It's a great pleasure to introduce our speaker today.
It says here on his bio that he's a senior research fellow at the Centre for International Studies.
That sort of makes me smile because we know Adam is something much more significant to all of us.
In his years as the Montagu Burton professor of international relations here in the department,
a position he held for a number of years, helping to build up the graduate program in international relations.
The community of research that we have here, and indeed, I would say the culture of research that we that we have here,
Adam's be involved in a couple of major research projects within the department and also bridging other areas of the university.
The changing character of your program.
Adam was one of the Gang of Four who created the changing character of work program in its initial years and also his very
interesting and pathbreaking project on civil resistance and power politics that he engaged with with Timothy Garton Ash as well.
A number of you will have read Adam's work over the years on areas relating to civilians,
to humanitarian action, to broader aspects of international security.
He was also one of the editors of the big project we did in CCW on the United Nations Security Council.
And War, I would say, is probably one of the driving editors of that project.
But he's with us today to talk about a fascinating project that he mentioned to me a couple of years ago on the train,
which I know brings together a number of his various interests.
The title of the talk is On International Order and Violent Extremism,
But Lessons from Sri Lanka and Adam will be drawing in particular on the book that
he's just recently edited that's been released by I do i v tourists excuse me,
democracy, sovereignty and Terror. Lakshman Kadar, a gambler on the foundations of the international order.
So we welcome Adam warmly to the CCW and Locke seminar.
We're delighted you found the time to be with us, because, of course,
Adam's day job these days is president of the British Academy, so we know he doesn't always have the same kind of time.
He used to be in the department. So we're really pleased to have you, Adam.
We are always open to questions at the end of these sessions, so we'll see how far we go.
But we look forward to hearing your comments. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer.
And it's a delight to be back here, ladies and gentlemen, and to be addressing the particular topic that I have today.
My presentation is about a really longstanding set of questions.
Its central concern is whether the difficult task of containing movements designated as terrorist and I realise
that's always a controversial designation can be conducted in a manner consistent with international norms,
including those relating to sovereignty, human rights laws of armed conflict and democracy.
It's well known that there are difficulties at every turn and this has been evident in most societies that have faced a terrorist threat.
Now, I must make clear at the beginning that I am absolutely not a specialist on Sri Lanka,
and I'm sure there are people here today who know a great deal more about Sri Lanka than I do.
One of them is Laxman, caretaker widow, who is here today.
This is a sister pretty, who lives in London.
And I take a particular angle on the Sri Lanka conflict, exploring it through the prism of Laxman Girma,
who served as foreign minister of Sri Lanka for most of the period from 1994 until his assassination in 2005.
I knew him pretty well. I first came across him in 1964 when he had just done a report,
which was the first ever report done on an international on the situation in a foreign country for Amnesty International.
And he very much starts out life as a committed lawyer and committed to democracy and civil liberties.
And that report, which is published in full in the book, was about the Buddhist movement that unseated the regime of note in Zim.
That's how I happened to be particularly interested because of my longstanding and incurable interest in civil resistance.
30 years later, I discovered that this same man,
as I had had a correspondence with by the old fashioned method of letters in 1964, was Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka.
Then I discovered, to my surprise, that he'd been a student at my own college, Balliol College,
including a billet on the fascinating topic of strict liability in English and Roman Dutch law,
which you can consult in a broadly in law library if you feel inclined.
It's wonderfully arcane because it's about a system of law, Rome and Dutch law that had ceased to exist in the Netherlands centuries ago,
but had this extraordinary colonial afterlife in Sri Lanka and South Africa.
And he was told by Tony Honoré, who hails from South Africa and is still very much alive.
And in his early nineties he still runs seminars at all schools.
That was his peculiar and special interest.
And I have to say that the thesis is largely about problems of dreams and what happens
when water sinks or sewage seeps out of one house into the ground of another.
And by one of those wonderful ironies of history, a problem that I thought was totally arcane,
arose in the case of two of the contributors to the book.
While the book was being compiled, whether the lawyers consulted the Oxford thesis, I'm not entirely sure.
