Neelan Tiruchelvam

Neelan was an Uncompromising Champion of Human Rights by Mike Marqusee

 The assassination of Neelan Tiruchelvam by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) on 29th July is a tragic setback for the causes of peace and democracy in Sri Lanka. Neelan was an uncompromising global champion of human rights, a world-renowned expert in constitutional law and a Member of Parliament for the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). He was a major contributor to the devolution plan proposed by the current Sri Lankan government, which remains to date the bast hope for a lasting solution to the ethnic conflict, and his death bodes ill for the immediate future of any meaningful Sri Lankan peace process.

Neelan was a Long-standing and outspoken critic of the racist and repressive practices of successive Sri Lankan governments, not least the abusses committed by the Sri Lankan army in the course of its prolonged war with the LTTE. But he also firmly rejected the LTTE’s violent and authoritarian ethno-nationalism. He was one of a number of Sri Lankan progressives, from various ethnic backgrounds, who came to believe that the ethnic conflict could only be resolved in the context of the democratisation of Sri Lankan society as a whole. With his brutal elimination – by a suicide bomber in the broad daylight of Colombo’s rush hour – the LTTE have signalled once again their refusal to tolerate the existence of any alternative leadership or programme for the Tamil people. As a result, Tamils have lost one of these most eloquence and credible advocates on the international stage. Neelan was a remarkable multi-dimensional figure – an intellectual and an activist, a pragmatic politician and idealist, an institution-builder, film fan and Cricket enthusiast. He was prepared to engage with the refractory details of the present while also applying his imagination and expertise to a vision of the future.
Neelan was an individual of expectional modesty, gentleness and good humour. His generosity to the legions to him seeking advice or assistance was legendary from which many drew strength. In the days following his death, there were messages of grief from heads of state, academics, religious figures, Journalists and most piquantly scores of NGOs and human rights groups from all corners of the world.
In a recent speech to the Sri Lankan parliament, Neelan called on both sides in the country’s civil war to recognise anew “the sanctity of human life”. Referring to the recent assassination of other TULF officials, he noted: “Sadly, the impact of these deaths were only too brief as we uncritically resign ourselves to war, destruction and political
assassinations as being inextricably part of our troubled history.” Yet Neelan refused to “surrender to despair”. His death is a bitter blow for his family, his friends, the human rights community in Sri Lanka and around the world. But his legacy is immensely rich, and will nourish many in the years to come.

Tragic Protagonist of Moral Choice in Public Life by R Sudarshan

R. Sudarshan of the UNDP was a close friend of Dr. Tiruchelvam. He published this in India-Seminar.com in 1999.

Neelan Tiruchelvam, in whom the elements were so mixed as to make him a virtuous and great human being, was killed on 29 July 1999. He was a man who was gentle and always affirmed the worth of all human life. Why should he have his own life (which he valued for the sake of his immediate family – his wife, Sithie, and his sons, Nirgunan and Mithran, and, for the sake of an extraordinary extended family of friends and colleagues all over the world) snuffed out by a suicide bomber? Only Neelan could best answer this question. He could do that because he was devoted to sustaining morality and civility in public and private life. At a time when barbarism has taken over political life in South Asia, and in many other parts of the world, he was truly a tragic protagonist because virtue in public life has become an oxymoron.
It is a grim commentary on the times we live in that self-proclaimed Tamil patriots killed Neelan because, unlike them, he was a true Tamil patriot. Neelan did not describe himself as a Tamil patriot, partly because he was much too modest to claim credit for the virtues that he possessed. More importantly, because he knew very well that those claims of patriotism made by others are all too often a façade for chauvinism and intolerance of others. Neelan understood well that patriotism is a virtue primarily founded on attachment to a political and moral community, and only secondarily to the government of that community. It was his identification with the Tamil community that made him use the symbolism of the Tamil epic, Silappadikaram, in his brilliant analysis of constitutional law, days before his death, affirming in the process that he was essentially pluralist and not in the least parochial. He was killed because we happen to live in times when there is really no patria, and patriotism is no longer what it was meant to be.

Neelan was a tragic protagonist of the cause of justice for Tamils in Sri Lanka. He knew very well that the government of his country did not represent the moral community of its citizens, neither Sinhalese nor Tamil. Neelan’s loyalty to the Tamil community – a cardinal virtue in a true patriot – could never be confused with loyalty to anyone who claimed the right to rule without the moral consensus of that community. Moral consensus of the Tamil community with its long civilizational history, Neelan believed, must include respect for universal human rights and the rule of law. Neelan did not think that justice for the Tamils implied derogation of claims of justice for the Sinhalese. He was not choosing between allegiance to one principle at the expense of another. This is what made him a tragic protagonist of morality and virtue. Tragic, because we live in times which lack a unifying conception of human life that can give moral judgments an objective basis, instead of regarding, as we do in this age, all moral choices as essentially subjective and arbitrary.

Neelan Tiruchelvam set for himself the task of resolving the crisis of modern constitutionalism. The crisis arises from an intense faith in the normative capacity of modern constitutions to empower disadvantaged groups and ensure fundamental rights, on the one hand, and intense skepticism arising from the failure of constitutions in many societies to human rights and democratic values, on the other.
He was acutely aware of the absurdity of the Sri Lankan and other constitutions that imposed a mono-ethnic state on a multi-ethnic polity. He was engaged in a fundamental reappraisal of the nature of the nation-state and associated concepts of sovereignty.

