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Text of the keynote address delivered by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga at the first death anniversary commemoration of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress founder and former minister M.H.M.Ashraff at the BMICH, Colombo, on September 16, 2001.

I feel extremely honoured that Madam Ferial Ashraff has chosen me to deliver the memorial on this the first death anniversary of my friend and respected colleague the Hon. M H M Ashraff.

My association with Mr Ashraff began in earnest about ten years ago before his most untimely demise last year.

When he wished to discuss the future of our country and the possible solutions to its most pressing problem which is the ethnic problem, 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 anyway.

A surreptitious meeting was arranged at the house, and I travelled there in a dark tinted vehicle and another vehicle for Mr Ashraff.

We talked about how we could end this type of terror in this country, 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 hand and said Madam, I think we can work together.

That was the start of a short but a strong political alliance between the party of his creation, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) and the People's Alliance (PA) which I represented.

Hon.Ashraff was a courageous and a visionary leader.

He was also one among the few political leaders who gave without expectations of personal or material gains.

When the history of modern Sri Lanka comes to be written, in times less charged with emotion than now, I am sure it will be said that his greatness was founded on his ability to understand the complex problems of post independent Sri Lanka.

The poet in Ashraff gave him the ability to understand the heartbeat of his people. His humanity and artistic sensitivity enabled him to break through the shackles of that thick and racial isolation moving into the realm of national unity, within a multi lingual, multi cultural, multi racial society.

Ashraff did not remain only a visionary. He was a dynamic pragmatist.

He formulated practical policies for the emancipation of the underprivileged members of his community, whilst he never forgot that this has to be achieved within a wider framework of a nation, where all the communities of different racial and religious entities would live in dignity and with equal rights.

He possessed boundless energy and undaunted commitment to the struggle to realise his dreams. What was this dream ?

I remember talking for many long hours with my friend and colleague Hon. Ashraff about the dream, which had much in common with my own dream for our people and for our country.

It was a dream about bringing back to our beloved nation, the greatness and the beauty she boasted for many long centuries. But for this we needed to complete one major task among numerous 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 will be equally respected and guaranteed within a free and democratic Sri Lanka.

I would say that the late Ashraff's greatest singular achievement has been the stewardship he gave to the people of the East, to move towards modernity and liberations from the shackles of poverty and ignorance, through democratic means.

The SLMC which he fathered provided a democratic basis first for the Muslims of the East and then to other Muslims to give expressions to their identity, and seek solutions to their problems, through democratic means.

If not for Ashraff, there could well have been a Muslim terrorist movement hailing from the East of Sri Lanka.

The SLMC's alliance with the PA government, provided the possibility of taking development to the greatly under-developed areas of the Eastern province.

The Hon.Ashraff almost spent his entire adult life, in the cause of his people and in the struggle for creating the right conditions for ethnic harmony and peace.

I remember Mr Ashraff describing with much pain the sufferings 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 and join with us in our project for peace, through a negotiated political settlement even with those terrorists who caused him and his family and his people so much pain and suffering.

I would like to go on, from this point onwards to make certain 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 am sure you all would agree that the problem of terrorism is the one most topical subject at this very moment, since last Tuesday's terrorist attacks in the US.

Of course in little Sri Lanka, we have experienced the power of terrorism for some 30 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 note that the horrendous attack in the world's richest and the most powerful nation has at last sent a "wake up call" to the entire world.

The immensity of the tragedy in the US that took place on the 11th of September, just five days ago leaves us numbed with shock and horror at the number of lives lost and the sufferings caused to the families of friends of those killed and injured, the heavy fallout of the American economy and thereby 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 the world in the past two decades.

To do this it may not be sufficient to say that we will hunt down the perpetrators of terror and their allies, but we must try to understand the deep rooted causes of this most unnatural de-humanising phenomenon and that this is terrorism, very specific to the 20th century.

No doubt the first world war was triggered off by an act of a terrorist to kill the Austrian Crown Prince in Bosnia. No doubt we know, of several groups of Russians 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 terrorism came into its own and began to be employed systematically as a political weapon in the post World War Two era.

The suffering caused by centuries of international warfare, the fear 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 insurrection 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 Two 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 type de-faults somewhat 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 movements were invariably provided by intelligence 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 hope now that agenda could be realised. No constructive programme to realise that agenda. Terrorism is destructive. It is neither radical nor revolutionary. Terrorism stems usually from conservatism and is usually 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 crisis, of modernism and the globalisation of capitalism and the free market economy.

Someone once said that hope betrayed transforms itself into bombs.

I would prefer to add to this that perceived injustice if allowed to continue and allayed would also transform itself first into despair and then into violence.

In today's context this violence could take the form of the most horrendous terroristic activities. I think it was 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 terrorists overthrow the duly elected government of 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 in 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 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 is its cradle and continued revenge by the State, becomes the mother's milk and nourishment for terrorism. We need to look at the causes of modern day terrorism because it has 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 in a developing poor country like ours pontifying the human rights of terrorists and terrorism shocked the heart of the developed world on the 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 one nation to encircle the entire world.

If we look at the cradles of terrorism today we know that they emanate from the decolonised world. From countries that have undergone nearly 500 years of the recent state 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 decolonisations during the immediate aftermath of decolonisation.

If we look at Sri Lanka for over 20 centuries Sri Lanka absorbed many waves of Arab and Muslim settlers as well as Dravidian and other settlers hailing from India.

- Continued tomorrow

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