Anton Stanislaus Balasingham, who died from a rare bile duct cancer on December 14 at the age of 68, was the chief ideologue of the LTTE rebels in their violent struggle against the Sri Lankan military for a Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka. Balasingham, or ‘Bala anna’ (big brother) as he was affectionately called by the LTTE cadres, was a complex personality. The LTTE regarded Balasingham as a revolutionary and political advisor to their supreme leader, Prabhakaran, while the international community saw him as a moderating force on the LTTE, while sections of the Sinhalese saw him as an apologist for LTTE’s atrocities.

In his youth Balasingham was part of the radical Left movement in Colombo and he never deviated from his life’s mission of promoting the interests and aspirations of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. For him the ends justified all means.

Balasingham’s 2004 book, War and Peace: Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers, gives us a clue to his personality. “As the political advisor and theoretician of the organisation I have worked closely with the Tamil Tigers, and with their leader, Mr Velupillai Pirapaharan, for twenty-six years,” he wrote in the introduction.

Balasingham was the face of peace, while Prabhakaran was the face of war. Even Sinhalese commentators pointed out that only Balasingham had the breadth of vision to realise that peace talks could not be sustainable outside of a political framework. He was the chief negotiator for the LTTE in every set of peace talks with the Sri Lankan government, starting with Thimpu in 1985 and ending with recent stalled Norwegian facilitated meetings in Geneva. Balasingham was instrumental in crafting a common platform with the Lankan government in Oslo (2002), where for the first time both parties agreed to a federal solution that accepted the right to internal self-determination in the country’s northeast. Immediately afterwards, he was sidelined by the LTTE supremo for being too moderate and making too many concessions. Balasingham returned to centrestage after the LTTE found itself vilified internationally for child-soldier recruitment and perpetrating atrocities in northeast Sri Lanka.

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