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I feel extremely honoured that madam, you have chosen me to deliver the memorial lecture on this the first death anniversary of my friend and respected colleague, the Hon. M.H.M. Ashraff. My association with Mr. Ashraff began about ten years before his untimely death last year, when he wished to discuss with me the future of our country and the possible solutions to its most pressing problem - which was the ethnic problem, and the subsequent war. The initial meeting was held at a time when the people of this country and especially political leaders feared for their lives in case the powers that be were displeased in anyway. Therefore a surreptitious meeting was arranged at the house of a friend, and I travelled there in a darkened vehicle and sent another vehicle for Mr. Ashraff. We talked about how we could end this type of reign of terror in this country, and we talked of our dreams for our country and at the end of a two hour long conversation, Mr. Ashraff got up and shook my hands and said, “Madam, I think we can work together.” That was the beginning of a short but strong political alliance between the party of his creation, The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and People’s Alliance, and the People’s Alliance, which I represented. Honourable Ashraff was a courageous and visionary leader. He was also one among a few of those political leaders without expectations of any personal or material gains. When the history of modern Sri Lanka comes to be written, in times less charged with emotion than now; I’m sure it will be said that his greatness was founded on his ability to understand complex problems of post independent Sri Lanka. The poet in Ashraff gave him the ability to understand the heart-beat of his people. His humanity and artistic sensitivity enabled him to break through the shackles of ethnic and racial isolation moving into the realm of national unity, within a multi racial, multi lingual and multi cultural society. Ashraff did not remain only a visionary. He was a dynamic pragmatist. He formulated practical policies for the emancipation of the under privileged members of his community whilst he never forgot that this has to be achieved within a wider frame of a nation, where all the communities of different racial and religious entities would live together in dignity and with equal rights. He possessed boundless energy and undaunted commitment to the struggle to realize his dreams. What was this dream? I remember talking for many long hours with my friend and colleague the honourable Ashraff about the dream which had much in common with my own dream for our people and our country. It was a dream about bringing back to our nation, the greatness and beauty she boasted for many long centuries. But for this we needed to complete one major task among many others; that was the task of recognising and respecting the differences and separate identities of each community living in this country. It is also the task of building a nation where the rights of all these communities would be equally respected and guaranteed within a free and democratic Sri Lanka. I would say that the late Hon. Ashraff’s greatest achievement has been the stewardship he gave to the Muslim people of the East, to move towards modernity and liberation from the shackles of poverty and ignorance, through democratic means. The SLMC which he fathered provided a democratic basis first to the Muslims of the East and then to the other Muslims to give expression to their identity, and seek solutions to their problems, through democratic means. If not for Ashraff, there could very well have been a Muslim terrorist movement hailing from the east of Sri Lanka. The SLMC’s alliance with the People’s Alliance Government provided the possibility of taking development to the greatly under developed areas of the Eastern Province. The honourable Ashraff spent almost all his adult life in the cause of his people and in the struggle of creating the right conditions for ethnic harmony and peace. I remember Ashraff describing with much pain the suffering he experienced when the LTTE set fire to his house in his village of Kalmunai, and how he had to escape with his young wife and his baby, just three years old. But he had the greatness to rise above the hatred and anger to join with us in our project for peace through a negotiated political settlement even with those terrorists who caused him, his family and his people so much pain and suffering. I would now like to go on from this point to make some observations about that very problem which concerned Ashraff right through the last years of his life and which concerns all of us today. They are some observations on liberation versus terrorism and the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. The ethnic problem in Sri Lanka is no more a simple ethnic problem. It has grown into a full-blown terrorist problem. I’m sure you would all agree that the problem of terrorism is the one most topical subject at this very moment since last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in the United States of America. Of course in little Sri Lanka, we have experienced the horrors of terrorism for thirty long years beginning from 1971, in several waves. We have lost many great leaders and invaluable lives and thousands of civilians to terrorism; not forgetting the thousands of young lives of soldiers and militants, lost on both sides of the divide. We are all indeed happy to note that the horrendous attack in the world’s richest and most powerful nation has at last sent a wake-up call to the world. The immensity of the tragedy that took place in the United States of America on the 11th of September just five days ago leaves us numbed with shock and horror at the number of lives lost, the suffering caused to the families and friends of those killed and injured, the heavy fall out of the American economy and there by the fallout of the global economy. As we recover from