Another predominant concern of Neelan Tiruchelvam was how to render intelligible and meaningful existing norms and values in constitutional discourse, which largely derive from post-Enlightenment Europe, for cultures and civilizations that have had a very different history. He was convinced that respect for fundamental rights, as presently drawn up in the post-colonial constitutions of South Asia, could be ensured only when they are linked to the cultural and religious traditions of people. These traditions, Neelan knew, emphasise communitarian conceptions of justice and conciliatory and consensual approaches to conflict resolution. Indeed, Neelan’s solid scholarly work was on conciliation as a mode of dispute resolution and how it could be fitted into the given framework of post-colonial constitutions in which adversarial modes resting upon notions of individual rights, as opposed to group rights, predominate.

Neelan Tiruchelvam had a modern mind, always receptive to the requirements of the present day even though he valued and recognized that in concepts such as dharma there is an absolute timelessness. He sought to draw upon traditional concepts of good governance in South Asia and imaginatively weave them into modern constitutional discourse in an honest effort to dispel the unreal nature of much of bureaucratic and judicial practice in the region. The death of this man, therefore, is a huge setback to the process of building moral and political consensus on concepts such as federalism, secularism and affirmative action that have broken down in India.

Although Neelan recognized that it is only by being part of a continuing tradition and civilization that the peoples of South Asia can lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, he was very worried that atavistic and essentially feudal ways of living, ossified and unevolved, were being revived by fundamentalist forces. Renewal and reconstruction of tradition, Neelan believed, is needed in order to reconstruct social and constitutional arrangements in the region to resolve its inter-ethnic and inter-group conflicts.

Neelan Tiruchelvam was an optimist. He firmly believed, unlike many who have witnessed the intensity of violence of ethnic conflict, that the worldyiews of the traditions of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils have common civilizational foundations, and therefore, the conflict can indeed be resolved. As a true philosopher, he understood that apparently incommensurable and intractable differences can be resolved and settled if the contending parties stood back from their disputes to examine what rational procedures are possible to end those disputes. Neelan was a practitioner par excellence of practical judgment. That is why he consented to be a Member of Parliament, and could engage himself in the task of devising constitutional reforms. He knew that by choosing to engage in a practical way in a process for peaceful and non-violent resolution of the ethnic conflict he was putting his own life in danger.

But he was a good man with practical intelligence who knew that the exercise of courage consists in the ability to distinguish it from the recklessness that Tigers take to be courage. Neelan was deeply distressed that so many young men and women have died in vain, because they never had the opportunity to cultivate their character and their intelligence so as to be able to see that their leaders were sacrificing them at the altar of an unsustainable goal. His His deepest sorrow was that the traditions of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils were being corrupted because of the lack of virtues of character and intelligence in their leaders. By killing him, the leaders of the Tamil Tigers have killed the one leader of their community who not only had a sound knowledge of what is good for the community but also possessed the necessary goodness of character. It has been truly said that a man cannot have practical intelligence unless he is good, and Neelan abounded in practical intelligence.

Neelan has been rightly acclaimed as much more than a brilliant thinker and theorist. He was also a doer and an institution-builder. The International Centre for Ethnic Studies and the Law and Society Trust in Sri Lanka are two of the institutions which he founded, besides scores of others whose work on democracy, human rights and law he inspired. By virtue of his intellect and character he was able to draw the best and the brightest young people around him and motivate their adherence to ideals and vision. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, is one of his many moral and intellectual heirs, including his sons, Nirgunan and Mithran. As Neelan was a happy family man, with a spouse in Sithie who matched all of his noble qualities, he lived up to the obligations of reciprocity and values supportive of children and the elderly. More to Neelan’s credit than all this, it must be said that he had an extraordinary grasp of future possibilities for the good life of human beings which their past has made available to their present. The institutions he founded will remain important because he has given them a futuristic, not atavistic, agenda.

I close this tribute to Neelan Tiruchelvam with the most intense sense of grief that I have ever known. I grieve the loss of a mentor and friend. I grieve the loss to Tamil tradition and to our common South Asian civilizational culture. Neelan had the quality to give his politics an intensely personal quality. As there was absolutely no evil in him, he would have seen his own death as a tragic consequence of the confrontation of good with good. That is why, as Radhika Coomarswamy reported, his son Mithran told The New York Times that his father would not have been angry about his assassination; he would only have been sad.

Courage Amidst Hatred by Shekhar Gupta

The Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Express wrote this article of that paper on August 1, 1999. COLOMBO (JULY 31 1999) I came here yesterday to speak at a conference hosted by Neelan Thiruchelvam’s centre. I ended up attending his funeral instead.As his body, wrecked by an LTTE suicide bomber, was consigned to the flames amid chants of om namah shivai memories of several conversations with a man who, for us itinerant hacks, diplomats, expats and human rights activists was for so long the first citizen of Colombo over so many years, raced past my mind. Till one froze. Numbingly.

It was a typical Thiruchelvam household evening. There were several of us, foreign journalists and scholars from Neelan’s International Centre for Ethnic Studies. Someone talked of how difficult it must be to be a middleground politician in Sri Lanka, particularly if you happened to come from Jaffna. Neelan, always the optimist, said it wasn’t such a problem, some risk was always to be accepted in public life.

