Kethesh Loganathan
Ketheeshwaran Loganathan was a Sri Lankan Tamil political and human rights activist and deputy secretary general of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP). He was among the fiercest critics of the separatist Tamil Eelam, which was widely blamed for his death. The group has neither accepted nor denied responsibility for his assassination.
Upbringing
Loganathan was born in Colombo, although the Loganathan family originally came from Puloly-Vadamarachchi in Jaffna. His father, Chelliah Loganathan, was a former General Manager and Chief Executive of the Bank of Ceylon. Kethesh studied at St. Thomas’s College Mt. Lavinia and Loyola College, Madras. Ketheesh Loganathan received a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University in Washington DC and a Master's in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague in the Netherlands. He also worked on a Master's degree at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.In 1998 he was awarded the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship and was enrolled for a year at the college of Journalism, University of Maryland, USA.
Political career
After completing his education, Loganathan returned to Sri Lanka and worked as a social science researcher and with the Marga Institute in Jaffna. With the outbreak of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1983, he joined the EPRLF, a militant Tamil group that eventually came to rival the LTTE. Loganathan's role was essentially academic and political, rather than military, and he left the group in 1994. He continued to work as an author and journalist. Along with his good friend Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, he helped to form an independent think tank, named the Center for Policy Alternatives, and served on its board of directors until 2006.In 1996 he published his book 'Lost Opportunities' which highlights the political context in which attempts were made to address/resolve the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and how they failed.