Lakshman Kadirgamar

The quintessential Sri Lankan

by Tissa Jayatilaka

It was a privilege to have known Lakshman Kadirgamar (LK) who was born on April, 12, 1932 and died on August 12, 2005. Ours was a brief but glorious friendship. Fittingly so, for in most matters, the LK I knew preferred quality to quantity.

It was another civilised Sri Lankan and yet another victim of the savage LTTE - Neelan Tiruchelvam - who introduced me to LK about a decade ago. I had applied for a position in an international organisation and was keen to have a letter of endorsement from the Foreign Minister.

Consequent to a meeting I had with him, arranged by Neelan, LK, king and generous as ever, gave me the piece of paper I had sought.

Years passed by and during this period I watched with great admiration from the sidelines LK's brilliant and spellbinding performance as our Foreign Minister. In particular I relished the finesse with which he handled the challenge of the terrorism of the LTTE.

To say that it was primarily LK's powers of persuasion and skilful handling of sensitive domestic and international issues that redeemed Sri Lanka's sullied image is surely no exaggeration. Needless to say, several dedicated and effective Sri Lankan diplomats played their crucial part in this restoration process, but the helmsman was clearly LK.

It was around this time that I confessed to my friend Nanda Godage, who had then just returned to the Foreign Ministry after his ambassadorial stint in Brussels, my desire to seek to build on my acquaintance with his Minister. I was anxious to let LK know how glad I was that he was Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister.

I also wished to engage him in friendly debate about aspects of our international relations, and subject review, the political plusses and minuses of his colleagues in government. Nanda in turn encouraged me to get to know LK better observing that any and all encounters with the man should prove both congenial and wholesome. Emboldened thus I indeed made the effort to cultivate a friendship with LK and he responded graciously and warmly.

This is how I came by the immense benefit of having LK as my friend, philosopher and guide and the memories of my subsequent close association with him I shall cherish for the rest of my life. The 'mellow tones' of LK that his Oxford contemporary Peter Jay has spoken about I shall always remember.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, in the course of his tribute to LK in Parliament, had noted that a meal with the Minister offered food for the body as well as the mind. On most occasions a mere telephone conversation with him provided such nourishment for the soul.

We began to meet each other frequently for chats on the vital issues of the day and these close encounters enable me to discover for myself what an exceptional human being LK truly was. He was an exemplary citizen of Sri Lanka.

There was not in him a trace of racism. He was Sri Lankan to core. And, to my mind, great and irreparable as the loss of LK is, the greater tragedy is that neither the zealots amongst the Sinhalese who mourned his death nor their counterparts within the Tamil community who rejoiced over it understood, or yet truly understand, Lakshman Kadirgamar the man. Both groups have missed the wood for the trees.

The Sinhala zealots (who, by the way, as Silan Kadirgamar pointed out at the memorial service at The Cathedral, did not even know how to spell or pronounce his name properly) mistook his principled and resolute opposition to the separatist extremism of the LTTE as a sign of his "pro-Sinhalaness".

Their moral inadequacy from which arose their failure and refusal to understand LK's heartfelt aversion to ethnic labels made the Tamil zealots conclude that his championing of an overarching Sri Lankan identity was an act of political expediency at best and a manifestation of "anti-Tamilness" at worst. It is ultimately the tragedy of Sri Lanka that neither zealot will ever know the essential goodness of the man whose passing all true Sri Lankans will mourn sincerely.

My abiding memory of LK will be his innate Sri Lankanness. He desperately strove to make all Sri Lankans - Muslim, Tamil, Burgher, Sinhala - live together in a united nation. He put Sri Lanka on the map.

His last public act on the evening of 12 August, 2005, was to preside over a ceremony to mark the release of the inaugural issue of 'International Relations in a Globalising World' (IRGW), the journal of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS).

The launching of IRGW, as Adam Roberts, another Balliol man, has pointed out, was key part of LK's long-term plan to raise the level of Sri Lanka' s contribution to international diplomacy. In similar vein, his decision to bring out a felicitation volume in honour of Stanley Kirinde (LK was to have presided over the launch of this publication on 18 August, 2005), I am personally aware, was part of his long-term plan to raise the level of Sri Lanka's contribution to the world of culture and the arts.

He felt that with the kind of heritage, we Sri Lankans are heirs to what we ought to give the world, as he so aptly put it, "Something more than just tea, tourism and terrorism" that unfortunately we have become known for in recent years. He wanted a book on a Sri Lankan artist that would be "an ideal brand label for Sri Lanka, an image which can be projected all over the world as the face of Sri Lanka in all its many forms".

As Chairman of the Stanley Kirinde Felicitation Committee, LK laboured long and hard to get 'The World of Stanley Kirinde' published.

He spent hours coaxing potential donors, encouraging its author Sinharaja Tammita-Delgoda and spurring him on his way. The result is a monumental and exquisite piece of work-an achievement LK was delighted with.

All in all, Lakshman Kadirgamar was peerless fellow-traveller, a man of the utmost refinement of word, thought and deed. Sri Lanka can ill afford to lose sons of his calibre. But, then, it is the tall trees that catch the wind. He will be much missed by every decent Sri Lankan in the dark days and years that loom before us.