Wednesday, 13th August 2014
Professor Adam Roberts, editor of the book ‘Democracy, Sovereignty and Terror: Lakshman Kadirgamar on the Foundations of International Order’, made the following speech at Chatham House St. James Square London on August 11, 2012.
The late Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar’s ninth death anniversary is being commemorated this week. We publish today in full the text of the speech made by Prof Adam Roberts in 2012:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I will speak, if you forgive me, in very staccato terms in order to keep to the strict time limits that we have been set.
“This meeting is about a very longstanding question: can the difficult international task of containing and weakening terrorist movements be conducted in a manner consistent with international norms, including those relating to sovereignty, human rights, the laws of war and indeed democracy? It is well known that there are difficulties at absolutely every turn and that this has been evident in most societies that have faced a major terrorist threat.
“I want to take a particular angle on this question, exploring it through the prism of Lakshman Kadirgamar, who served as foreign minister of Sri Lanka for most of the period from 1994 until his assassination in 2005.
“I knew him well. I first came across him in 1964, if you please, when I was doing some research – which was eventually published in a Chatham House publication – on the Buddhist movement in Vietnam that had a part in overthrowing the tyranny of Ngo Dinh Diem. He had written the first-ever report on the country for Amnesty International. A young lawyer based in Sri Lanka, he had been sent to Vietnam to do this report. We will hear from Matt Pollard from Amnesty in a moment.
“I later discovered (a) that he was foreign minister of Sri Lanka, a mere thirty years later, but (b) that he had been a student at my college at Oxford, which I hadn’t understood before – at Balliol, which is why I’m wearing a Balliol tie this evening. You will find in the book Lakshman wearing one too. So we had that in common. We met much more, including a visit that my wife and I paid to Sri Lanka at his invitation in 2005. His widow, Suganthi, who is a lawyer in her own right, is with us today. A very warm welcome to you, Suganthi.
“I wanted to do this book about him because he struck me as an extraordinarily interesting figure in precisely this debate about how to combat terrorism and maintain legitimacy at the same time. I also wanted to do it because he was an extraordinarily brave man who deserves a tribute. He went into politics shortly after a close acquaintance of his – who indeed had also, like Lakshman, been president of the Union at Oxford, Lalith Athulathmudali – had been assassinated in Sri Lanka. To go into politics at the very time when you are reeling from the shock of the assassination of a colleague is a brave thing in itself.
“I was also interested because he symbolized in his youth the unity of the peoples of Sri Lanka. He actually carried a scroll in a relay in 1952 opening the Colombo Exhibition, which symbolized that unity. There were four people representing the four communities and he handed the scroll to a fellow Tamil in Colombo. His death in Colombo half a century later was also symbolic of the disappointments of Sri Lanka’s existence, of the difficulty of that very question of ethnic relations that had been the issue that he had sought to assist and ameliorate by that symbolic relay race fifty years earlier.
“So here was a very unusual combination in one person. He had an impeccable background and a strong belief in democracy and human rights that was not just a youthful indiscretion – it continued. When he went into politics in 1994 he was explicitly critical of the employment of state terror and said so. He continued to emphasize human rights and the law of armed conflict as basic rules that must be observed. Yet he was also exceptionally tough on terrorism. I believe this reflected the fact that although we in Western societies think and act as if terrorism is uniquely a threat to us, actually the societies that are seriously threatened by terrorism are the more fragile societies of, for example, post-colonial states, some of which have broken up and more no doubt will break up under the terrible strain of such divisiveness.
“His toughness was shown in a quite remarkable speech that he gave in this very hall in 1998. In that speech, he proposed an expanded definition of terrorism, because he said that in British law we had too narrow a definition – we were only concerned with threats to us, not with threats to others. He also proposed that we had too narrow a definition of the types of action that might constitute terrorism, and then already in 1998 he identified willful interference with electronic communications – willful disruption of it – as something that might need attention. Incidentally – and it shows how hard he did his homework – both of those amendments to UK law were subsequently enacted in the Terrorism Act 2000. It wasn’t because he stood here and said it and it was done, it was because he studied the way that the matter was being considered and what the logic of it must be, and went ahead on that basis.
“He also memorably stated – and that was the most important part of the speech he gave from this podium – that we were being too tolerant in the UK of foreign terrorist organizations in our midst. Of course after 9/11 everybody suddenly agreed with him, but it took the events of 9/11 to provoke real awareness of that.
“He did a phenomenal job of getting Western governments to classify the Tamil Tigers as a prohibited terrorist organization. What he didn’t achieve in his lifetime, he achieved after his assassination, when, on the rebound, Europe finally got its act together – also Canada at that time, the European Union and Canada – and declared it a prohibited organization.
“I could go on about his toughness and his belief in the use of power as well as in legitimacy. The way in which he took very quick action to get military support to save Jaffna when it was under threat in 2000. What I think must be the most memorable speech ever in the Sri Lankan parliament, when he denounced the ceasefire agreement with the Tamil Tigers as an agreement that threatened the dissolution of the Sri Lankan state.
“In conclusion: one, he is worth remembering because he saw terrorism as a dangerous threat but also as an essentially political one that had to be met by a political response. Two, he did believe in the importance of power, including military power. He was a lawyer by training and inclination and profession but he came to respect the art of war. Graeme Lamb perhaps can tell us more about the role of power in addressing terrorism.
Three, he was critical of interventionism even when it was in the name of counterterrorism. He opposed the US-led war in Iraq but he had more sympathy with the 1999 NATO war over Kosovo. It is an interesting illustration of how he, as a lawyer, could be flexible in his interpretation of the law when difficult questions arose.
Four, although he was strongly in favour of the United Nations, he opposed it getting involved in Sri Lanka’s conflict, much as we in the UK had opposed United Nations involvement in the Northern Ireland conflict. Fifth, while firmly in favour of proscribing the Tamil Tigers, he also, interestingly, supported their de-proscription in Sri Lanka when there seemed to be a possibility of serious negotiation with them. Again, a sign of flexibility.
“Lastly, he was surely right to see that the war between terrorist movements and their opponents is in significant measure a struggle for legitimacy and that governments need to be careful to ensure that to the maximum extent possible, their actions are perceived as legitimate both domestically and internationally. The interesting thing about his career is not that he saw that connection – you can find it elsewhere – but that in his career and his decisions, he had to face up to all the difficulties that that connection poses. Thank you very much.”
http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=local/he-had-impeccable-background-and-strong-belief-democracy