We resumed contact when I discovered this connection with very little.
He visited de Lille. I saw a lot of him. We elected him with acclamation, an honorary fellow of value.
And that contact was not merely formal but intellectual.
I found him extraordinarily interesting on the subject.
Of terrorism, a subject which does not always attract the most subtle minds.
And he was also extraordinarily realistic about the risk that he would be assassinated.
He knew that it was highly likely without being melodramatic about it.
And on his invitation, I visited Sri Lanka in 2005 to give some lectures.
So after his death,
I felt somebody owed it to him to collect his major speeches and writings and to give some account of his life and what he stood for.
And I felt that that was a job that I really had to do.
The world is not waiting to hear about the wisdom of a third world diplomat or minister.
On the subject of terrorism, it's naturally more conventionally assumed that we should listen to other voices.
And yet I felt there was something here of value.
And he struck me as an interesting figure for three reasons.
First of all, as a young athlete, you had an interesting and privileged education within Sri Lanka and excelled at practically everything he did.
And here he is in 1952, winning the South Asian 110 metre hurdles title.
I think it was the second time he'd won it. Extraordinarily talented man.
And his talents resulted in him taking a role.
A role in a very symbolic event which tells one something about the Sri Lanka
of the time in post-colonial Sri Lanka having achieved independence in 48.
This was a relay to celebrate the unity of the peoples of Sri Lanka.
He's in the group on the left, far from the camera.
Quite hard to make out, but that's him handing a scroll to a young maiden of the same ethnic group.
He's representing the Tamil route. And the scroll has a message about the unity of the peoples in Sri Lanka.
And it was again in Colombo half a century later that he was cremated in Independence Square,
Colombo, in circumstances that symbolised the divisions of the people of Sri Lanka.
So in his person, he symbolically symbolises the hopes that they were not just in Sri Lanka but in
many countries for the huge progress that there would be after decolonisation.
And that's what the Colombo exhibition was all about. It was the, if you like, Festival of Britain, except with more of an international flavour.
And then the disappointment is now symbolised with that cremation in Independence Square all those years later.
So that symbolic role struck me as important.
Secondly, it strikes me as interesting because he was quite exceptionally brave.
He, after a long and successful career as an international lawyer,
mainly with the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, he chose to go into politics in 1994 at the age of 62.
Within months of the killing of his close acquaintance, who he who had preceded him as president of the Oxford Union.
That's lovely. I love New Delhi. Bottom, right.
I think was the first Sri Lankan ever to be president of the Oxford Union.
And that's Laxman cutting on the top left.
Who was the second? And the causes of Lalit Modi on his assassination are not known with certainty,
but there is at least a suspicion that the government was involved for.
It's a pretty remarkable thing in those circumstances to have decided to go into politics.
A sign of bravery in itself.
And Leishman, as foreign minister, was to work fearlessly, despite the strong evidence that he was a target of the Tamil Tigers.
He was consistently warned by the Sri Lankan police intelligence army that he was a target because he was a tunnel.
And the idea that a Tamil should defend the unity of Sri Lanka was obviously a betrayal that they could not tolerate.
And hence the awful result.
Above all, Lakshman represented, as I've tried to indicate, an unusual combination of beliefs.
On the one hand, he had an impeccable background of strong commitment to democracy and human rights.
Here he is at the Oxford Union, making a comeback as a guest speaker in October 1959,
opposing the notion that democracy is unsuitable for the developing for the underdeveloped nations of the world.
Underdeveloped was that era's euphemism for developing the other way around, developing as a euphemism.
And this was no mere youthful indiscretion when he went into politics.
He was and remains sharply critical of the employment of state terror.
He explicitly said in his statement of why he went into politics, which is in the in the book,
he was very much the same person as a student at Oxford, maybe a little older and wiser, but with the same very strong beliefs.
Yet at the same time, and this is where there is a dichotomy, he was quite exceptionally tough on terrorism.