In Sri Lanka, I said, that risk was a bit more than usual. I mentioned my first Sri Lanka notebook, of March 1984 vintage.It contained names of 28 personalities interviewed in Madras and Colombo. More than half of these were already deadassassinatedin June, 1991. Keep that notebook,” Neelan said, ‘ and watch the survivors.” Then he asked if his name figured there, with the smile that, in
the words of one Ruwanthie De Chickera, one of his students who spoke at the funeral today, always suggested he was hiding a secret from you.

Actually, it didn’t. But as I go over it now, eight years after I last ‘visited” the Sri Lanka story, following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, only seven of the first 28 survive.

Thereby lies the story of a tragic nation, blighted by politics of terror and murder, unseen and unheard in the history of democracies.

The LTTE, though not the only specialist in the politics of murder in Sri Lanka, is primarily responsible for this. At least for most of the names scored out on my first notebook. Among the first of these was a balding, genial, scholarly, and very depressed exile in what was thencalled Madras, TULF member of parliament V. Yogeswaran. This was January 1984 and I met him with his wife Sarojini. ‘Sri Lanka, actually has no future. At best it will be the Lebanon of South Asia,” he told me, words made famous subsequently as the publication I worked for then used these in its advertisement campaign: Read today, quoted tomorrow.”

Yet Yogeswaran and Sarojini chose to give peace another chance. They returned to Sri Lanka. In 1989, Premadasa had just begun talking to the LTTE, the IPKF was on its way out and the Tamil moderates, among them Yogeswaran and TULF chief Amrithalingam were active again. The LTTE shot them both as they sat sipping tea at home. The third TULF MP, Sivasithambaram, survived, with a bullet in the neck. Two good men were gone from my first notebook. Sarojini, however, was not one to give up. She believed in peace, and in the need of Tamil politicians to return to the north to lead their hapless people. She went back, was elected mayor of Jaffna in January 1998,1ived in a small house without security. Till LTTE gunmen walked in one morning and snuffed the life out of the other Yoqeswaran.

Other names were also quietly disappearing meanwhile. Sri Sabaratnam, nick-named Tall Sri, for his slim, lanky frame, and the head of Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) who was my nightmare in Madras for ordering endless cups of coffee in my hotel room and finishing my entire per diem in a couple of hours, had been killed, along with 300 of his supporters in one LTTE massacre. Uma Maheswaran, the founder and head of People Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) was killed too, supposedly in internecine warfare. At least for this one you couldn’t blame the LTTE. Nor for the death of Kittu, the one-legged propaganda chief of the LTTE, who was later entombed in the gun-running ship sunk by Indian Navy.

Padmanabha and Yogasankari, MP of the Eelam Peoples Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) were among a dozen massacred by the LTTE in Madras a year before theRajiv assassination. Sam Thambimuthu, the EPRLF MP from Batticaloa and ever so gracious a host at his MP’s hostel apartment in Colombo, was shot in 1990. That pretty much accounts for most of the Tamil names on that first Sri Lanka notebook.
The Sinhalas didn’t do much better. Most prominent in that unfortunate list was Lalith Athulathmuthali, then National Security Minister, the most articulate Sri Lankan spokesman, and a friend for many years, always proffering a bottle of cognac and quotable quotes, though he accused me of using the most unflattering of his photographs in my magazine. When I last met him, in June 1991, you could call him very fortunate, or very unfortunate depending on how you looked at things. A bomb aimed at Jayawardene in the national assembly missed him and landed in Lalith’s lap who, battered and wrecked, survived. A medical marvel of sorts with shrapnel lodged all over his body. Now he was a completely broken man. Gone was the old arrogance and bravado. A defeated man, strugglingto live along. You want to know who killed Rajiv?” he asked me.

This b…killed Vijaya Kumaratunge. This b…killed Ranjan Wijetunge (Lalith’s successor in the security ministry). This b…also got Rajiv killed. I survived the first time but he will finally get me killed. He will get Gamini (Dissanayeke) killed. And you, my friend, do not ask too many questions here. In fact, the sooner you return to India the better,” he said, ominously.

The man had obviously lost his marbles, I thought. The b…he was referring to was his own President, Premadasa.

In April 1993, a gunman got Lalith, an assassination Premadasa’s police blamed on the LTTE, picked up a young Tamil suspect who, it was said, died while trying to escape. A commission later pointed the finger at Premadasa. Just eight days later, Premadasa, too, joined the man he hated so much as a Tamil human bomb blew him up at a May Day rally. Gamini, the new claimant for Jayewardene’s legacy, survived another year and was then, almost inevitably,shot and bombed by the LTTE at an election meeting.

I must underline that the LTTE is not solely responsible for this devastation on my first Sri Lanka notebook. Lalith was probably killed by Premadasa’s vigilantes. Vijaya Kumaratunge, Chandrika’s filmstar and peacenik husband, who was described as the Amitabh Bachchan of Sri Lanka and whom every visiting Indian hack approached for that one conciliatory Sinhala quote, was done in by the ultra-left 3VP that saw him as a threat, particularly as the left moderates loved him.

To understand the real meaning of Neelan’s courage and contribution, you have to appreciate this universe of hate, death and hopelessness. Where public men lived such short at things. A bomb aimed at Jayawardene in the national assembly missed him and landed in Lalith’s lap who, battered and wrecked, survived. A medical marvel of sorts with shrapnel lodged all over his body. Now he was a completely broken man. Gone was the old arrogance and bravado. A defeated man, strugglingto live along. You want to know who killed Rajiv?” he asked me.

