“Raviraj I actually got to know first when I was at International Alert. We had taken twenty MPs to various countries to learn about peace processes. But I got to know him better when we returned and when he became a strong supporter of the National Anti-War Front. He was an eloquent Sinhala speaker and he saw himself as a bridge builder between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities.

We had taken part in a demonstration in Colombo, at the Vihara Maha Devi park, when we were attacked by Buddhist monks. The monks had said go take it to Killinochchi, don’t say it in the South! My response to the monk was you can never go to the north, but we can. And so we took up the challenge and agreed to have a rally in Mannar. Raviraj came for the rally, as well as Vasudeva Nanayakkara and several others; quite a few didn’t. The Bishop had organised for large numbers of people to come, but this time the military did not want us to demonstrate. They did everything possible to block the people from coming, but we managed to still have the meeting. Raviraj was to help organise the next rally in Vavuniya and then in Jaffna. That didn’t happen. Of course, several weeks after the Vihari Mahadevi incident, he was shot dead in Colombo. When we heard about it we were all shocked. We took the decision to have a mass procession as a tribute to Raviraj. We discussed it with his family and when we were planning the whole thing, the decision was taken to close down all the shops. We were able to put some advertisements on television, with Raviraj’s picture with blood on his face. Then we were told by the DIG on the day that we couldn’t have the rally. So I said please go and inform whoever gave you that order that I will be compelled to go on television and ask the people to do sathyagraha. Then one hour later the DIG came and said, “sir, you can have the rally!” It attracted some ten thousand people. The procession took only two days – it was not just Tamils that took part, but large numbers of Sinhalese and Muslims.

I’m sure Raviraj had a problem with regard to the position he held. He was obviously close to the TNA, and also worked with the LTTE. But he was a passionate human rights lawyer, he worked on many cases. To me, he was a very human person. He responded to injustice whether it was Sinhalese or Tamil, black or white. He was that kind of person. He was very popular, not only in the North but also in the South.

Raviraj did not conform to the stereotypical Tamil militant. For them, there were two nations for the Sinhalese and for the Tamils and they had no business in trying to co-mingle with the other. But Raviraj was always keen to identify with the so called “Sinhalese issues”, to join forces with the Sinhalese. So obviously he must have been a terrible threat to those people who wanted to show that all Tamils are anti-Sinhalese. Raviraj was not anti-Sinhalese and I’m sure [certain people] must have found this image very difficult. There must have been forces on both sides of the divide who may have found it an uncomfortable position. Who killed him, I don’t know. Scotland Yard was supposed to uncover the murder, but it still remains a mystery.

Vijaya Kumaratunga I knew very well. During my earlier incarnation as Janaweera, a kind of ‘people’s force’, it was Vijaya who said to me that he would do everything to join forces with us. He had the adoration of the minorities and he was fearless. An actor, but also an ordinary guy – he used to sing love songs! He had gone through the whole process of politicisation – of the need for peace. It was very clear that he was also a target by the JVP and it was only a matter of time; he was getting too popular. If he had lived, he would have most probably been the president of Sri Lanka.

In my case, I have always lived with the possibility of death knocking on my doorstep. In 1971 or 1972 when Janaweera became a massive movement, people were threatened. There were attempts at that time on my life. And in one instance, during a bi-election in Katana, when we were campaigning for the SLFP and Vijaya was also campaigning, they mistook me and killed another guy thinking it was Kumar Rupesinghe in a white Volkswagen! That was my favourite, everybody knew me for this white beetle. After that I knew I was taking a risk, that one had to take. But being high profile has its own insurance policy. Because you become so high profile, people think twice. Do they want to make you a martyr?”