This, I believe, reflected the fact that whereas we in the West tend to view terrorism as mainly a threat against our own societies,
actually, and those who have studied many third world societies, I think would agree with this much.
The bigger threat is to the fabric of societies that have less long historical traditions of managing a
democratic system and which are more vulnerable to ethnic or religious conflict or a combination of the two.
It is actually societies such as Colombia, Lebanon and Somalia that have been more vulnerable to terrorism becoming absolutely endemic.
Or Pakistan could add than some more developed Western societies.
Among his deep beliefs was the need for a serious,
professional and academically informed approach to the management of diplomacy and to our understanding of the world and his.
So this is that's him as foreign minister. Here's a poignant picture of him on the 12th of August, 1995.
On the day on which he announced the creation of a new journal which is handing to one
of the contributors to a book on the road was now the Indian ambassador in Washington,
DC was then in Colombo. That's the first edition of the Journal that the first issue of the journal that he had long wanted to create.
And it was on that very day when he launched this journal on International Relations that he was assassinated.
No. A few basic facts about the Sri Lanka war and please correct me where I make mistakes on.
The first issue, of course, is it's very contentious to call it a war.
Lakshman always avoided the term for reasons which are familiar to many who have lived in societies where they faced some kind of internal threat.
They were reluctant to agree with the term war,
but the so called Eelam war between the Tamil Tigers and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the
Sri Lankan government can be said to have begun in 1983 and was fought in four main phases 83 to 7,
92, 95, 95 to 2002 and 2006 to 9.
The last phase being, of course, after Lovren's death.
No. This war was not the beginning of political violence in Sri Lanka.
The country had had an unusually smooth transition from colonialism.
If it had, I don't know what the British thought they were doing. Universal suffrage since 1931.
Most unusual for a colony. And it was partly a reflection of a number of progressive British thinkers who really saw
the empire in idealistic terms that that particular eventuality occurred in Sri Lanka.
But maybe that very lack of a liberation myth of a prolonged struggle with a
coherent single leadership resulted in a certain vision in the Sri Lankan politics.
Thereafter, and in 1971 and 1987 to 9,
there'd been an armed socialist uprising in the southern and central provinces led by a party
known as the JVP and put down by Sri Lankan security forces with very considerable loss of life.
Now the Tamil question. This slide is taken from the last census that was of evidentiary value taken in 1991,
at which time there were, according to that sense that the census results,
73% of the inhabitants of Sri Lanka were Sinhalese, 12% was Sri Lankan Tamil, 5% were Indian Tamil and 7% were Moors, mainly Muslim.
The sense of insecurity of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka became serious in the mid 1950s and it's an
absolutely classic problem of the limitations of democracy when faced with a divisive ethnic conflict.
We've had our version of those limitations in the history of Northern Ireland and in Sri Lanka,
and they were all there became serious and Sinhalese Buddhist majority came to was attracted by the idea of
influence commensurate with our numbers and linguistic nationalism was part of the result of that attraction.
It was in contrast to the rather more elitist constitutionalism of the early years after independence.
And its outcome was the 1956 Official Language Act, which made Sinhala the only official language of the state.
Unsurprisingly, especially as many Tamils had traditionally worked for the state as clerks and civil servants and the like.
This was followed by much opposition,
especially by Tamils who had good reason to fear any threat to their identity and diminution of their access to jobs.
This led to riots in June 1956, the first serious occurrence of violence between communities since the Sinhala Muslim riots back in 1915.
And then it led to the May 1958 clashes between Sinhalese and Tamils,
which were the first major outbreak against Tamils and in many ways a point of no return as a result of continuing troubles over the language issue.
There were various modifications of the Official Language Act.
Some convincing. More convincing than others. They reached the logical conclusion in the Constitution's current Article 22 as it was modified in 1987.
I'm trying to remember the detail of it, but if something like Sinhala shall be the official language of Sri Lanka.
Tamil shall also be an official language.
English should be the bridge language.
Now, if any of you can work out logically what that means, you are better experts on language than I am.
And it failed to satisfactory. It was too little, too late, probably to satisfy the issue at hand.
