The last time Bob Rae saw him, Lakshman Kadirgamar was in a dark mood. They were talking in the Sri Lankan foreign minister’s office in Colombo. The former Ontario premier had been visiting Sri Lanka’s capital regularly for a few years, on occasion even venturing out to backwoods bases of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, trying to help the island nation talk its way out of a cycle of vicious civil war. “You people,” Rae recalls Kadirgamar saying, meaning Westerners, “you really don’t understand what it’s like and what we’re up against. I know that I could be shot dead any time, even getting out of my swimming pool.”

A few months later, on the evening of Aug. 12, 2005, a LTTE sniper killed Kadirgamar as he climbed out of his pool, just as he had foretold. Rae was back in Toronto when he heard the chilling news. This was not the first time one of his Sri Lankan contacts had been assassinated by the Tigers. Yet earlier this month, Rae was blocked from entering Sri Lanka on the grounds that he was a Tiger supporter, a charge he of course denied. Detained at Colombo’s airport, he was put on a plane to Britain after 12 fruitless hours arguing with security officials. Continue…