“Neelan I knew pretty intimately, during different phases of his life. First, when he established the ICES, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies. I was then Secretary General of International Alert and we took part in quite a few conferences together. After that, when I was coordinator of the United Nations university programme in conflict resolution and governance, ICES became a key partner and as a result I used to meet Neelan quite frequently and we talked a lot about the situation in Sri Lanka. He was a very different person – gentle, firm, a visionary. A cosmopolitan who felt comfortable in Colombo and who had many Sinhala friends. When the government of Chandrika came into power, he thought that he could play a role in the making of the constitution, as an ‘insider’. He was able to muster support for it, but he was also then being seen as a traitor. He was in the TULF, but was also not in the TULF – whilst he was more of a moderate who felt that dialogue with the Sinhalese was essential, there were those in the TULF who had already decided that that was not on. When he was involved in the constitutional issue, the attack on him by the LTTE became very vicious, particularly when they thought that he had played a role in bringing Kadirgamar into the cabinet – that it was he who had suggested the appointment. He was therefore now increasingly being seen as a quisling, as a traitor.

Over this period of time, I was very conscious of Neelan’s security. I would raise the issue with him frequently when he came to my house and take my two kids for ice cream – he was very fond of my two children. I asked him once was it worth it? He seemed always very stressed, having so many bodyguards around him at all times – it was not a pleasant way to live. And he said yes it’s telling on me, but he said, “Kumar, how can I go abroad? Sri Lanka’s still the best place in the world!” But in the last period of his life, he told me that he had decided to take sabbatical leave, that he was going to take three months, to spend some time in Italy and then go to Harvard. That he would decide after that. He got some kind of sense that it may not be worth it, that he may end up a casualty. But of course he was assassinated before all that. It was again a situation where any moderate Tamil eschewing polarisation and trying to find the middle ground was attacked by your own people as a traitor. In deeply divided societies you cannot stand in the middle, because you are then in the firing line. So once again, he was a casualty of that. I don’t think we are going to have any more Neelan Tiruchelvams in the future, they are a dying breed. The more this conflict gets polarised, there won’t be people who can stand in the middle, either from the Tamil or the Sinhalese side. There will be more and more polarisation and people will have to decide, to choose. We already seeing this when we take the Sinhala intellectuals today. Who is writing to the newspapers? During the ceasefire there were quite a few people I knew who were writing to the papers, to the Daily Mirror. But they are not writing anymore.”

“Kethesh Loganthan I have known for a fairly long time, but intermittently. I knew him before 1983, at the Social Scientists’ Association. He was an angry man at that time. He was very articulate, quite brilliantly articulate, about the Tamil national question.

Then after ’83 he underwent a profound transformation. His father was a distinguished banker and he came from a pretty upper middle class family. But he gave everything up and went to South India to join the EPRLF [Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front]. And that was a period where he played another role, as an advocate of the cause, where once again brilliantly, he argued his case for Tamil Eelam and the whole question of the armed struggle. He had played a role in Thimpu, the first talks. Then I met him much, much later around 1989 or 1990 when he came to Norway. Now this time, he went through another metamorphosis. The EPRLF had been destroyed by the LTTE and he was very shaken by that experience. I was in a position to help him to get refuge in Norway. It was a period of self-reflection for him. And I think what bothered him was the question of who were heroes and who were patriots. He had been part of a militant movement and was seen as a hero and then suddenly after the Indo-Sri Lankan accord, he was brandished as a ‘traitor’ by the LTTE. He couldn’t live with that. We discussed this issue and he was very uneasy with the term, reflecting on the fratricidal struggle within the Tamil community, of the deep divisions of the community. Then there was another metamorphosis, when he was very much [part of the government's] Peace Secretariat. He had opted to join the government and now he had taken specifically an anti-LTTE position. For me, I found that uncomfortable. He was in the Peace Secretariat and one of the parties to the conflict was the LTTE. So I raised the issue how can you be in the Peace Secretariat when you have to bring these parties together. You have a subjective experience, however valid that experience is, you are now talking to me, and I came here to discuss how to bring the two parties together and you are now telling me that by doing that I am [inappropriately] supporting the LTTE. So you are now taking up the position of the so called ‘patriots’ amongst the Sinhalese, who also brand me with the same brush. You are all strange bedfellows. And that was pretty sharp argument and discussion, which not only I but several civil society [members] felt when they went to visit the Peace Secretariat. But what comes out of Kethesh is his complete involvement and engagement of the issues of his time and himself is a creature of his time. Would he be seen as a martyr? That was what eventually came to his mind: when I die how will history see me? As a traitor or as a martyr? And my answer to that was, it’s too early to say. It would take a fairly long time for that position to be defined.