This b…killed Vijaya Kumaratunge. This b…killed Ranjan Wijetunge (Lalith’s successor in the security ministry). This b…also got Rajiv killed. I survived the first time but he will finally get me killed. He will get Gamini (Dissanayeke) killed. And you, my friend, do not ask too many questions here. In fact, the sooner you return to India the better,” he said, ominously.

The man had obviously lost his marbles, I thought. The b…he was referring to was his own President, Premadasa.

In April 1993, a gunman got Lalith, an assassination Premadasa’s police blamed on the LTTE, picked up a young Tamil suspect who, it was said, died while trying to escape. A commission later pointed the finger at Premadasa. Just eight days later, Premadasa, too, joined the man he hated so much as a Tamil human bomb blew him up at a May Day rally. Gamini, the new claimant for Jayewardene’s legacy, survived another year and was then, almost inevitably,shot and bombed by the LTTE at an election meeting.

I must underline that the LTTE is not solely responsible for this devastation on my first Sri Lanka notebook. Lalith was probably killed by Premadasa’s vigilantes. Vijaya
Kumaratunge, Chandrika’s filmstar and peacenik husband, who was described as the Amitabh Bachchan of Sri Lanka and whom every visiting Indian hack approached for that one conciliatory Sinhala quote, was done in by the ultra-left JVP that saw him as a threat, particularly as the left moderates loved him.

To understand the real meaning of Neelan’s courage and contribution, you have to appreciate this universe of hate, death and hopelessness, where public men lived such short lives before an assassin, whether from the LTTE, JVP or one of the assortment of vigilantes, Green Tigers, Yellow Scorpions, what-have-you snuffed it out.

But Neelan was an optimist. He could have easily settled abroad. He could have quietly withdrawn from public life and confined himself to the legal, academic andhuman rights work he loved so much. He knew all the risks, yet made no compromises. No, he did not figure in my first Sri Lanka notebook, but in each one after that. And out of all the names that have disappeared from those years of reporting Sri Lanka, his is the one that I, and anyone else who knew him, will miss the most.

He was born to Greatness by C Rudra

“Learning by hard study must be won. It never entails from son to son”: said the poet, Gay. Though this holds good in the majority of cases, yet there are exceptions where certain individuals have inherited a wealth of knowledge from their ancestors, besides acquiring it by toiling upwards in the night. One such individual in our times, who was born great as well as achieved greatness was the late lamented Neelakandan Tiruchelvam affectionately called ‘Neelan.’

His father the late Senator M. Tiruchelvam, QC ex-solicitor-general and cabinet minister, was well known for his mastery of the civil law. His paternal grandfather Mr. V. Murugeysen who was a post master in the Malayan Postal Service was said to be devoted to reading English classics all the time and was a graduate of Calcutta University. His mother Punitham was a voracious reader and her passion for books surpassed all other likings so much so that her rooms in the house were full of books. Punitham’s mother Soundaram is said to have passed the Senior Cambridge exam from Ramanathan College, Jaffna in flying colours setting an all time record in the island and was an teacher at Drieberg College, Chavakachcheri. Punitham’s father Mr. V.Canagaratnam JPUPM had won prizes for Mathematics at St. Thomas College and was a leading proctor who sat on the Commission appointed to revise the Law of Thesavalamai in early thirties. The late District Judge C.Manohara quite famous for his condign judgements in bribery cases was one of his maternal uncles. And as if to crown it all, Neelan maternal ancestor-actually his grandmother’s uncle Alagasundaram (later Rev. Francis Kingbury’s) father-was the illustrious Tamil scholar of the nineteenth century, the late Rao Bahadur C.W. Thamotharam Pillai. No wonder Neelan’s small head could carry all he knew. Guiding Principle Though Neelan’s learning had the hallmark of approbation and admiration of foreign scholars, yet it sat lightly on him. All those who are privileged to have known him personally would recall his unassuming nature, sweet speech and cheerful countenance. On the day he died even an auto-driver was heard to say that he was a ‘Raththaran Manusseya’. He really walked with the kings but not lost the common touch. His guiding principle seems to have been the ancient Tamil’s epigram. ‘Every country is my country Everyman is my kinsman’ No wonder he is today hailed as a Citizen of the World.

Neelan had a penchant for assigning challenging tasks for those who come into close contact with him. Once he asked me to write the biographies of ten Tamil politicians of yester-year named by him by contacting their descendants and gathering authentic information. This he said would be useful for posterity. I could not embark on the job due to pre occupation with mundane matters. But he in his busy life had the time to write ‘Politics and culture-Faces of an era’, a collection of biographical sketches and got it translated into Sinhala as Yugayaka Muhunu. Conviction Incidentaly he is the first Tamil parliamentarian to write a book in the language of the majority community. Again when one of the oldest newspapers in the Jaffna peninsula namely, ‘THe Hindu Organ’, once edited by my mother’s uncle, ceased publication due to the ongoing conflict in 1994, Neelan asked me to take it and publish it from Colombo until normaly returned.

A stupendous task for an ordinary mortal as I am and this behest too was not carried out by me. Neelan, I think was ‘One of God’s great creations in our time’ even as Jawaharlal Nehru was considered by Adlai Stevenson.

