Columns

Alice was right. It is sure getting curiouser and curiouser. No, not in her Wonderland though. It is in our wonderful land where the tragi-comedy being played out in a remote-controlled foreign ministry is turning diplomacy into a sick joke. When Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe tried from the turn of this century to make a right to information law and much later with Maithripala Sirisena as president the leadership duo saw it through parliament, the Unity Government hailed it as one of the most important pieces of legislation since it came to power.

Media specialists here and abroad thought so too. People were entitled by law to ask for and receive information-except on exempted subjects – from state-run or managed institutions so that transparency and an informed public would contribute to better governance. But one always suspected that stubborn and half-baked bureaucrats over the years accustomed to covering up their perverse doings and those of their colleagues will somehow circle the wagons and strive to circumvent the law.

Take an institution such as the Foreign Ministry, maintained at huge public expense but not particularly relevant to the public’s daily life, that seems to consider itself above and beyond the country’s laws.

Muddle-headed (empty headed?) officials ignore the law and in so doing cock a snook at the president and prime minister of the country who managed to meet at least one of the crucial promises to buttress their pledge of good governance.

The Information Officer manning the ministry’s Right to Information (RTI) unit is said to be the Director-General of the Legal Division which should be clear enough to him. Yet he seems to ignore provisions of the Act perhaps believing that since it is the Foreign Ministry domestic law is foreign to it the high and mighty who inhabit a netherworld of sorts and don’t need to abide by it.

Such an approach might not be a bad thing. Otherwise roads in the heart of Colombo would be congested by protesting citizens demanding to know what these chaps are doing in Republic Square talking of cabbages, kings and less civilized things.

This ministry is headed by a minister and a state minister who studied law. It would be helpful all round if they start – the denizens of the deep that exist there willing – some tuition classes on the basics of law for the benefit of their underlings.

On November 28, more than three weeks after President Sirisena wrote a letter to Lord Naseby for his attempts to elicit relevant information on the last stages of the anti-LTTE war and the Foreign Ministry did its damndest to hide it from public knowledge, I addressed some questions to the ministry’s Information Officer (IO) RTI unit which tangentially had relevance to recent happenings in London.

It appeared there was a strange nexus between some divisions of the ministry and the diplomatic (which some would consider hyperbolic in many ways) mission in London which needed a closer look.

Section 24 (2) (3) of the RTI Act states that “On receipt of a request an Information Officer shall immediately provide a written acknowledgement to the citizen”.

With no confirmation forthcoming I sent two reminders to the IO and an email to the ministry’s spokesperson requesting her to inquire from the IO whether he intends confirming receiving my queries.

While the usually active spokesperson (to that sometime later) was on silent mode, the IO (aiyo?) seemed to be in deep torpor. It took almost 7 days to resurrect him which gave the biblical Lazarus a head start on reappearance.

Interestingly the Foreign Ministry’s own Web Notice on Right to Information states “ As per the Act, Public Authorities should respond to RTI requests within 14 days, with provision in certain circumstances for the time frame to extend to a maximum of 21 days.”

Not only have the 14 days passed by but also the IO and the ministry seem to have taken an early Christmas/new year break providing a convenient cover to hide gullibility and the bending of ministry rules and procedures to satisfy the politically connected. One of the questions I posed related to the recruitment and posting to our overseas missions confidential secretaries and PAs to the heads of Sri Lankan diplomatic missions.

My own experience over 50 years associating with career officers from the very first batch to more recent ones among whom are many close friends, seeing missions at work and working in some is that those posted to such sensitive positions are sent from Colombo or cross-posted from another of our missions.

As the name implies confidential secretaries are engaged in confidential work for the head of mission and are privy to classified information, correspondence, highly sensitive and confidential files under lock and key in the office of the head of mission. Given the nature of the work I asked the ministry, among other questions, the usual procedure and practice in posting such officers.

I asked because non-Sri Lankan nationals have been recruited in recent times. Who were they and who authorised such recruitment. To be fair by the IO it must be said that he has to depend on heads of other divisions to obtain the information.

