations – about the role of democratic systems, the continuing validity of sovereignty, and the contributions of international law and organizations? And above all, how coherent was his view that terrorism had to be tackled within a framework of law? Or, put differently, is his amalgam of realism and idealism intellectually and politically defensible?

Inheritance: Religious and Ethnic Issues in Sri Lanka

Lakshman Kadirgamar was born in Colombo on 12 April 1932. The family, originally from the city of Jaffna, was Tamil – that is, part of the ethnic minority who inhabit many parts of Sri Lanka, especially the north. His forbears, like most Tamils, had been Hindus, but his grandfather had converted to Christianity, taking on the given name of Christian, and becoming the first Ceylonese Registrar-General of the Supreme Court. It was Christian Kadirgamar’s son, Samuel, who established the family in Colombo, where he became the first President of the Law Society of Ceylon. He admired Mahatma Gandhi and presided over one of the many meetings attended by Gandhi during his visit to Ceylon in November 1927.¹⁰ He married Edith Mather, whose father was a businessman. Lakshman was the youngest of their six children.

Religion

Sri Lanka has long experience of being multi-confessional. In the 1981 census – the last to be conducted in all 25 districts of the country – the population was about 15 million (today it is about 21 million). Of these, some 69 per cent of the population were Buddhists, 15 per cent were Hindu, 7 per cent Muslim and 7 per cent Christian.¹¹ Leaving ...