Even after three decades of civil war in Sri Lanka, Lakshman Kadirgmar’s death last August was different. In what was supposed to have been a period of ceasefire between the government and the Tamil separatists, he was felled by a sniper’s bullet as he was climbing out of his backyard swimming pool in the diplomatic district of Colombo.
Kadirgmar, a Tamil, had spent years pushing for a peaceful end to the vicious fighting, which had brought the assassination of one president and of another in waiting, the frightening spectre of children suicide bombers, and of Buddhist priests calling for a return to military campaigns. Viewed against the long and bloody history of the conflict, Kadirgmar’s death should have come as no great surprise.
Eight months earlier, the tsunami that ravaged Sri Lanka’s coast seemed to have swept away the ethnic and political tensions that had divided the island. There were stories of Sinhalese fishermen saving their Tamil neighbours, of aid being rushed through previously guarded control lines, and of Tamil Tigers, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), putting down their weapons to help anyone in distress in their territory. The tsunami had overwhelmed the ingrained distrust among Sri Lanka’s different communities and, for a time at least, made them seem trivial by comparison.
I was among a group of journalists that met Lakshman Kadirgmar in 2000, as the Tamil Tiger leaders were making the first overtures towards a negotiated peace. The meeting was in the Foreign Affairs Ministry in downtown Colombo, a Victorian-era building reminiscent of an English public school. The building was enclosed by a six-metre-high reinforced iron fence, installed after the Tamil Tigers set off a bus bomb that damaged it in 1998. Kadirgmar was then nearing the end of his first term as foreign minister in a government formed by President Chandrika Kumaratunga.
He arrived two hours after our group had been herded into the state room, preceded by stony-faced and heavily armed soldiers. He was eloquent and engaging, prepared to admit the faults and mistakes of past Sri Lankan governments with candid comments that set his staff fidgeting uneasily in their seats.
His theme was that peace could be negotiated, but only if the rest of the world recognised the terrorism of the LTTE and moved to prevent funds being remitted to them from the expatriate Tamil communities in Australia, North America, Britain and elsewhere.