In this case it would most probably be the Director-General of the Overseas Administration Division (OAD) who is responsible for all our diplomatic missions abroad whose proclivity and readiness to appease the politically-anointed is astonishing.

Moreover there was the episode of a curious confidential letter dated November 8 from Foreign Secretary Prasad Kariyawasam to Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to London Amari Wijewardene instructing her to deliver President Sirisena’s thank you letter to Lord Naseby with utmost ‘secrecy’ (see letter).
But why all this hush-hush James Bond-like approach. The foreign ministry’s damndest efforts to hide it not only from the Sri Lankan public but also from some of the western countries such as US and UK which some so-called pundits in the ministry treat with such demeaning obsequiousness, was exposed by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Vasantha Senanayake who fortunately tabled it in parliament along with his own letter of thanks to the British peer.
By the time Kariyawasam’s letter of November 8 enclosed in a separate cover along with the President’s letter reached the great diplomatic panjandrums at No 13 Hyde Park Gardens on Nov 17 and was handed over to Lord Naseby on Nov 21, parliament and the public had already read the presidential letter.
If one examines Kariyawasam’s letter that is carried here one would notice some interesting features. Usually the diplomatic bag reaches London on a Thursday and at times on a Friday. November 17 which is the date stamped on the Kariyawasam epistle was a Friday. It is not clear whether the bag arrived on Thursday and the letter was opened by the high commissioner on Friday as the date stamp indicates.

That is not important. What is important and indeed curious is Kariyawasam’s instruction to the high commissioner not to share the content of the President’s letter with the UK or Sri Lanka media. How would she know the contents of the presidential letter if it is addressed to Lord Naseby to whom she was instructed to hand it over to?

There is no likelihood of Wijewardene disclosing anything. It would indeed be an intrepid journalist who manages to extract the time of day.
Look now at the date stamp on the letter. Obviously that stamp was placed in London for the stamp in Sinhala states Sri Lanka High Commission London.

But look more closely at the numeral 1 in the date and the year. The numeral 1 in 2017 looks clearly different. So whoever in the high commissioner’s office who date stamped the letter had stamped the wrong year- possibly 2007- and then tried to change it leaving a somewhat curved numeral and certainly not like the numeral 1 in the date 17.

Two matters arise from all this. Why was Kariyawasam so insistent that the contents of President Sirisena’s letter not be divulged to even the Sri Lankan media? If the letter can be tabled in parliament by his own state minister for all to read and to be quoted in the media why was the foreign secretary trying to hide his own president’s letter which related to vital happenings during the late war years and Lord Naseby’s efforts on behalf of Sri Lanka? Was Foreign Minister Marapana aware of his secretary’s letter?

Anybody who has heard the stories emanating from Republic Square know that the foreign ministry is more divided than Gaul in Caesar’s time. There are the Rajapaksa loyalists, the Mangala Samaraweera (and UNP) acolytes who pay regular pooja to the US and some Sirisena supporters. Some have evolved their own theory of relativity which is to grant any demand or request by a head of mission with the correct relatives.

But most of all there are the careerists known as the “serappu soup” imbibers who would do the utmost to get an extension of service at the same foreign posting as some career men have done, clinging to a posting more tenaciously than a leech.
Had the third or fourth extension been allowed to some officers they might still be here.

That is why one question I asked concerned the diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff who have been given extensions since August 2016.
Like the other questions the ministry has tried to bury, the latest is how Kariyawasam’s letter that was obviously ‘for her eyes only’ and doubtless handled by her office and date stamped there ended up with the media? This letter could not have been available to any other staff in the high commission in London given the confidentiality and the handful involved in running the office. If so who let the cat out?

That surely needs to be investigated especially if the high commission continues to recruit staff from elsewhere to handle confidential work, including non- Sri Lankan nationals from a particular community who have not been security-cleared in Colombo as we all were before being posted abroad.