Neelan could inspire confidence in a person who is in state of despair. His love for his country and his conviction that the Tamils would get their due rights in this land of their birth are remarkable. For instance, soon after the holocaust of July 83, I filled the Australian emigration forms and called on Neelan for his opinion. He talked to me at length and asked me why I want to be a non-entity in an alien land rather than someone in the land of my birth. After listening to him I was convinced that I should stay in my native country whatever happened and at once gave up the idea of migration. He too lived here true to his convictions.

But alas! he had to sacrifice his life for the Tamil cause leaving me in maudlin sorrow.

Neelan’s tragic end belies the philosophy of Socrates that no evil would befall a good man either in life or after death. I tend to believe Danial Defoe when he says, ‘The best of men cannot suspend their fate, the good die early, and the bad die late.’

A Senseless Killing of Democrat by Australian Foreign Minister Downer

This is the statement by the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on 3rd August 1999 delivered in Canberra.

Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam,

I was deeply shocked to learn of the tragic assassination in Colombo of Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam. Dr Tiruchelvam was a member of the Sri Lankan Parliament representing the Tamil United Liberation Front. He was also the Director of the Colombo-based International Centre for Ethnic Studies and of the Law and Society Trust and was a good friend of many Australians who have worked and lived in Sri Lanka.

I strongly condemn the political murder of this highly respected, democratically elected member of parliament. It is all the more regretable in view of the dedicated work in which Dr Tiruchelvam had been engaged to achieve a political solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. Dr Tiruchelvam was a man of principle and courage whose life and work epitomised the principles of peaceful ethnic co-existence and the rule of law, the very principles which must form the basis of a just and lasting solution to the war in Sri Lanka.

This senseless act of violence seems to have been the work of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). I call once again on the LTTE to step off the path of terrorism and urge all parties to work for a lasting political solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka. I also reaffirm the Australian Government’s position that it will not have any dealings with groups or individuals that do not unreservedly condemn such acts of wanton terrorism and dissociate themselves from violence as a means to further political aims.

I extend my deepest condolences to Dr Tiruchelvam’s family and to his many friends and associates.

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A Sharp Mind and Full of Convictions by The Times, London

Neelan Tiruchelvam was a tireless activist in the sphere of human rights and on behalf of ethnic minorities, not least in his native Sri Lanka.

He devoted much of his time and energy over the years to an attempt to resolve the often violent relations between the island’s minority Tamil population and the majority Sinhalese, a conflict that has left more than 50,000 dead since 1983.

Highly regarded around the world both as a legal scholar and as an advocate for a peaceful resolution to inter-ethnic strife, in his native country Tiruchelvam represented the moderate Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) as a ‘national list’ Member of Parliament. He was dedicated to peaceful change and to seeking a solution to his country’s ethnic conflict that would accommodate both communities, and he was much involved at the time of his death with the Sri Lankan Government on plans to introduce a significant measure of constitutional reform and devolution.
Neelan Tiruchelvam was the son of a TULF politician and former Local Government Minister. Educated at the University of Ceylon and at Harvard Law School, he was a Fulbright Fellow in 1969-71 and went on to hold academic appointments in Sri Lanka and at the University of Harvard and Yale.

He soon built an international reputation both as a scholar and as a campaigner for social justice.

As a result he was invited to join missions of experts and observers sent in the 1980s and 1990s to Pakistan, Chile, Kazakhastan, Ethiopia, South Africa and Nigeria.
He performed similar work in Sri Lanka as a member of the Presidential Law Commission and the Presidential Commission on Democratic Decentralisation and Devolution, and held a number of other legal and constitutional appointments.

When Sri Lanka’s first woman President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, came to power with her People’s Alliance Government in 1994, there were hopes that the island’s protracted and bloody inter-ethnic hostilities might be settled by negotiation and compromise. Working with Tiruchelvam, President Kumaratunga devised a plan to transform Sri Lanka into a federation of eight regions.

Although the proposals for reform and devolution were supported by Tiruchelvam and other Tamil parliamentarians when they were presented in 1995, inter-party negotiations were impeded by renewed and intensified violence. Nevertheless, several chapters of the proposed new constitution were released after two years, and the political debate continued, even though it proved difficult to attract the support of the necessary two-thirds of Parliamentarians for these far-reaching proposals. The measures were due to be presented to Parliament over the next two months.

The most dangerous opposition came from outside Parliament, however. The Tamil Tigers – who have been waging a war for a separate homeland for the mostly Hindu Tamils against the Buddhist Sinhalese since 1983 – rejected the proposed compromises and continued to wage a guerilla war against the Government for total independence. Atrocities were continuing and a climate of violence remained the norm in parts of Sri Lanka.

Tiruchelvam was a senior partner in the law firm, Tiruchelvam Associates and director of the highly respected, non-governmental International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo. He was also closely associated with the Law and Society Trust.
In 1994 he found a new outlet for his commitment when he became a member of the International Council of the London-based human rights organisation, Minority Rights Group International. When the group published its report on the Sri Lankan conflict in 1996, it was Tiruchelvam who presented the report’s recommendation to the Sri Lankan Parliament. In April this year he succeeded Sir John Thomson as chairman of MRO’s council.

Slight and unassuming in appearance, with a quiet, thoughtful manner, Tiruchelvam had sharp and firm convictions. His commitment to reconciliation and to radical but peaceful change set him at odds with those whose positions were more entrenched.
He was in constant personal danger in his own country, and had for some years been under police protection after repeated threats from the Tamil Tigers.