the pain and horror of this incident, let us join hands at least now more honestly and with more dedication to fight the wave of terroristic politics that is sweeping across the globe since the past few decades. To do this it may not be sufficient to say that we will hunt down the perpetrators of terror and their allies, we must attempt to understand the deep rooted causes of this most unnatural de-humanising phenomenon, that this is terrorism, very specific to the 20th century. No doubt the First World War was triggered off by the act of a terrorist who killed the Austrian Crown Prince in Bosnia. No doubt we know, of several groups of Russian anarchists employing terror tactics at the turn of the 19th century in Czarist Russia. And also in Western Europe in the last decades of the 19th century; yet, terrorism came into its own and began to be employed systematically as a political weapon in the post World War II period. The suffering caused by centuries of international warfare, together the fears of the possible use of nuclear weaponry perhaps kept major wars at bay. Anyway in the last two decades, this has given way to intra-national conflicts, within nations. The era of revolutionary or insurrectionary movements that were active in the Western hemisphere as well as in Russia and China at the dawn of the 20th century has given way in the post World War II period, that is the latter half of the 20th century, to guerrilla type organisations beginning from Latin America and spreading to Western Europe and now to Asia. It is important to note that the goals of the first type of activity, the revolutionary activity type differs somewhat from the second type; that is the guerrilla type of terrorist activity. Revolutionary movements seek to effect radical changes in the social and economic structures of a country. Changes in the power structures, the vision and the programmes for this movement were invariably provided by intelligentsia within the relevant country or outside it. The guerrilla and especially the terrorist movements are often born out of frustration and despair. Despair due to political defeat, social marginalisation, and economic decline. Despair is accompanied by hope for a better life. But there is no clear agenda of how that hope could be realized. No constructive programme to realise the agenda. Terrorism is destructive. It is not radical nor revolutionary. Terrorism stems usually from conservatism and is vengeful. The only ones who gain from terrorist warfare, are the terrorists themselves, and the war industry, the arms manufacturers and their agents. Terrorism has become endemic to modern society, because it is the product of recurrent social crises; of modernism and the globalisation of capitalism and the free market economy. Someone once said that hope betrayed transforms itself into bombs. I would add to this that perceived injustice if allowed to continue and not allayed would also transform itself first into despair and then into violence. In today’s context this violence could often take the form of the most horrendous terroristic activities. I think it was Leon Trotsky who once described the two emotions central to terrorism as being despair and vengeance. We need today to desperately study and understand the true causes of terrorism and terroristic movements, or for that matter any social upheavals in nations. At this point I would like to remind ourselves that it is not terrorism or terrorists that divided Ireland nor sent the Palestinians into exile, 50 odd years ago. They did not impose white rule in South Africa nor did the terrorists overthrow the duly elected government of Salvadore in Chile. The terrorists did not separate India and Pakistan and create the tragedy of Kashmir as a buffer zone. To come closer home, neither did the LTTE nor the armed Tamil militants create the circumstances for the marginalisation of the minority communities of Sri Lanka. It was not the terrorists who unleashed waves of attack upon attack on innocent Tamil civilians between 1977 and July of 1983. It was not the terrorists who prevented the implementation of the reasonable use of the Tamil act or the Languages Act nor they who prevented the proper implementation of guarantees given in various Sri Lankan Constitutions to the minorities. Violence, social, political or physical perpetrated by the State or the agents of the State against other States or against its own peoples has been said to be the womb of terrorism. Humiliation its cradle and continued revenge by the State, becoming the mother’s milk and nourishment for terrorism. We need to look at the causes of modern day terrorism because it had become, in the past decades the one single most terrifying factor in national and international politics the world over. But the powerful in the world relegated the problem of terrorism to the developing poor countries like ours pontificated to us as to how we should protect the human rights of terrorists until terrorism struck at the heart of the developed world on 11th of September 2001. We hope in our countries that at least this would make the whole world, the powerful and the not so powerful, and the least powerful join hands together in the common realisation that the modern expression of frustration, of destroyed hopes will not be contained within the boundaries of one nation, but will spill over in the most horrendous and terrifying fashion, through the boundaries of all nations to englobe the entire world. If we look at the cradles of terrorism today we note that they emanate from the decolonised world. From countries that have undergone nearly 500 years of the recent spate of human colonisation. 