By this time the Eelam conflict had been going on for four years now.
This war, which went through all conflict, which went through four phases, resulted in a point in 2002, at which point judgement was in opposition.
It resulted in a ceasefire agreement and you can get an idea of the areas that are covered by the ceasefire being recognised
held by the Tamil Tigers as up in the northern province of there and then these two areas in the eastern province.
So those are the three main areas that were recognised as held by the Tamil Tigers.
Now there was no official map with the ceasefire agreement.
The whole thing was done in a rush without the approval of the president of Sri Lanka.
We represented a different party from the government at the time.
So it wasn't concluded in the most propitious of circumstances.
By this time, Norway was involved in an intermediary role.
I have tried I've tried hard to get a map, this map from the Norwegians,
through the foreign ministry, through various contacts in the Foreign Ministry.
And although I associate the Norwegians with efficiency and helpfulness, the money never came.
And eventually, through a contact in the Sri Lankan Defence Ministry, who have been exceptionally helpful, I must say, I managed to get hold of this,
of this map, and I think the reluctance to produce it had to do with the extreme difficulty of actually monitoring the ceasefire,
the ill defined nature of some of the borders,
the extreme disagreements over what the high security zones on the Sri Lankan government side of the borders actually meant, and so on and so forth.
And this just as background to the war, and then I will end my PowerPoint extravaganza.
This is just to illustrate the situation in the immediate in the last few years before the highly controversial final, final campaign of 2009.
The red areas are controlled by the Tamil Tigers.
By this time they've lost strong control in the eastern provinces, but they had partial control of quite large areas.
They were operating certainly. And then the yellow areas, those controlled by the government of Sri Lanka, but still claimed for the Tamil state.
And one of the features of the conflict was the reluctance of the Tamil Tiger leadership.
Not always the most politically astute leadership, I have to say,
to make significant compromises about the areas that they might control in some confederal arrangement now.
And I just want to explore a few general questions raised by the Sri Lankan conflict and by Peter Gomes performance.
First, is it intellectually legitimate or merely propaganda for a government or citizens of a
country to call a movement fighting for a minority people's homeland within it as terrorist?
It goes without saying that the term terrorist is highly emotional.
And I remember years ago in a book I contributed to on the subject of terrorism,
Laurie Friedman said that the description of terrorist is a victory for those who are in the anti-terrorist cause.
In any given case, it is highly emotional and it is inevitable that some will use different terms.
That's absolutely inevitable. And yet we do need a term to describe actions which aim at assassinations and of course,
actions which aim at civilians aim sometimes at more or less random.
Destruction and which operate by inculcating an atmosphere of fear not only against their adversaries, but also within the territory they control.
And it seems to me that there is a need for the term and to reject its use entirely is problematic.
But to recognise that it is a difficult term, an emotional term is right.
Secondly, is it sensible for states outside a conflict area to proclaim one party in the conflict
terrorist and to adopt legislation to prohibit certain kinds of support for that party?
That's one thing that Laxman worked tirelessly to do.
He worked precisely to get the Tamil Tiger movement declared to be a terrorist movement in certain countries where they were raising funds.
And you can get a flavour of that from Richmond's own speeches, for example.
Here he is speaking in Washington, D.C. in 2000, and he says of the emigre Tamil population.
And of course, emigre populations are often prone to feel guilty about the lack of direct involvement
in the society from which they have fled and their desire to see it changed.
It's not surprising, just as Irish emigres in America often gave money for the Provisional IRA.
It's not surprising that they should do so in these cases. And here is Lakshman in Washington saying,
I don't for one moment say that every one of the terminal emigres in North America supports terrorism most certainly, and categorically they do not.
The funding comes from, I would say, a small minority.
The answer I used to get from foreign offices in this part of the world and in Europe was that they had no laws to deal with terrorism,
especially the funding of terrorism. I was told it was a new phenomenon.
Our legal system does not provide for combating international terrorism.
We have old penal laws and so on. And he was entirely right about that in the sense that, for example,
in the UK our definition of terrorism was one of planning actions within the UK or against the UK.
