The death of Dr Neelan Thiruchelvam on 29 July 1999 is a particularly unfortunate turn of events. Each one of us in The Action Group Of Tamils (TAGOT) interacted with him on numerous occasions over several years and had known him as a friend and colleague. We regret the passing away of an individual of considerable intellectual stature and unusually personable demeanour.

However, Dr Thiruchelvam was assassinated, that is, it is a politically motivated killing. He is the most recent casualty among the many Tamil politicians who have paid with their lives for the politics of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). If his killing as alleged was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), then historical lessons arising from the circumstances leading to Dr Thiruchelvam's assassination, and from the tragedy itself, have to be acknowledged.

Dr Thiruchelvam in his personal capacity was a scholar of exceptional repute. He was concerned with defending human rights in the international arena. But, he was also a member of a political party, the TULF; he was a politician.

As Vice President of the TULF, Dr Thiruchelvam exercised a decisive influence in crafting and purveying the party's widely condemned politics of collaboration with the Sinhalese State. Even the proverbial child knows that this assassination had nothing to do with his work in human rights and had everything to do with TULF's treacherous politics, which he promoted as its loyal member.

Yet, we find that most commentators writing on this tragedy nimbly side-stepped the all-important political aspect of Dr Thiruchelvam’s life. They focussed instead on his personal qualities, which were undoubtedly exemplary, to substantiate political assertions; that by killing him "a voice of reason and sanity" has been "silenced", that Sri Lanka has lost a "democratic-reformist thinker".

From portraying him as a democrat who was killed, the commentators slid almost imperceptibly into the assertion that he was killed because he was a democrat. The caption, for example, of the United News of India (UNI) report of 29 July filed from Colombo screamed: "Leaders condemn killing of intellectual" (The Hindu, 30/Jul/99).

By this sleight of hand the Colombo intelligentsia and the media have sought to structure the discussion around the following spurious question: Why does the LTTE target a moderate like Dr Thiruchelvam who was trying to bring constitutional reforms and devolution proposals for the Tamils? Their obvious intention is to engineer the condemnation of LTTE for killing a Tamil man of peace, a democrat.

But as life would have it, the intelligentsia and the media were thrown off balance by an unforeseen event. The Tamil people did not participate in Dr Thiruchelvam’s funeral in Colombo. An Indian journalist who noted the Tamil response reported that the Tamil community is "unmoved and unprotesting" (Indian Express, 3/Aug/99).

The verdict of the Tamil people is loud and clear. Their unequivocal response, of not attending the funeral, is a definitive statement. It is a statement against, and a firm rejection of, the TULF's reviled politics of running with the (Tamil) hare and hunting with the (Sinhalese) hound. Moreover, the united expression clearly showed that the Tamil people as a whole are not impressed by Dr Thiruchelvam’s credentials as a democrat and human rights advocate in the international arena. They judged him by his track record in Sri Lanka with respect to the violations of human rights of Tamils.

TAGOT expected those who crave for "democracy" and swear by "the will of the people" to abide by the virtually unanimous declaration by Tamils of their revulsion over the politics of TULF. Perhaps we are idealists.

If the commentators’ assertion that Dr Thiruchelvam was killed primarily, if not solely, for his work as a democrat and defender of human rights of Tamils is to hold water, then the Tamil people’s popular verdict against him had to be neutralised. 

So a few days later the Colombo intelligentsia began damage limitation ploys and, before the end of the first week, they employed a logical twist; they invented a fear of the LTTE. In the weekly columns of national papers the intelligentsia patronisingly alleged that Tamils did not attend Dr Thiruchelvam's funeral because of a "debilitating fear" (The Island, 4/Aug/99) of the LTTE and political violence. A political commentator in the Colombo-based English media gratuitously insulted Tamils; he arrogantly declared that "there were no longer peace loving Tamils but only frightened Tamils" (The Island, 8/Aug/99).

The members of the intelligentsia seem to have conveniently forgotten that Tamils showed no "fear" when they voted for Mrs Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in the 1994 elections as well as when they enthusiastically hugged and kissed the helicopter that brought to Jaffna the "peace emissaries" of the her Peoples Alliance (PA) Government.

The establishment in the South also sought to denigrate the judgement of the Tamil people. At a briefing to the diplomatic community on 2 August, Foreign Minister Mr Lakshman Kadirgamar told Tamils in Sri Lanka and abroad to "pause to consider" and to "open their eyes". And the Indian journalist dismissed Tamil opinion out of hand as the response of a community that "has mortgaged its soul to the LTTE" (Indian Express, 3/Aug/99).

As a Tamil parliamentarian, Dr Thiruchelvam was accountable in the first instance and always to the Tamil people. The views of others, including those of the international community, however valid are nevertheless secondary; and they are credible only insofar as they duly respect and take into account the verdict of the Tamil people.

The concrete reality is that the Sinhalese State is at war with the Tamil people. The fundamental issue in dispute is the right to national self-determination of the Tamil people, the right to State power, and not the farcical “defence” of “minority rights". 

The TULF's political wheeling and dealing with the Sinhalese State is cheered in the south of the country as "the capacity and commitment to re-conceptualise Tamil politics in democratic emancipatory terms". From the standpoint of Tamils, they are TULF’s opportunistic manoeuvres to undermine the rapidly growing competing centre of political power, namely, the LTTE-led Tamil national movement for the right of national self-determination.

From 1994, the year in which the TULF appointed Dr Thiruchelvam as Member of Parliament (MP), the TULF parliamentarians have callously voted in favour of the Government's defence budget year after year. By ensuring adequate financial resources for the Sinhalese war machine, the TULF members joined the chauvinist Sinhalese MPs of the PA Government in effectively signing the death warrant of a whole generation of Tamils. Barring the occasional statement made by Mr Joseph Pararajasingam, no other TULF member, parliamentarian or otherwise, defended within Parliament or outside the human rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. But some among the southern intelligentsia would like the world to believe that TULF politicians are "working for peace".

In the eyes of the "unmoved and unprotesting" Tamils, Dr Thiruchelvam is unfortunately a comprehensively discredited Tamil politician. 

He tried among other things to exonerate President Kumaratunga, by issuing a "character certificate" of dubious origin, when she clearly was wrong in making anti-Tamil remarks in a private gathering. He was instrumental in obtaining the Nandhi flag, which the TULF shamelessly supplied to be hoisted at the infamous "victory" ceremony of the army after the "conquest" of Jaffna on 5 December 1995.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the unprecedented outpouring of grief among Sinhalese intellectuals and politicians and in the Sinhalese-controlled media confirms the usefulness, to the Sinhalese State, of Dr Thiruchelvam's invaluable contribution to legitimise TULF's collaborationist politics.

What is necessary at this tragic juncture is a clinical review of the bankrupt politics of the TULF. And we pose a different question, which is in the hearts of most Tamils: Why has the TULF repeatedly attempted to sabotage the Tamil movement for national self-determination through a counter-revolutionary strategy seductively packaged as "democratising project", "ethnic as well as social pluralism" and "ethnic inclusivism"?

THE ACTION GROUP OF TAMILS (TAGOT)

Dr S Sathananthan
Secretary