Rebels Eyed in Sri Lankan Official's Murder

Copyright © 2009 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

JENNIFER LUDDEN, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Jennifer Ludden.

The island nation of Sri Lanka is under a state of emergency after the assassination yesterday of its foreign minister. The government is blaming the Tamil Tiger rebel group, though a Tiger spokesman denies that accusation. Whoever's to blame, there is concern now that the killing threatens the three-and-a-half-year-old cease-fire. Dumeetha Luthra is in Sri Lanka for the BBC.

Welcome to the program.

Ms. DUMEETHA LUTHRA (BBC): Hello.

LUDDEN: Can I ask you first, I understand that the foreign minister, Lakshman Kadrigamar, was himself a minority Tamil. Can you explain why the government would think that Tamil Tigers had killed him?

Ms. LUTHRA: Well, Lakshman Kadrigamar was a Tamil, but he was a Tamil who was strongly opposed and very vocal about his criticism of the rebels. He actually led a campaign to get them outlawed and succeeded in several countries, including Britain and America. A lot of Tamils felt that he'd betrayed the Tamil cause by not calling for an independent homeland, so he really wasn't a Tamil who was with the rebels, and that's one of the key reasons why they are the main suspects.

LUDDEN: And he was actually killed in his own home. It sounds like quite a sophisticated operation. Can you explain it?

Ms. LUTHRA: What we understand from the police now is that the shooting came from a house nearby, and they've investigated the house, and they said that they found evidence that people had been there for quite a while, that they'd been ensconced in the house for at least a couple of weeks watching what was going on in Lakshman Kadrigamar's home. This, of course, raises questions about how anyone could be watching a very highly protected man for such a long time without a security breach.

LUDDEN: What has the government's reaction been?

Ms. LUTHRA: The government has rejected Tamil Tiger claims that they haven't been involved in the killing. The government said they find this very difficult to accept, and has said that it is a severe setback for the cease-fire and for the peace process. What they have also, however, said is that at the moment, they have made a decision not to pull out of the cease-fire, which suggests that in the short term there isn't going to be a hard-line response to the killing.

LUDDEN: Dumeetha Luthra is a BBC reporter in Sri Lanka. Thanks very much.

Ms. LUTHRA: Thank you.

LUDDEN: For some background on Sri Lanka's civil war, we turn now to Philip Gourevitch. He's just visited the country for an article in the August 1st issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Welcome.

Mr. PHILIP GOUREVITCH (The New Yorker): Nice to talk to you.

LUDDEN: I understand that you interviewed the foreign minister who was just assassinated.

Mr. GOUREVITCH: Right.

LUDDEN: Can I ask if he was worried about his safety?

Mr. GOUREVITCH: Well, yes. I mean, I knew he was worried about his safety because when I arranged the interview and went to his house, all around were guys who were clearly security officers and also just piles of submachine guns.

LUDDEN: Three and a half years into the cease-fire that his government had signed with the Tamils, how did he see things going?

Mr. GOUREVITCH: He saw it as rather hard going by then. The cease-fire was agreed three years ago, but talks and a larger peace process had broken down within a year, and when I was there earlier this year, there was a sort of lull after the tsunami struck that had made people think, well, maybe this event will force a kind of national unity and force the two sides to deal with each other as they deal with the damage that nature wrought. But he was pretty pessimistic about the prospect of the Tiger faction coming to what could be regarded as an acceptable negotiating position, which is to say, he believed that they stood only for separatism.

LUDDEN: The Tamil minority has been fighting the Sinhalese majority there since 1983 before this cease-fire. What is at the heart of the conflict?

Mr. GOUREVITCH: It's a kind of strange sad story about an island that had lived with a fair amount of unity, not just before independence from British colonial rule but for a while afterwards. And then in the early years of independence the Sinhalese majority--a kind of nationalism sprung up amidst the electoral politics that led to making Sinhalese the only official language, making Buddhism tantamount to a state religion and effectively disenfranchising the Tamil minority. As Tamil resentment grew, there was unrest, there was violence. The violence almost always was stronger in its reaction against the Tamil until young Tamils became increasingly militant and took up arms saying, `You know, the old Tamils who said you could have a political deal with these Sinhalese, they're wrong. We have to fight for an independent state.' That's where the war began in the early '80s. The Tigers emerged out of these various militant groups as the dominant force, not just because they were better at fighting the government but because they never hesitated to eliminate Tamil rivals, and that's essentially what you see again today where a Tamil politician who does not hold their point of view, in fact, who is in the government, had...

LUDDEN: A government that signed a peace deal.

Mr. GOUREVITCH: To them that is a death sentence.

LUDDEN: So do they want a separate land still? Do they say that?

Mr. GOUREVITCH: Officially, because they're in a peace-talk situation around the cease-fire, they are saying that they are considering other alternatives, but they've never really seemed to abandon that idea, and the fact is they've got one. The country is really two countries. There is a cease-fire line that divides the country from one coast to the other in a big slice, and that area inside there is controlled by the Tigers and it's effectively a rebel state within the state, not officially recognized but effectively there.

LUDDEN: It was interesting to read about your talk with the political analyst there who lamented that there's no sense of national identity.

Mr. GOUREVITCH: This is the great catastrophe. Here you have a small island with a long history of relatively peaceful coexistence amongst its ethnic groups, and yet everywhere I went people said, `He's Tamil, he's Sinhalese; I'm Tamil, I'm Sinhalese.' Nobody ever said, `I'm a Sri Lankan,' and when I talked to people about this, they often were taken aback. It was so ingrained in them that when I said, `Well, why don't people think about what's good for Sri Lanka?' they would always look a little startled and then they'll say, `Oh, yeah, well, you know, by now it's really--nobody really thinks that way.'

LUDDEN: How do you think that this assassination of the foreign minister might affect the situation?

Mr. GOUREVITCH: Well, I think the situation in Sri Lanka has been extremely volatile. One of the phrases that they use over there all the time is `No war, no peace. That's what we live in, this limbo.' And that limbo has to tip one way or the other eventually, and I think the reality is that whether this is the trigger event or something else is, the fighting in Sri Lanka--it's very hard to say that it was over.

LUDDEN: Philip Gourevitch is editor of The Paris Review and a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine, where his article on Sri Lanka appears in the August 1st issue.

Thank you very much.

Mr. GOUREVITCH: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.