Tiruchelvam had close links with the .Faculty of Law at Cambridge University, and had shared experiences and insights on conflict resolution with scholars and practitioners from Northern Ireland. He had a deep affection for Britain, where his sons completed their university education. At the time of his death he had recently taken up a one-month Rockefeller fellowship in Bellaggio, Italy, and was looking forward to a visiting professorship at Harvard.

He is survived by his wife Sithie, herself an attorney, and his two sons.

The conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers has deep, tangled roots. But to a rough order of magnitude, the moral stakes can be reduced to a single act of terrorist savagery that took place on July 29, 1999 – the day Neelan Tiruchelvam was blown out the side of his Nissan sedan by a female suicide bomber riding a moped.

Tiruchelvam was a Sri Lankan Tamil, but not the kind that makes excuses for terrorism, or for the nihilistic death cult led by Tigers chief Velupillai Pirapaharan. nstead, he sought to bring justice and self-determination for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority through negotiation and constitutional reform. Sri Lanka, he was an elected parliamentarian and the founder of two major think tanks.  The United States, he taught at Harvard University, enlightening Western students about human-rights abuses committed in Sri Lanka – by the nation’s military and the Tigers alike.

The Legacy of Neelan Tiruchelvam by Jonathan Kay

Jonathan Kay on the legacy of Nee/an Tiruche/vam: The Tamil Tigers have reaped what they’ve sown
Posted: May 05, 2009, 12:16 PM by Jonathan Kay in The National Post (Canada)

He was a moderate, in other words – the Tamils’ answer to Yitzhak Rabin or Nelson Mandela. And that’s why he was assassinated: The Tigers despise any Tamil who does not share their commitment to war and terrorism. Tiger propaganda – including the terrorist group’s own “poet laureate” – spent years vilifying Tiruchelvam as a traitor prior to his assassination. Muzhakkam, a Tiger-controlled newspaper here in Canada joined in the campaign.

The act serves as a grim metaphor for the war itself. Much as many Tamil-Canadians claim that the Sri Lankan government is engineering a “genocide,” the greatest threat to the country’s Tamils has been their professed protectors. The Tigers are the ones who have assassinated moderate Tamils, erected a murderous mini-dictatorship in the northern part of the island, abducted Tamil children to serve as terrorists and soldiers, and stolen tsunami-relief money to fund military operations. Now that the Tigers are cornered in northeastern Sri Lanka, the Tigers are holding tens of thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields – shooting them in the back as they seek to flee.

Tiruchelvam’s sacrifice is remembered in the highest places – including right here in Canada. n fact, it helps explain why Michael gnatieff has decisively reversed the Liberal party’s traditionally soft stand on Tiger terror. In the late 1980s, Tiruchelvam and  gnatieff were Harvard colleagues,preaching human rights from the same hymn book. When Tiruchelvam was blown up,Ignatieff traveled to Sri Lanka to deliver a lecture in the man’s honour. A year  later, he described the experience in a speech at the propagangda – including the terrorist groups own poet laureate = spent years vilifying Tiruchelvam as a traitor prior to this assasination. Muzhakkam, a Tiger controlled newspaper here in Canada joined in the campaign.

The act serves as a grim metaphor for the war itself. Much as many Tamil-Canadians claim that the Sri Lankan government is engineering a “genocide,” the greatest threat to the country’s Tamils has been their professed protectors. The Tigers are the ones who have assassinated moderate Tamils, erected a murderous mini-dictatorship in the northern part of the island, abducted Tamil children to serve as terrorists and soldiers, and stolen tsunami-relief money to fund military operations. Now that the Tigers are cornered in northeastern Sri Lanka, the Tigers are holding tens of thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields – shooting them in the back as they seek to flee.

Tiruchelvam’s sacrifice is remembered in the highest places – including right here in Canada. n fact, it helps explain why Michael gnatieff has decisively reversed the Liberal party’s traditionally soft stand on Tiger terror. In the late 1980s, Tiruchelvam and  gnatieff were Harvard colleagues, preaching human rights from the same hymn book. When Tiruchelvam was blown up, Ignatieff traveled to Sri Lanka to deliver a lecture in the man’s honour. A year later, he described the experience in a speech at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awards dinner in Toronto.

Neelan Tiruchelvam, lgnatieff declared, was “a man whose memory I revere.” But that wasn’t  the  prevailing view among many of the noisiest members of the Canadian Tamil community: “When the word got out that I was going to give a lecture in Colombo in his honour, I began to get very extraordinary bits of Tamil literature, mailed to me with a Canadian postmark. And the sum and substance of these newsletters was basically to say that Neelan, my good friend, got what he deserved. This was a man who’d spent his entire life seeking peace and reconciliation on that bloody and tragic island. And it shocked me deeply to discover that the people who wished and rejoiced in his death were fellow citizens of [Canada] … Don’t think it doesn’t put a chill down your spine when you get mysterious little missives  like that.”

A decade later, with Igantieff leading the Liberal Party, those hatemongers are now reaping what they’ve sown. And so are the Tamil Tigers themselves, whose last-ditch positions are now set to be overrun by Sri Lanka’s military. Ten years after the group killed Neelan Tiruchelvam, an opportunity to implement his vision of peaceful reconciliation may finally be at hand.

– Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. jkay@nationalpost.com

Sri Lanka Peacemaker’s High-Risk Life, and Death by Celia Dugger

This is an article that appeared in the New York Times on August 24, 1999.