500 years of colonial subjugation of Asia, Africa, Latin America the Caribbean and the Pacific Isles has given their eyes to the numerous and diverse problems in the decolonisation; during the immediate aftermath of decolonisation. If we look at Sri Lanka for over 20 centuries, or nearly 20 centuries, Sri Lanka absorbed many waves of Arab and Muslim settlers as well as Dravidians and other settlers hailing from India. But the colonial rulers employed the policy of ‘divide and rule’ apparently favouring the minority communities when jobs and other privileges were handed out together of course with conversions to the religious faiths espoused by the colonial rulers. At the same time some of the Sinhala elite were also quite willing to compromise to the colonial rulers for similar positions of power and privilege. Those who were unwilling to comply were summarily executed and or dispossessed of their wealth. The vast majority of the nation stood apart from this process seeing themselves dispossessed of traditional means of livelihood and increasingly marginalized. The jobs were available to only those who spoke the language of the colonials, but then that language was taught only in the elite schools whilst the vast majority of the peoples of all communities could not afford it, or would not be allowed to enter through the portals of those elite schools. The seething frustrations caused by these situations have burst out into various types of nationalistic actions all over the decolonised world. Add to this the passionate need of a colonially subjugated nation to seek out its own identity in order to rebuild an independent nation from the ashes of colonialism. One has here an explosive recipe for a Molotov type political cocktail. Decolonised nations have the need to rebuild their nations with its own specific national identity in order to shake off the colonial bondage attitudinally emotionally and economically. In the process of this national reconstruction the leaders or the nation builders must possess a vision, which could overcome the frustrations, anger and the pain of the past suffered by the various groups of the populous in order to weld them all together within a well formulated and clear national agenda. Where all communities could play an important role with the possibility of participating actively in governance. The sense of newly found freedoms born with independence gives rise to many hopes and aspirations in all groups of the independent nation. An effective vision is required to weld together the separate sets of aspirations into one collective national dream, composed of the multi faceted aspirations of each community, living freely and proudly with its own separate identity which could co-exist symbiotically with the other entities to compose a harmonious and united entirety - the Nation-State - a strong and stable one. The failure to operate – the lack of such a vision – for a new nation and the failure to build such a nation after independence has caused in many countries the majority community to attempt to establish a hegemonistic and exclusivist regime in order to apportion for itself political and economic power. Sri Lanka is a case in point, but we are not alone. This phenomenon has swept across many countries in the post-colonial era. This in turn gave rise to movements of minority groups attempting to enforce their own specific identities expressed in various forms such as the demand for a separate state etc. The separation of India into India and Pakistan, and then the breakaway of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the continuing conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the various conflicts in the African and American countries are some of the examples. One could well and truly state that the era of conflicts between nations has transformed itself in the second half of the 20th century into an age of civil conflicts within nations. In recent times groups fighting the state are increasingly employing terrorist tactics against the power of conventional militaries. Modern terrorist tactics permit organisations to operate below the level of sophistication of the weapons systems of the state. This is a most interesting and recent phenomenon. Modern terrorism permits terroristic organisations to operate below the level of all the weaponry and the weapon system of the organised state. This renders the fight against terrorism more complex and obviously more difficult than fighting a conventional army. The views of experts and specialists who have studied and written about terrorism and terrorist movements can be divided into two schools of thought. One school of thought placed the terrorist beyond the pale of civilised society and considered him an anathema to civilisation and stigmatised him as a plain murderer. The extreme of this line of thought was expressed by Paul Wilkinson, the British Representative at the Council of Europe, Conference of Terrorism in 1980. He stated that the democratic government, which negotiates with these murderers, loses its moral right to govern. This type of argument would logically lead to witch-finders seeking out the witches, reminiscent of the Spanish inquisition many centuries ago. This reminds us also of a certain Latin American General who declared in 1976, “first we are going to kill all of the subversives then their collaborators, then their sympathises the indifferent and finally the timid.” I would say add to this then, that there would be no one left and thus there would be no more conflict. In recent times we have heard (in very recent times) leaders of other great countries making similar statements. The second school of thought is the one, which promotes deep study of the causes of insurgency, in a given context and finding solutions and methods of eradicating these causes. The rational political, social and economic aspirations which when frustrated continuously, gives rise to full blown terrorism of the modern day and must be sifted out of the process of terroristic action and looked at seriously. The causes must be sifted out of terrorism and looked at separately and seriously. Those political aspirations must be addressed honestly and seriously. The solutions that are employed must be made effective legally and constitutionally, politically economically and socially. Peace is more