It wasn't any kind of universal definition of terrorism.
And he urged that there be changes in the UK law, specifically in a speech at Chatham House in 98,
and eventually that was secured and after his death he had a posthumous triumph in getting European countries,
the European Union and India and Canada, to prohibit fundraising for the LTTE.
So in a particular circumstances of his case, there was, it seems to me, a powerful argument for what he was doing.
Third question raised is the theory that terrorism can be infectious and can easily become endemic in a society.
Validated by the Sri Lankan case. To me, it has always seemed one of the major problems of terrorism that picked up or started by the right.
It may get picked up by the left, started by nationalists, and they get taken up by communists or the other way around or whatever.
And whether one looks at the history of Cyprus or the history of Palestine started terrorism movements,
really gained currency with the Jewish national resistance, a gun and a stone going against the British then got picked up by the PLO.
There is something to the theory of the infectiousness of such methods, and I think that without going into too strongly into medical analogies,
which I am deeply suspicious of, I do think that the Sri Lankan case, for reasons I've indicated, tends to support that view.
Fourthly, are democratic political systems more or less likely than others to undergo terrorist attacks?
As I mentioned, he was a firm advocate of democracy. And yet in his writings on terrorism,
he recognised that actually it's very often democracies that witness terrorist
campaigns because it's easier to organise in them than it is in dictatorial states.
And so he saw what the very least is a paradox in this situation.
And particularly, of course, he was conscious of that problem of Democratic politics,
that the majority Syrian tyranny that leaves a minority feeling dispossessed or
vulnerable to extreme leaders because democratic politics don't seem to yield results.
If fifth issue. What is the place of negotiations and ceasefires in a struggle between a government and its insurgent adversaries?
And here we have to confront cutting our own ambivalence on the subject.
He reluctantly consented to the 2002 ceasefire agreement with the Tamil Tigers, but only on certain understandings.
And of course, one of them was that there be progress towards a political settlement.
He even went so far as to approve the deal prescription of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka,
even while he was encouraging the proscription everywhere else in other countries.
And he he had the agreement, for example,
of the United States government on that course they said were perfectly happy to go on keeping the Tamil Tigers proscribed,
even if you did proscribed them in Sri Lanka,
because he did believe that there was a case for talking because he profoundly believed that however destructive,
stupid or whatever terrorist methods were, a terrorist movement did represent a series of political problems that had to be addressed.
And he would say that as a generalisation about such movements,
that they tended to have a social basis and that it was would be foolish not to address them.
And of course, he certainly believed in, shall we say,
somewhat variable geometry towards movements depending upon the circumstances in which they developed, for example.
I don't think he supported the idiotic as I thought it at the time,
British definition of the African National Congress of South Africa as a terrorist movement.
There is a world of difference between a movement which has gone through some
phase of organising attacks which might just about be construed as terrorism and
being a systematically and consistently terrorist organisation and the foolishness
of the British government in that particular description and needless to say,
echoing the United States government. It seems to me to be an example of just how not to handle these problems.
And in the book there's a lovely picture of a Laxman enjoying the company of Nelson and Cynthia, I think, enjoying the company of Nelson Mandela.
So he was discriminating, I would say, in these matters.
And yet he also was the leading critical became the leading critic of that ceasefire that he'd
initially approved when he saw its consequences in the way in which it was being handled.
And his speech in the Sri Lankan parliament criticising the ceasefire.
About a year after it was concluded is a very powerful speech.
It's forensic in its detail and it suggests exactly why a ceasefire cannot be allowed if it allows continuing
control of territory and continuing military and naval activities cannot be a basis for permanent peace.
And of course, there were numerous violations of the ceasefire,
and it was a very impressive speech and a classic example of his toughness in relation to terrorism.
Another issue I think we've got to the fix can upside interventions whether in the form of direct military involvement,
third party monitoring etc. or unroll be effective in the case of an insurgency such as that in Sri Lanka.