In a country where there is no vocation more perilous, indeed more radical, than being a voice for peace, Neelan Tiruchelvam had worked to bring an end to the savage ethnic conflict that has tormented this lush island nation. His friends and family had watched in dread as other leaders of his moderate ethnic Tamil political party were gunned down or blown up by guerrillas fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Hindu Tamil minority.

When some of them pleaded with Mr. Tiruchelvam, a member of Parliament who helped draft the Government’s peace plan, to get out of Sri Lanka with his life, he told them: “!can’t run away. My duty is here.” So on a hot, sunny morning last month, he went to work as usual, with armed men in a jeep behind him and on a motorcycle in front. And as usual, he got stuck at a busy intersection just a couple of blocks from his whitewashed bungalow.

As he turned the corner, a stranger walked up to his car, pressed his belly against the window and detonated a bomb strapped to his waist. Mr. Tiruchelvam’s shattered body exploded out the other side of his car, and hung limply out the window like a rag doll. The suicide bomber’s severed head flew over the vehicle and landed on the curb. The attack, brazenly carried out just a stone’s throw from the Prime Minister’s residence, has provided yet more evidence of the brutal effectiveness of the terror tactics used by separatist rebels in silencing fellow Tamils who favor political compromise over armed struggle. More than any other Tamil leader, it seemed that the Harvard-educated Mr. Tiruchelvam (pronounced teer-oo­ CHELL-vum), 55, had the intellectual stature, the gentle temperament and the high-level contacts to coax from the majority Sinhalese rulers constitutional changes to redress the grievances of the Tamil people. His death has been a blow to the search for a peaceful end to Sri Lanka’s 16-year-old civil war, which has left 60,000 dead in a country whose population — 18 million — is about the size of New York State’s.

Sri Lanka’s Justice Minister, G. L. Peiris, a Sinhalese lawyer, said his dead colleague was a bridge between the Tamils and the Sinhalese — a bridge that the guerrillas wanted to blow up. “We are now without a consensus builder,” Mr. Peiris said. The package of constitutional reforms that Mr. Tiruchelvam and Mr. Peiris crafted to give Tamils more power is still stuck in the poisonous partisan deadlock between the country’s two main political parties, both dominated by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority. That deadlock is unlikely to be broken before national elections next year, political experts say. While the rebels, who call themselves the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have neither denied nor claimed responsibility for Mr. Tiruchelvam’s slaying, they have been blamed for it by officials and political experts. They note that the group had demonized Mr. Tiruchelvam in their propaganda and that the method of killing — by a suicide bomber — is a Tiger signature. At the end of his life, Mr. Tiruchelvam, a constitutional scholar,was discouraged by the lack of progress in getting the peace package through Parliament. But his wife and colleagues say he never lost hope that a resolution to Sri Lanka’s fratricidal war lay in ideas of federalism, individual liberty and tolerance.

“He still felt that it was in his grasp to bring about this historic settlement,” said Gowher Rizvi, a friend and former professor at Oxford University who now heads the Ford Foundation’s South Asia office. “He would say, ‘We’re almost there. Our work is almost done.’ ” For Tamil moderates like Mr. Tiruchelvam, 1994 was a year of great hope. They believed that the majority Sinhalese might agree to a just settlement of Tamil grievances and that the guerrillas might accept a peace deal to end the fighting in the country, off   ndia’s southern tip. That year,Chandrika Kumaratunga, daughter of the powerful political family most associated with the rise of Sinhalese nationalism, had won a landslide victory on an unprecedented peace platform.

Her victory came with support from Tamils after she promised to open peace talks with the separatist Tiger militants. Many Tamils believed that her Government would deliver a plan to give them a measure of political autonomy in the north and east of the country, where Tamils are in a majority. The clash between Tamils and Sinhalese — over language, religion, university admissions and government patronage, among other things — had festered since the country gained its independence from the British in 1948. The Tamils, who make up slightly less than a fifth of the population and who had a privileged position under the colonial rulers, felt discriminated against after the Sinhalese, who are about three-quarters of the population, took the reins of governance. For Mr.Tiruchelvam, Mrs. Kumaratunga’s election seemed to be a moment he had been preparing for his whole life. He was an upper-caste Hindu born into a politically engaged Tamil family that was part of Colombo’s English-speaking elite. After he earned his doctorate at Harvard Law School in 1972 as a Fulbright scholar, Mr. Tiruchelvam came home and spent his career searching for ways to end Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife. He helped organize the International Center for Ethnic Studies, a research group here, and became an expert on how countries had accommodated ethnically diverse societies constitutionally.

He and his wife, Sithie, also a lawyer, built an influential, multi-ethnic circle of friends. She described him as “a small- multi-ethnic circle of friends. She described him as “a small­ made man,” just 5 foot 3 and a half inches tall, whose shy, quiet ways complimented her own teasing gregariousness.

Roberto Unger, a professor at Harvard Law School who had been close to Mr. Tiruchelvam since their student days at Harvard, said, “He was completely devoted to reconciliation on the basis of this intuition he had that we have to forgive one another before we can talk to each other.” During her long years in the political wilderness, the new Sinhalese President, Mrs. Kumaratunga, had joined the Tiruchelvams around the dinner table in their home. “In political discussions with Neelan, she always felt that the Tamils had gotten a raw deal that had to be corrected,” Mrs. Tiruchelvam said. “He believed she had the courage of her convictions and that she would carry out her promises.”