than the simple absence of war. It entails the active engagement in the battle for construction; for reconstruction, for identifying and rectifying the root causes of war and conflict. All this is true very true of our own situation here in Sri Lanka. When the present government took the reigns of power, all these things had already occurred and given rise to a full-blown war between the terrorists and the state. We have attempted to formulate responses to situations by first seeking out and understanding the causes for this terrorism. We have attempted to understand the frustrations caused by the injustices perpetrated upon the minorities and very specially, the Tamil peoples. We have identified or attempted to identify the solutions and tried to gather together the political representatives - political parties that represent the Muslim peoples the SLMC and the NUA, the Tamil peoples; whoever is willing to work with us, and thereby empower them; to correct the injustices that have continued for too long in the areas where the Tamil and Muslim peoples live. I must note here that the only terroristic minority community organisation that exists today in this country actively, namely the LTTE, sees this as their main enemy. They seem to want to stop all effective action to resolve politically and peacefully the Tamil peoples’ problems. They do not want a constitution to be brought in which would guarantee the Tamil people’s rights. They do not want to see in power a government which for the first time has openly apologised to the minority peoples of this country for all the injustices that have been heaped upon them by the various governments since independence and would try to resolve those problems politically, socially and economically and above all humanely. They have tried at every point when this government has tried to bring in a new constitution to guarantee the rights of the Tamil and Muslim peoples and the others, they have exploded bombs in Colombo, in Kandy, perpetrating the most horrendous and hateful terror against civilians living in these areas in the hope that the Sinhala majority and the government would be pushed into various acts of terror like those that were perpetrated in 83’ against Tamil and Muslim civilians. They have tried to kill all those leaders of the majority community who have espoused honestly the cause of a peaceful and negotiated political settlement. They have managed successfully to kill quite a few but they have not triumphed each time, thankfully. They seem to prefer to deal with any government that is weak and through its weakness or lack of a vision or through plain opportunism would continue to generate the causes of terrorism in this country. I would like to tell you and I believe most honestly and strongly that the most effective response to terrorism is to stop generating it. How should we do this? By finding solutions to the problems that cause terrorism. For long the powerful could continue to oppress nations through direct colonial oppression or through the globalisation of the capitalist economic system. And governments could continue to oppress communities within nations by the use or misuse of state power. Modern technology has put a stop to this. Modern technology has effectively ensured that states may find it difficult in the near future to continue to blind themselves against the injustices and the oppression that causes social upheavals and finally terrorism in other nations. And governments of nations, of states also would find it difficult to continue to oppress the under-privileged in their nations and turn away from the problems pretending comfortably that they do not exist. The most startling realisation of this possibility of the potency of modern technology in the hands of the terrorist came to the entire world five days ago on the 11th of September through the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. I believe that it is time now for the world to stop and take stock; honestly and strongly. We cannot encourage and finance friendly terrorist organisations for example and defeat the others. These double standards cause all kinds of confusion in the minds of the terrorists and those who encourage them and the innocent peoples who live amongst the terror and the havoc caused by terrorism. Double standards cannot work anymore, and double standards will not resolve the long-standing problem of terrorism. The use of force directly by a state or through encouraging the terroristic movements to use violence against the enemy may temporarily curb a terrorist movement or the enemy. But these methods have proved to spread and intensify violence in the given society leading to more terroristic activity by perhaps new organisations in the long run. Wars within nations and even wars between nations have been caused by this type of shortsighted encouragement of political violence used by various groups. Today I believe that the task and the challenge before us nationally and internationally, is to recognise terror and political violence as the main enemy of modern society. The main enemy of all that is just and decent, the main enemy of all that humanity has built up through the centuries to be respected and looked upon as civilisation. But saying this will not be sufficient. To identify terrorism as the main enemy of modern societies would be or should lead eventually and urgently to identify the causes for this terrorism in each different nation and state where these terrorist movements have been born, to identify each separate cause or causes and begin within nations and together internationally, to find solutions to these causes, to alleviate the sufferings and the frustrations that have given rise to these terroristic movements. For this we need the mass mobilisation of those young people; because it is the young people in every nation that have taken up arms and taken to terroristic tactics. We need to mobilise the great energies of these young people, their immense commitments towards