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The
true figure of speech Not that the UNP Governments of the past have not chartered such territories to abandon the non-aligned nations and the ranks of the poor to win special favours for the country and her suffering people from the powerful West. We referred to this " bold if brazen" stance that would have secured his Government brownie points with the US, but made the country look a turncoat state in the eyes of others. This week, President Chandrika Kumaratunga did the honours at the UN General Assembly in New York. Taking the podium she spelt out her Government's foreign policy, which was, understandably, bringing Sri Lanka more on track with the rest of the world, rather than the US lobby. On Iraq, she played it safe saying " We are deeply saddened at the violence...in Iraq " etc., and on the hot topic of international terrorism, she said that "security measures " a euphemism for military solutions, are always not the solution, and that one has to look into the causes for terrorism as well. That sits well with the anti-US hatred in mainly the Arab world, which has much sympathy in Africa, Latin America and Asia, but cuts thin ice when it comes to local terrorism waged by the LTTE. Such a pronouncement will be welcomed by the pacifists and surely be frowned on by the Nationalist elements, in equal measure. But the bombshell in the President's address was not exactly what she said, but what she is supposed to have not said.The confusion starts with the President's Press Office, which sports the high-falutin nomenclature, the Policy Research and Information/Media Unit. They released two different speeches of the President to the local media. The latter they referred to as the 'revised version'. In that second version, the President omitted reference to the Norwegians as peace brokers, and supposedly included some tough rhetoric about the LTTE. Ex-facie, these exclusions and inclusions, are no big deal to a nation that has had its overdose of such 'rhetoric' - theme songs sung with different tunes at different times and places. On the other hand, if the President did deliver to the UNGA, the same speech she actually delivered to the local media eventually then she is fully entitled to make revisions before she takes the podium. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, she probably waited for the UN Secretary-General's speech to add a few paras, and needed to keep her speech trim to avoid the 'red light' that comes on when speakers over-step the strict time-limit imposed on them. And probably too, she wanted to curtail her address to terrorism in the macro-sense, rather than the issue at home. And nobody at the President's Policy Research and Information/Media Unit (Press Office) was at hand in Colombo to clear the doubts for days. The one question that arises is whether speeches at such important forums should be actually done on-the-run, so to say. That was what happened to the former Premier as well. In that case there were too many cooks that spoilt the broth. This time, it was bureacractic bungling at the Press Office. Some jinx, all the time, it seems. Bridge
of dialogue Identifying areas for this clash of civilizations, Mr. Zapatero calls for an Alliance of Civilizations to reconcile the West and the Muslim world. He has called for a multilateral diplomatic process to discuss political and cultural issues on this front. Actually, the Spanish initiative is only an echo of a similar call from Iranian President Mohammed Khatami (please see our Special Report article on the subject on page.11), but the UN is unable to escape the grip of US influence; Iran is a bad boy, Islamic and therefore rejected. The European Union has also launched a Euro-Mediterranean partnership on these lines. There are fears that behind the veil of the global war on terror, there is a secret agenda for globalization where the economically poor must rubber-stamp Western roadmaps. On the broader canvas of things, despite all the millions of words spoken and to be spoken at the UN during this on-going sessions, the world is drifting to a more dangerous plane. There is no better organisation today, than the UN, albeit all its deficiencies, to adopt the Spanish-Iranian-EU initiatives. |
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