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Revisiting the Views of Kumar Ponnambalam

Ponnambalam Jr.’s Assertions

The International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) is the public house built by Dr.Neelan Tiruchelvam (born 1944), in 1982. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of ICES, and its opportune to think a little about the deals of Dr.Neelan and why ICES came to be built. One should search for clues beyond what is presented in the website of ICES. The ICES was built at the time when Cold War rhetoric was flourishing. The chief patron of ICES was the Ford Foundation, one of the grand wands of American philanthropy cum diplomatic maneuvers.

Until Neelan Tiruchelvam’s assassination on July 29, 1999, I had read a few disgruntled commentaries penned by anti-Tamil polemicists such as Dr.Susantha Goonetilake and H.L.D.Mahindapala on the pernicious influence on the Sri Lankan policy making by the local relays of Yankee imperial agents (read as Dr.Neelan Tiruchelvam) and their public house of dubious repute (read as ICES).

I had initially felt that these were sour grape comments of Sinhalese analysts who lacked Neelan Tiruchelvam’s talent in attracting American funding. However, following his assassination such overt criticism on Neelan became muted, since projecting Neelan (a fellow Tamil ethnic) as an unfortunate victim of LTTE brutality was good for pro-Sinhalese propaganda. Thus, a ‘dead Neelan’ became the darling of these same carrion-feeding commentators.

Tiruchelvam was a CIA agent

At the time of his untimely death, Neelan was functioning as a nominated TULF MP in the Sri Lankan parliament, and also held the rank of a Vice President of TULF. The good deeds of Neelan Tiruchelvam have been brandished in the anti-LTTE polemics by some Tamil analysts (prominent among these are D.B.S.Jeyaraj, Radhika Coomaraswamy and Rajan Hoole) who parade their skills in front of Sinhalese constituency. But, G.G.(Kumar) Ponnambalam Jr., who was a political rival of Tiruchelvam in 1980s and 1990s, an exception. G.G.Ponnambalam Jr. asserted in a commentary immediately after Tiruchelvam’s death that “Tiruchelvam was indeed a CIA agent.”

What is poignant is that, Ponnambalam Jr. had the courage of his conviction to say openly that Neelan Tiruchelvam, like the Emperor in that Hans Christian Andersen’s story, was nothing but naked in the eyes of Eelam Tamils. While Jeyaraj had attempted to show that the formal eulogies delivered to Dr.Tiruchelvam by high ranking Americans including that of President Bill Clinton recognized Tiruchelvam’s talents as an internationally recognized peace negotiator and human rights activist, these eulogies also shed some unsavory light and provided circumstantial hints about the links Neelan had with the executive branch of American bureaucracy. How? 

Kumar Ponnambalam also suffered the same fate of Neelan Tiruchelvam five months later, on January 5, 2000. How come that Kumar Ponnambalam’s assassination hardly elicited a blink from the executive branch of American bureaucracy?

In the eyes of Eelam Tamils, both Tiruchelvam and Ponnambalam Juniors, had the same political pedigree - being the sons of two ranking Tamil politicians of yore. In this, Ponnambalam Jr. was at a higher pedestal since his father G.G.Ponnambalam was the uncrowned king of Tamils for more than a decade (1936-1948) until he accepted a Cabinet minister position, but M.Tiruchelvam was in national limelight only for three years (1965-1968) as a Cabinet minister, since he took to politics after his retirement from the Sri Lanka Attorney General's Department where he had served as Solicitor General. 

The only visible difference (in the eyes of Eelam Tamils) between Neelan Tiruchelvam and Kumar Ponnambalam was that whereas the latter had blossomed into a vocal activist for Tamil rights and had been a regular participant of electoral democracy (which the Washington Poo-Bahs like to toot from the roof top), Tiruchelvam was essentially a back-room deal maker and hardly known for his vocal activism for Tamil rights. If one cares to links the dots to clarify the hidden frame, then the high octane eulogies delivered by the Washington representatives of executive branch makes simple sense. 

