'Unsilenced': Neelan Tiruchelvam revisited

THE life, and violent death. of Neelan Tiruchelvam is the subject of a new documentary by young Canadian Tamil director Pitasanna Shanmugathas. Its title is apt.

- By Mark Salter

In life Tiruchelvam was silenced in July 1999 by the LTTE suicide bomber who threw himself onto the eminent Sri Lankan Tamil lawyer turned politician's car close to his Colombo office.

Both before and since that grimly characteristic Tiger response to opponents, real and imagined, Shanmugathan suggests, there have been other silences around Tiruchelvam. During his life, resolute espousal of a pluralistic, equity-based approach to resolving Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict won Tiruchelvam's many friends but also plenty of enemies, and on both sides of the ethnic divide.

Partly as a result, it was only really later in life that Tiruchelvam's voice began to gain a wider audience, notably within official Sri Lankan and international human rights circles the latter via a combination of academic connections with Harvard University, and political links to organisations such as the US National Democratic Institute (NDI), a number of whose international election observation missions he participated.

All in all, for anyone with an interest in modern Sri Lankan history, in particular the ethnic conflict, this documentary offers an absorbing story. Starting with Tiruchelvam's father, himself a noted politician during an earlier stage of Tamil attempts to respond to overarching Sinhala majoritarianism in the aftermath of independence, it goes on to chart his progress from gifted law student to the higher echelons of academia, human rights activism and the national political arena.