The return to madness after four years of temporary sanity:

An Interventionist Tribute to Kethesh Loganathan

by Rajan Philips

'Sri Lanka: Lost Opportunities' is the title of an important book on Sri Lanka's national question. The good man who wrote that book in 1995, Kethesh Loganathan, has fallen victim to yet another lost opportunity to give priority to finding a political solution to the national question.

What began euphemistically as a 'humanitarian' dispute over water has now become a full scale war. Several hundreds have been killed, almost a lakh of people are displaced, local and foreign NGO workers have been killed or threatened, and even the High Commissioner for Pakistan has been targeted.

Kethesh Loganathan joins a long list of Tamils killed by Tamils over political differences. The killing of Tamil intellectuals and political leaders has become a predictable crime of the LTTE. Government spokesmen have called on the international community to stop the LTTE from future killings. The international community has done more than its part. The banning of the LTTE in India and several Western countries is a direct result of the LTTE's violation of the most basic of human rights: LIFE.

EU statement

The recent EU statement condemns the killing of Loganathan and makes it clear that the EU will not lift its ban until the LTTE stops such killings. Significantly, the EU did not indicate the LTTE's ongoing battles with the Sri Lankan army as a reason for continuing the ban. The international community seems to be adopting a neutral position in the battles between the LTTE and the army, apart from calling on both sides to stop fighting and start talking.

Will the Sri Lankan government deliver on this expectation? Or will it again turn a deaf ear to this call of the international community just as the LTTE always turns a deaf ear to calls for observance of the human rights of Tamils and Muslims?

'Devolve or die', wrote Dayan Jayatilleke. 'Die rather than devolve' seems to be the motto of the JVP and the JHU who are now in the saddle riding the State to war.

'Self-rule and shared rule', opined Kethesh Loganathan. He joined the Government Peace Secretariat to work towards that goal. That the JVP and the JHU should be allowed to usurp the government agenda for their own ends is a betrayal of Kethesh Loganathan and everything that he stood for and hoped to achieve through the Peace Secretariat.

What is conveniently forgotten in the lamentations for Loganathan and those who preceded him is that everyone of them, in their different ways, not only stood up to the LTTE but also stood up for the Tamils against the unitary state. The LTTE's human crime of killing is blatant and is readily condemned, but the government's political crime of not doing anything to change the unitary state is rarely mentioned and is easily ignored.

With a macabre sense of timing, Kethesh Loganathan was killed on the anniversary of Lakshman Kadirgamar's assassination. But I must say that Kethesh Loganathan was different from all others before him because he was a rare, if not the only, member of his social milieu to actually become a member of one of the Tamil militant organizations that sprouted after 1977. Each organization has had its bourgeois or notable fellow travellers and benefactors at home and abroad, but few of them crossed the line and became members of these organizations.

Kethesh was not only the son of C. Loganathan, a charming Colombo Tamil socialite and the first Ceylonese national to head the Bank of Ceylon, but also the nephew of C. Tharmakulasingham, C. Loganathan's younger brother, lawyer, and an LSSP stalwart in Point Pedro whose untimely death deprived the LSSP of a leader of potential national prominence but based in the North. C. Loganathan was proud that Kethesh was taking after his uncle in taking to politics.

More than his pedigree Kethesh was unique for his disinterested commitment to the cause of peace, which he understood as being not only the absence of war but also the assurance of justice and equality for Sri Lanka's minorities in a federal structure. I say 'disinterested' because he did not see politics and the peace process as launching pads for fame and career. He did not join the Peace Secretariat to embellish his CV but to do something positive and did so against the advice of many about his own security. To the end he stubbornly preferred the obscurity of his suburban residence to the panoply of state protection.

The critic

Kethesh Loganathan (KL) was critical of the Norwegian designed peace process because it did not protect the Tamils who did not agree with the LTTE from being killed by the LTTE. In fact, he agonised over this lacuna. But he did not entertain any illusion that peace could be achieved in Sri Lanka without negotiating with the LTTE. For him peace process meant neither the appeasement of the LTTE nor a military engagement with it. Finally, he urged the need for a southern consensus on a federal solution as the necessary premise for negotiating with the LTTE.

Like many others, KL went further and blamed the Norwegians for all these shortcomings. In my view, the Norwegians have been made the scapegoat for the failure of the government and opposition leaders in the South to take advantage of the peace process and the ceasefire agreement, reach consensus between them, and bring diplomatic and international pressure to bear on the LTTE.

It is fair to say that KL did not join the Peace Secretariat to be a party to restarting the war. But once the war restarted he was reduced to a co-opted Tamil who had no input or relevance to government decision making that was all about war and nothing about peace, let alone devolution.

The least the government can do now to honour the memory of Kethesh Loganathan, Neelan Tiruchelvam, Lakshman Kadirgamar and everyone else who paid with their lives for Tamil democracy and Sri Lankan federalism is to unilaterally set about federalising the state and creating international pressure on the LTTE to accept both.