So in 1994, when Mrs. Kumaratunga became President with a huge mandate for peace and Mr. Tiruchelvam was elected to Parliament, he began working with her Government to draft a package of constitutional reforms that were to turn Sri Lanka from a centralized state into an “indissoluble union of regions.” As that work progressed, however, negotiations with the guerrillas fell apart in 1995. The Government, in turn, stepped up its military campaign against the Tigers. Ominously, by late 1995, the authorities had learned that the Tigers planned to stake out Mr.Tiruchelvam’s home. The Government began providing him with round-the-clock security. He never again left his walled enclave without bodyguards. The peace plan stalled. It needed a two-thirds majority in the 225-member Parliament to pass, but opposition from the other major Sinhalese party, the United National Party, left the governing People’s Alliance coalition some 17 votes short.

Then in 1997 and 1998, the Tigers, who had already killed a dynamic leader of Mr.Tiruchelvam’s party over tea and biscuits in 1989, began killing more of the party’s most promising talent, officials say.

Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the underground leader of the Tigers, had built a battle-hardened corps of 4,000 to 8,000 followers, as well an elite cadre of suicide bombers, celebrated as martyrs to Tamil Eelam, the separate country they were fighting for.

First, they gunned down a member of Parliament at a ribbon cutting. Then they killed the newly elected Mayor of the northern city of Jaffna, herself the widow of an assassinated partyman, and a few months later killed her replacement, too.

Mr. Tiruchelvam’s elder son, Nirgunan, 26, an investment banker in Singapore, became almost obsessed with his father’s security. He begged his father to stay inside their house, or to wear a bullet proof vest and travel in a bomb­ proof car. The son tracked down an aging bomb-proof Jaguar that had carried the Queen of England when she visited Sri Lanka in the early 1980’s. But when his father used the car, it broke down. The one garage that could fix it always seemed to be busy.

The signs that Mr. Tiruchelvam was a target mounted. D. B. Jeyaraj, a Sri Lankan journalist living in Canada, kept up with the Tigers’ propaganda and saw that their verbal attacks on Mr. Tiruchelvam as a traitor to the separatist cause were becoming more venomous. He cautioned Mr. Tiruchelvam, who replied that there was little he could do to stop the Tigers if they were determined to get him, especially in Colombo, where he was often immobilized in traffic jams. Carol Grodzins, a longtime family friend who was an administrator at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, decided to find a way to get the Tiruchelvam’s to safety, if only for a few months. She phoned Mr.Tiruchelvam’s admirers at the Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard Law School. Soon, he had offers from both places and accepted them. For a month this summer, the Tiruchelvams went to the Rockefeller Foundation’s study center in Bellagio, Italy. Mrs. Grodzins had expected them to go directly from taly to Cambridge, Mass.,where Mr. Tiruchelvam was to be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School for the fall semester. Instead, the couple returned to Colombo on July 19. There was widespread speculation that Mrs. Kumaratunga’s Government planned finally to introduce the peace plan in Parliament this August. The day they got back, the Government warned Mr. Tiruchelvam of a new assassination threat from the Tigers, but did nothing to increase his security. He considered asking the Government for more protection, but decided against  it.

“Neelan did not want to be under obligation,” his wife said. “He did not want to ask for something that was not given.”

Despite the strain, he carried on with his work. On the morning of July 29, he and his wife had breakfast together as usual. He had a long telephone chat with his journalist friend in Canada, Mr. Jeyaraj. Mr. Tiruchelvam spoke of the Tigers’ latest threats, and said he was convinced that they were out to extinguish his party, the Tamil United Liberation Front. But he needed just a little more time in Parliament to see the constitutional reforms through, he said. Then he would relinquish his seat. Half an hour later, he got in his car to go to work. At 9: 18 M. the suicide bomber’s blast rocked the neighborhood. In the weeks since, Mr. Tiruchelvam’s fellow Tamil moderates have become even more fearful. Party workers recently filled rusty tar barrels with sand and lined them up at the entrance to the party’s shabby headquarters in Colombo to block any bomb-laden car. One recent afternoon, Mr. Tiruchelvam’s sons sat with their mother in their father’s darkened, book-lined study and spoke of what the national tragedy has cost them. After anti-Tamil riots swept Colombo in 1983 and Sinhalese mobs killed hundreds of Tamils, there was an exodus of Tamils from the country. Even then, when virtually every Tamil moderate who had been in Parliament moved toIndia, Mr. Tiruchelvam refused to leave. But he and his wife decided to send their sons, then 8 and 10, to boarding school inIndia to protect them. Mithran, now a 24-year-old law student at Cambridge University, still seems wounded by the experience of growing up so far from his parents. “It was very hard for the younger one, ” Mrs. Tiruchelvam said as her sons listened, “He felt unwanted because he wasn’t allowed to come home.” The sons admire their father’s commitment and sacrifice, but agree on this: The family tradition in Sri Lankan politics ends with them. They want no part of it.

Photo: Neelan Tiruchelvam, right in an undated photo, having lunch in a restaurant with his wife, Sithie, and son Mithran. Mr. Tiruchelvam, a Tamil moderate, stayed in Sri Lanka despite rising threats from Tamil militants.

(Universal Photo/Kent Productions)(pg. AS) Map of Sri Lanka highlighting Colombo: A suicide bomber assassinated Mr. Tiruchelvam in Colombo in July.