And there had been the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka in an attempt to solve the war following an earlier cease fire agreement,
which wasn't a terribly clever agreement because it had been concluded between the Indian
government and the government of Sri Lanka without the participation of the Tamil Tigers.
This was, I think,
before Lakshman became foreign minister and this led to a massive Indian peacekeeping presence and there that too badly broken down.
And India had eventually to give up its peacekeeping role rather hastily.
And it was one of the Tamil Tigers more more foolish mistakes that they irritated and the Indian so much and attacked them so much.
And then ultimately they assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in India and that act rebounded in the face,
as so often happens with movements using terrorist methods,
but that the nasty taste left in the mouth of that attempted intervention in Sri Lanka was,
I think, an indication to other powers that they were not likely to succeed in a major role, although Norway came forward offering a different role,
a monitoring role and to some extent an intermediary role in connection with the 2002 ceasefire.
And that too went pretty wrong. And there's a lot of soul searching being going on in Norway about it.
And when you think about it, there's a fundamental problem not only in Sri Lanka,
but in many countries undergoing civil war that's really hard to escape.
And that is the problem. Either an intermediary regards the two sides as in some sense equal.
In which case they did things like, for example,
suggesting that the maritime zones controlled by the Tamil Tiger Navy and others controlled by the Sri Lankan navy,
or you don't treat them as equal, and if you do treat them as equal,
you're naturally going to irritate the government of a sovereign state that feels that its cause is being undermined.
If you don't treat them as equal, you will irritate the insurgent movement.
The Norwegians wandered into this situation without, as far as I can see,
having very thoroughly analysed the structural problems and then handling it with a lack of finesse.
That was quite remarkable. I was in Colombo on an occasion when the Tamil Tigers had, in their infinite wisdom,
shut off the sluice gates to an area in the eastern provinces largely farmed by Muslims.
And all they had done was create a very large number of refugees.
They could no longer farm land.
They fled as they had to, to government controlled towns.
And then, after much outrage and opposition of the Tamil Tigers eventually agreed to reopen the seascapes and the Norwegian
intermediaries made speeches about how statesmen like the Tamil Tigers would be in allowing them to be reopened.
You can imagine that didn't go down terribly well in Colombo where it was felt that they had made too many compromises.
And as I say, as much soul searching about this as was also unrolled.
Lakshman was a great admirer of the United Nations.
But just as the British have been great admirers of the United Nations, an active participant in it, but didn't want a UN role in Northern Ireland.
So Sri Lanka was very much the same in respect to Sri Lanka, not keen on a UN role and for similar reasons.
The UN is often caught in rather rigid positions.
They may not be quick footed enough to handle crises.
They may be subject to political winds of change that are unpredictable and so on.
And so he was not particularly keen on that direct U.N. involvement,
although he was keen to engage with the United Nations on matters such as human rights.
He had written a major report on human rights before he became foreign minister and on human rights in Sri Lanka,
drawing attention to some of the most problematic features of government action in Sri Lanka,
the treatment of prisoners and the like, including torture.
He drew an attention to all of that, and in office he helped to set up a human rights commission in Sri Lanka and the like.
He was always willing to to engage and to defend even when some of the policies he had to defend were questionable.
Next question Can the laws of armed conflict be applied by government forces in such a conflict?
He repeatedly addressed army units.
I got the text of one of his speeches on that Army training institutions about the importance of the laws of armed conflict and human rights.
And stressed important it was that they be observed.
You might criticise his speeches for being a little bit lawyer like that, maybe reflecting his training in the Oxford Law faculty, I don't know.
But the emphasis was clear,
and it's a question whether that approach could have been more effective in practice than what we know happened in the final months of the war,
when he particularly emphasised the importance of observing the laws of armed conflict.
If you hope to gain support within the international community and the adversaries community.
Next. Can counter-terrorism be pursued at the same time as the sovereignty of states is respected?
And here, as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, although he was, I would say,
less than wholly enthusiastic about the performance of the Non-Aligned Movement and its capacity to think.