Being a personal friend, I did not necessarily agree with him when he took a very explicitly anti-LTTE position. For me, parties to conflict have blood on their hands, both sides have blood on their hands. I am not one to pronounce and give judgement on that. If you are for peace you need to somehow find ways of engaging with people who have blood on their hands. But he came to the position like many militants that the LTTE was fundamentally no longer a progressive force, but a fascist force which itself was a problem for the Tamil people. Therefore the physical elimination of the LTTE was in order. This was the position taken by Kehesh Loganathan, by Dayan Jayatilleke and a whole lot of people who at an earlier stage had joined the militant movement and played their role and had now come to that position. It was an uncomfortable position because that was also the position of the Sinhala nationalists. And I think in that I am sure he must have felt very uncomfortable. Certainly we had very sharp debates publicly on these issues but we continued to remain friends.

The issue of fratricide amongst the Tamil community continues to be there. Traitors and martyrs is an eternal story in this saga and Kethesh is a casualty in that.”

Does this context now mean that all journalists who exercise freedom of speech in expressing their opinions and attempt to make information available to the public have become ‘activists’ simply by virtue of doing, what is after all, their job?

June 19, 2008

For me, a human rights activist is an individual who has made a commitment to defending the human rights of others. The commitment can vary from the individual deciding to gather at Lipton Circus to protest the eviction of Tamils from Colombo, to the exceptional sacrifice that Rajani Thiranagama has no doubt made. Those that are also mentioned in this feature – Vijaya Kumuratunga, Neelan Tiruchelvam, Richard de Zoysa and Raviraj – also belong somewhere along this range of commitment.

For me, by including Rajani in the group, the bar is set very high. Not many will come close to the unwavering commitment that she has made to human rights in Sri Lanka and the example she has set for us all. This commitment is captured by Helen Klodawsky in this clip from her documentary ‘No More Tears Sister’ (2004), about the life and work of Rajani.

Why does Raviraj deserve the label ‘activist’? Activists may not of course measure up to the ideal, but does that make them any less deserving of the description? I know that Raviraj the lawyer, like Rajani, worked tirelessly in defence of political prisoners and others detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act through his work for the well-respected Home for Human Rights. But it is true Raviraj’s life comes with complexities: Raviraj the human rights lawyer, Raviraj the government mayor and Raviraj the parliamentarian with the “proxy organisation for a ruthless and fascist organisation”. To Sivamohan, the membership of Raviraj to the TNA necessarily excludes him from being considered an ‘activist’, or certainly to be mentioned alongside the company of Rajani and Kethesh.

But Kethesh’s life is no less complex. Many people didn’t understand why Kethesh took the decision to join the government’s Peace Secretariat or take on the role of Secretary to the APRC in the final months of his life, having earlier criticised the government for its failings. Both of these bodies represent a government that at the time of Kethesh’s involvement was justifying all manner of human rights violations, for which it was condemned internationally. But for me, it was clear that he was trying to influence these institutions and hoped in turn they could influence the government to improve its track record on human rights and devolution proposals. Whether he achieved this aim or not is irrelevant. And his involvement in these government bodies is also irrelevant to him being considered an ‘activist’; in fact it was the activist in him that made him join up. As Jeyaraj wrote, remembering Kethesh as a “pro-government, establishment man” was perhaps “the unkindest cut of all”. Kethesh didn’t “succumb” to accepting the ways of the government; he joined thinking that by working with it, he may be able to change a party to the conflict. Similarly for Raviraj and his involvement in TNA politics. When you talked with Raviraj, you would have understood that he was working with the TNA in the belief that he could bring about change.