democratic change in their societies. For this we need visionary leaders, we need programmes of actions with a vision to cause those radical changes within those countries and nations. We also need to look at the need to change radically the present distribution of wealth in nations and internationally. We need to look at the more and more increasing concentration in the hands of a few multi-national companies; we need to look at the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few states which breed attitudes of hegemony amongst states which has proved dangerous right through to the unfolding of dangers to that state itself; dangerous to the rest of the world because the problems created against the hegemonies of some states would quite certainly spread across the globe in this age of globalisation. What can less powerful or powerless groups do in such a situation? In a situation where the de-segregation of the cold war - two blocs - two opposing blocs in the world, have left one hegemonistic bloc of countries that are perceived as the enemies, that deny the rights to various peoples in some nations on the one hand and within nations on the other; where one hegemonistic group of some race or religious community is seen as the one that is perpetrating the injustices against those who perceive those injustices. We will have to turn modern technology on its head perhaps and employ it to wreak vengence as the terrorists who are being identified at the moment (I don’t want to mention who they are) as those terrorists tried to wreak vengeance on all of the United States of America five days ago. This does not of course solve the problems the bombings of New York and Washington, the bombing of the Dalada Maligawa or the Sri Maha Bodhi by the LTTE, the killings of the Sinhala leaders or the Tamil democratic leaders, the killing of hundreds and thousands of Sinhala and Muslim innocent civilians, the chopping up of women and children while asleep in the Muslim villages or in Sinhala villages in the North East, will not resolve any of the perceived injustices caused to the Tamil people or to any of the peolples. We have to today, with international organisations begin even at this late stage to identify specifically the reasons and causes that have given rise to this most horrendous modern day phenomenon of terrorism within countries outside countries and internationally. We will have to address these problems. I do not want to go into the identification of those problems today and bore you with my thoughts on that. It needs serious research and writing. But I would like to mention and underline just one cause that springs to my mind, probably the first one. It is the continued perception of economic poverty and dispossession within nations and between nations, and secondly it could well be the perceived injustice caused by the dispossession of political power by some groups within nations whilst other groups enjoy the positions of power and privileges accruing from them. These may be the two major factors that have given rise first to revolutions and now to terrorism. The whole of the 20th century which was our century which was a century of our generations and partially of those our parents has bred and seen or perhaps has reaped the fruits of this great tragedy which was on one hand the very accelerated development of humanity employing science and modern technology. But the tragedy was in ignoring the possible fallout from the accelerated development on large sections of populations within the nations and on large areas of the world. We are reaping the fruits, the horrendous fruits, the bitter fruits of that tragedy today, of having ignored, that some people and some nations could apportion to themselves alone the possibility of enjoying the fruits of that great human enterprise, which emanated from Western Europe and spread across the Americas. The enterprise of the modern development of science and technology. We forgot to be humane in the process. We were too much in a hurry to reap the benefits of modern technology and science and the industrial age, the nuclear age. We forgot that there were others who were waiting also in the sidelines to enjoy the fruits of that development. Today it is time perhaps even now, when the developed world has seen the horrors of terrorism that we have in our poor part of the world been experiencing for many decades. Perhaps it is now time for us all and especially for the richer developed nations to give of technology of their knowledge and to give generously of their monies not only to obtain contracts for companies in their countries, but also to understand and alleviate the problems generated by the spread of modern development in its present day form, in its present day highly selfish format through countries and through the globe. Let us at this moment when we commemorate a great leader who saw that salvation for a nation was possible only if everyone separately and collectively in that nation, recognised and respected the dignity and the rights of everyone living in that nation; who recognised and gave his life to the struggle to bring all those peoples together in a united nation, whilst respecting the separate identities of each and everyone within that nation. Let us today when we commemorate our friend and colleague and great politician the late Hon. M.H.M. Ashraff, rededicate ourselves to the cause for which he lived and gave his life the cause for which many of our leaders and our peoples rich and poor have given their lives so that we could march in to the new millennium and 21st century, rid of the horrors of hatred, of jelousies, of selfishness, and rebuild together a nation where we could all live in equality and dignity in peace. I thank you all and may I take this opportunity to wish the Hon. Ashraff Jannaithul Firudous. May he attain eternal bliss. I wish you all the blessings of the triple gem. Samadenatama ayubowan. Assalammu alikkum.
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