ICES History, as told by Prof.K.M.de Silva

The ICES, established in 1982, is the ultimate flagship of Dr.Neelan Tiruchelvam’s professional endeavors. I’ll let Prof.Kingsley Muthumuni de Silva – the ranking Sinhalese historian and a co-author of two volume hagiography of President J.R.Jayewardene – to describe, how this ICES came to be established. Here is the story, in his own words, as it appears in the ICES website

“Early in 1981, I had two American visitors, one of whom, Donald Horowitz, I had known since the late 1960s when he visited the island for the research he was doing on the abortive coup d'état of 1962 in Sri Lanka. The other was Robert Goldmann, a programme officer of the Ford Foundation in New York. They had come to invite me to a Ford Foundation sponsored conference to be held in August 1981 at the Taita Hills Game Park about 200km from Nairobi, Kenya, where a group of scholars and administrators from many parts of the world would discuss the theme of Ethnic Problems in the Developing and Developed World.  

Robert Goldmann had persuaded the Ford Foundation to establish a research institute for the study of ethnicity and conflict, and the policies and mechanisms useful in managing such conflicts. There was unanimous support for this from the participants at the conference. We believed that such a research institute was important, and some felt that it was a vital necessity. There were very few such institutes in the world, but none in any part of Asia. The three Sri Lanka representatives, myself, Dr C R de Silva, and Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam, argued that Sri Lanka should be chosen as the home of the Centre, because of its convenient geographical location with easy access to South and South East Asia no less than to East Asia; and because of its relatively free intellectual life. The work of the Centre to be established was important enough, but it was too sensitive and too controversial for most countries, Asian and African alike. Governments would be reluctant to encourage the establishment of such an institution. We argued that Sri Lanka would be an exception.

A second conference was held in 1982, this time in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, on Preferential Policies and Programmes. By this time, two others had joined the Sri Lankan group: Dr S W R de A Samarasinghe and Ms Radhika Coomaraswamy. We learned that the Ford Foundation had decided to establish the research centre, and it would be located in Sri Lanka. The Ford Foundation had agreed that Sri Lanka would be a good location for the Centre, and had committed itself to funding it for two years in the first instance. After two years and an evaluation of its prospects, more long-term support was envisaged.

Sri Lanka's then President J R Jayewardene also gave his enthusiastic support to the project. Once his approval was given there were no administrative obstacles. The preliminary moves for the establishment of the ICES gathered momentum. At the Kenya conference, delegates had spoken of the need to locate the Centre within a university. We may have done so had it not been for the intervention of Professor Uma Eleazu, a Nigerian delegate, who became one of the first directors of the ICES. He made an impassioned plea that the Centre should not be located in a university. He cited Nigeria's experience of how divisions and rivalries within the universities worked their way into these centres and made it virtually impossible for them to function as they were expected to do. Professor Uma Eleazu's sage advice was that we locate the Centre close to a university, but keep it entirely independent of the university.

In his eulogy to Neelan, Prof. de Silva also described the same anecdote of he and Neelan being “invitees to a Ford Foundation sponsored conference held in a game park some 200 kilometres or so from Nairobi” [vide, Ethnic Studies Report, January 1999, vol.17, no.1, pp.125-128].

The Ford Foundation links to CIA

What has not been mentioned by Prof.K.M. de Silva is the fact that the Ford Foundation has had cozy links with CIA operations and sponsoring international conferences with expense paid trips to locales which historians from Third World countries can hardly dream of visiting was bait used by the Ford Foundation to rope in potential academic informers. Just google the phrases ‘Ford Foundation’ and ‘CIA agents’ in combination. One of the top five items which appear is a thought-provoking commentary by James Petras, entitled ‘The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the secret police", dated Dec.2001 (www.rebelion.org/petras/english/ford010102). “In the current period of a major U.S. military-political offensive, Washington has posed the issue as ‘terrorism or democracy,’ just as during the Cold War it posed the question as ‘Communism or Democracy.’ In both instances the Empire recruited and funded ‘front organizations, intellectuals and journalists to attack its anti-imperialist adversaries and neutralize its democratic critics. The Ford Foundation is well situated to replay its role as collaborator to cover for the New Cultural Cold War.”