But he did clearly believe that the principle of sovereignty remained important in today's world, as anybody in a post-colonial state is likely to do.
If you've been through the experience of colonialism and the damage that that has done.
It's not surprising that you should be extremely suspicious of latter day colonialism,
and you should see European or Western involvement in other societies through a particular lens, not in the least surprising.
And yet he was nuanced in his views.
He, for example, did not criticise as far as I was able to establish going through his speeches.
He did not criticise the nature of involvement in Kosovo.
And when you consider the amount of opposition that was to it in the Non-Aligned Movement and especially in India,
which is always Sri Lanka's big brother next door, it's very remarkable that he he didn't join in that chorus, but he was suspicious of critical,
I should say, of the United States involvement in Iraq and consistently so.
And his ground wasn't just although that was part of it, the loyalty issue, as it were, a violation of sovereign state.
It was also clearly simply a questioning of its prudence.
Is it wise to be doing this? Is there a proper plan for it?
Etc. Will the costs outweigh the gains?
What will be the post-colonial order? An issue of which he was naturally always very conscious.
And I speculate in the book that when it came to the violation of Pakistan's sovereignty with the killing of Osama bin Laden,
it's an interesting question whether his pro sovereignty beliefs would have outweighed his anti-terrorism beliefs.
And I think that in that particular set of circumstances, he would probably have sympathised with the United States action.
But that is speculation on my part.
Lastly, and most difficult of all, and perhaps we can discuss it because I think it's high time I stopped.
Does the military outcome in May of 2009 show that a terrorist movement can only be defeated in battle by the ruthless application of force?
And here I would just make two comments. Which both of them are somewhat critical of.
What one might say is the channel for received wisdom in this country.
On it. The first is that actually a lot of the preparatory work for the defeat of the Tamil Tigers had been done by other governments patience,
work and exceptional leadership in the Foreign Ministry.
The undermining of international support for the Tamil Tigers was one precondition for the outcome.
Another was that following the willingness to negotiate and their participation in negotiations,
the Tamil Tiger leadership in the East defected, and that couldn't have happened without there being extensive contact.
And it was that defection of the leadership in the East with large numbers of
Tamil Tiger forces who marched into government held areas and incidentally,
as they did so, demonstrated the truth of what Lakshman had been saying for years,
which is that most of them or many of the soldiers were child soldiers who were being forced into the struggle.
And they were. That was the proof when the groups in the east up so much of the work had been done before the actual final campaign.
But lastly, there is a problem, which I think is a problem for those of us who are interested in elections,
in the laws of armed conflict, in the final stage of the struggle, which is a problem that I think has not been very squarely put.
I take very seriously the UN report on the question of war crimes in the final phase and the killing of civilians in the five free zones,
the no fly zones. And so. But the problem is essentially this.
If as did happen, an area is proclaimed to be a no fly zone and civilians flee into it.
And if after that happens the of armed forces of the Tamil Tigers or under exceptional pressure as they were from the Sri Lankan army,
what do they do? They locate quite largely in the no fly zones and that may be in violation of the rules,
but it is not frankly terribly surprising that they should do it.
And if the Sri Lankan army then sees that problem, it's not surprising, perhaps,
although I find it deeply shocking that they continue to fight against Sri Lankan military targets even if they are in a no fly zone.
It's not just me saying that. Take this word from a February spokesman, a very interesting article on Sri Lanka and all out war.
So Sri Lanka amid all out war.
In a book produced by various numbers of medicines, some frontier, of course, humanitarian negotiations revealed the medicine frontier experience.
And here is what every spokesman says as the rebel territories shrink.
The Tigers used increasingly violent means to dissuade the civilians from fleeing to government controlled areas.
The LTTE forced the government to choose between tools to slow down or even halt the offensive or commit war crimes.
Now I'm the first to be critical of much that was done in that period,
but I do think that what is described by February spokesmen suggest something else as well.
But there may be a problem in the notion of no fly zones as enshrined in a law as developed from the laws of armed conflict.
In other words, there's a paradox at the heart of this problem.
Thank you.