User:Sri.moorthy/A. T. Moorthy

Sri Lanka High Commissioner to London 1981-4
A. T. Moorthy was High Commissioner for Sri Lanka in London from 1981 to 1984 at the moment that tensions between the Tamil minority community and the Sri Lanka Government reached the crisis that triggered a civil conflict that only ended twenty-five years later. Moorthy was the only Sri Lanka Tamil to have served in this capacity. It was the final posting in a thirty-one-year long career in the Sri Lanka Foreign Service that began shortly after the country gained independence in 1948.

Education
Moorthy began his education at the Sivananda Vidyalayam in Batticaloa District, in Eastern Ceylon, under the tutelage of Swami Vipulananda. At 14 he was sent to Jaffna College, in the North of Ceylon. Aiming at entering the University of Colombo, he moved to Ananda College in Colombo. He graduated from the University in Economics in 1949. He was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn, London, in 1965.

Diplomatic career
Moorthy was closely involved with the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement beginning with the Colombo Conference in 1954 and the Bandung Conference in Jakarta in 1955, where he was posted as Second Secretary and Chargé d’Affaires (1955-57). In 1959 he was posted as Chargé d’Affaires to Peking where he witnessed the emergence of another great nation and was privileged to meet its leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou En Lai. Sri Lanka was to form close ties with China and Moorthy was involved in the early bilateral trade and diplomatic agreements that set the foundation for these ties.





From 1961 to 1963 he served as First Secretary in London. Whilst in London, his wife Suseela and he studied for their Bar Examinations at Gray’s Inn and were called in 1965. From 1964 to 1966 he served as First Secretary in the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1969 to 1970 Moorthy served as Chargé d’Affaires a.i in Thailand and was also Permanent Representative to the Economic Commission for Asia and Far East. In 1970 Moorthy was posted as Chargé d’Affaires a.i to Iraq, shortly after the Ba’ath Revolution. In 1974 he returned to Colombo to help coordinate the Fifth Non Aligned Summit in Colombo that was held in August 1976. In 1978 he was posted as Ambassador to Pakistan, and concurrently as Ambassador to Iran. During this time he witnessed critical political developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of course the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He was involved in an effort by the Sri Lankan government to negotiate the release of the American Embassy hostages in Teheran in 1979, an example of the special diplomatic missions that punctuated his career, sometimes in the company of the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister. During his career he worked directly with six Prime Ministers. In 1981 he was appointed Sri Lanka High Commissioner to the Court of St. James in London, the post that he held until he retired early in 1984.

Tamil conflict
Moorthy’s premature retirement coincided with the most important and the most tragic turning point in the post-independence history of Sri Lanka. In the immediate post-independence years, Moorthy, along with the other Tamils of his generation united with the majority Sinhalese and minority Muslim, Burgher and other communities to work towards placing the new country on the world stage. Very idealistic in their thinking, they overlooked the signs of majority racialism (that manifested itself in the form of periodic anti-Tamil riots, lynchings and murders) believing that education and increasing prosperity would eventually eliminate such currents of feeling. However they underestimated the role of Sinhala politicians who over a thirty-five year period invoked latent racialist feelings for electoral gain, partly through a series of discriminatory laws that repressed an entire generation of Tamil youth and which eventually led to the explosion of Tamil armed resistance by the Tamil Tigers and other groups in the summer of 1983. The counterpart to armed resistance by angry Tamil youth was the disillusionment of the older generation, including Moorthy, who refused to be complicit in the brutalisation of their own community.

End of career
Rather than misrepresent to the outside world the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils, Moorthy chose to retire early instead and not return to Sri Lanka. He had been required to declare that if he as a Tamil could hold the country’s highest diplomatic office of High Commissioner to the Court of St James, a post normally reserved for senior politicians, it must prove that Tamils were not suffering any serious discrimination. His refusal to do this caused senior Sinhala politicians, including the President J.R Jayawardene to covertly order that he and the Sri Lanka Amabassador in Paris, also a Tamil, be recalled from their posts. Ironically, as a Tamil person he continually received threats to his life from both Tamils and Sinhalese.

Retirement
After he retired he concentrated on voluntary work and helping bring up his three granddaughters. He died in 2008, three years after the unexpectedly early death of his wife Suseela in 2005.

Category:1928 births Category:2008 deaths Category:High Commissioners of Sri Lanka to Pakistan Category:High Commissioners of Sri Lanka to the United Kingdom Category:Sri Lankan diplomats Category:Sri Lankan Hindus Category:Sri Lankan Tamil People Category:Alumni of Ananda College, Colombo Category:Alumni of the University of Ceylon (Colombo) Category:Barristers of Greys Inn, London