I think that you need to look at the life and work of an individual in their totality. Raviraj may have been a less than perfect activist when judging him against Rajani Thiranagama, but he had demonstrated a commitment to defending the human rights of others. And that is what got him killed. For me, that is enough to remember him as an activist.

august is the cruelest month,
but so are others
and have become
justly indistinguishable.
we have painted the town all
red, read in tooth and claw,
the tigers’s clasp
on our grasp
of our destiny, writ large
in red.
our land, our sand, nation-mad-sad.

i dream, over and over,
a picture painted in the colour
of kumkum, a goddess
bathed in sweat;
the assassin’s hand pointing,
an over the shoulder shot, medium, long.
its not me.
the news print is violent.
rites of passage
write of blood; tales
lulling children to sleep
through the shelling
and the guns shooting.

death haunts
every corner
of our word
misbegotten on an ill-fated day
as the nation and land
creep into our bloody
existence.
a red hot fever
burns it,
a newspaper boy
delivers news of his
gunman’s victory, gunning him down
in the light of day–his youth
ful body
took up
too much space
in our minds–our home
land.

words politic;
here lies a body, uncaring,
footprints already erased,
like marks left on the water’s edge
by soft silken slippers.
a nation mourns for the foreign minister
it seems, as the sniper
lands a bullet, made in foreign,
on his neck, he is foreign
too, traitor.
my words see the blood curling up
on the edges of the body
as hope quickly dies;
for we did hope for him
and for us.

i scour each face i encounter
for traces of death,
lurking in the corner of
every smile,
in laughter, breaking out in dimples,
and creases of love and life;
the jeweled finger
tugs at the strings binding my heart tight
against love;
the muzzle
on
where the heart
pounds wild
with new born blood
spilled all over the asphalt;
she, a broadcaster, urgently puts a call through
to the world, to make love to it,
publicly, in a public booth,
for another lease of life on this earth, our home
land.
to broadcast other words of hope,
of struggle

sivaram i knew
and did not like,
yet words must flow in blood for him too,
the memory of his face undimmed by years
of hostility. the bodies
lie across the front page
of the cheap newspaper i scan
and the closeknit words
jump out at me, the order to the hangman
reversed that last minute
tell:
its not me, me, me,
not you; we
can mourn today, let tears flow
let your feelings slip
through when the flat screen
in my life’s room
turns red in its daily ritual telling;
i lie in a heap, lusting,
in a dream hovering against my
sleep, waiting for
the crack of dawn
in another crack of the pistol
chaste, unlying.

from ‘like myth and mother’, a political autobiography in poetry and prose, sirahununi, 2008.

Why did I feel first, annoyed and second, uneasy? Is it because Raviraj belonged to a party that I intensely disliked? I had privately and publicly condemned the murder of Raviraj, yet placing Rajani and Kethesh, alongside Raviraj lumping them together as fallen activists appears to make death and killing cleanse life of its impurities and political complexities. TNA is a proxy organisation for the ruthless and fascist organisation LTTE. Raviraj might have been a dissenting voice within it as some have suggested. Others have said that he was the most liberal of them all. He did have a lot of courage in appearing on TV. It is also said about Raviraj that he was a close associate of the dissenting Tamil, Anandasangaree, and had resisted the pressures of the LTTE at first, only to ‘succumb’ later. He probably believed in dialogue unlike the party he belonged to, which seemed to have believed only in following the orders of murderers. Yet, all this largely eluded me and I saw only a person who was a member of an organisation that seemed to care only for their position as sole representative of the Tamil polity and nought for Tamils as a collectivity.

But we condemn his murder. But the question for all of us is, is there a difference between mourning a person’s death and condemning a person’s murder and hailing that person as a figure of forthright activism, a defender of human rights? Murderers have to be unequivocally condemned and brought to justice. But does that condemnation and call for justice then bestow upon the ‘fallen’ the posthumous status of ‘activist’? Raviraj might have been an activist, for all I know. But once again, this begs the question, what is activism?

Now what can I say of Rajani that is not clichetic and platitudinous? More importantly, what can I say of her that points to at least a partial answer to my question of what is activism and who is an activist? Something that is little known about her in the larger political circle is the way she would defend and protect students from arbitrary arrest and harassment, students who were known to be members of the LTTE. Some of these very same students would later aid and abet in her killing. She was not unaware of that possibility either as she had no illusions about these students and the ruthlessness of the organisation they belonged to. Maybe, more importantly, it was the political analysis with its keen focus on looking at Jaffna Tamil society that made her seem such a threat to the LTTE. Was she a threat to the hegemonic dominance of middle class Jaffna Tamil society too? This is what interests me the most about her. As we continue to work, hopefully in our different ways, toward dialogue, toward democracy, is it important to hold the societies we identify with to political scrutiny? Did Rajani do that?

It is toward this critical plane that I would like to push this discussion. In condemning the murder of Raviraj, we are upholding something that is precious and irreplaceable, his life with all its complexities, and are at the same time holding society responsible for the betrayal of his person. It is ultimately society, ‘Tamil’ society in this instance that has to take the rap for silently watching the slow distintegration of what I see as the most valuable of all social expressions, dissent. This is what Rajani stood for unequivocally.

I shall close with what I see as the only possible response I can have to the long list of deaths that have assailed our communities in the north and east, the ‘unfinished poem’. In presenting this, I go back to the questions I raised above, who, what, how and why are we mourning today?

“The whole process of making this film was in a large part determined by fear. There was so much fear associated with researching this subject, with filming it. When I went to Sri Lanka, I realized that most people were afraid to speak about Rajani, not because they weren’t inspired by her or they didn’t love her — they did. It’s just that given the political climate that exists — now and then — to speak out about Rajani could mean their own death. And so every step of the way I had to wonder, if I do this, will I put my subjects in danger?”

View a clip from the documentary.

“Lionel Ranasinghe and Tarzon Weerasinghe were taken into police custody as the suspected assassin and accomplice respectively. The mother of Lionel Ranasinghe and the sister of Tarzon Weerasinghe have stated to the Commission that these persons disappeared from police custody while they were detained at the 4th floor of the CID Headquarters in Colombo. Tarzon Weerasinghe’s sister produced to the Commission a letter from the ICRC representative who had visited this place of detention [and who] had been informed by a co-detainee that [Tarzon Weerasinghe] had disappeared while in the custody of the CID in March 1990. … The CID’s position to the IRP had been one of the denial of detention of Tarzon Weerasinghe. … Both petitioners have had no further information about these persons’ fate until they read newspaper accounts of the evidence transpiring at the Special Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of Vijaya Kumaratunga. The finding of the Commission of Inquiry into the assassination of Vijaya Kumaratunga on the disappearance of Lionel Ranasinghe from custody is as follows: “The preceding account clearly shows that the conduct of the police regarding the transfer of the suspect from the CID to Homagama, his interrogation for five days at Homagama, the ambush of the police party and the escape of the suspect is laced with falsity at every turn. The evidence of the respective police officers stretches credulity to breaking point and more”. That Commission’s finding on the disappearance of Tarzon Weerasinghe from custody is as follows: “The evidence is that Tarzon Weerasinghe was not seen alive after his detention in the CID. It is in evidence before us that no disciplinary inquiry or action of any kind was taken against the errant police officers.” Source: A Memoradum to the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Asian Legal Resource Centre, Hong Kong; 11 February 1999.

The Commission identified the likely murderer as President Ranasinghe Premadasa.