Columns

Foreign Minister GL Peiris must surely find his right hand terribly sore. Turn over the pages of local newspapers and even some news sites and there he is shaking hands with numerous foreign politicians and diplomats that he must need a good rub down at the end of the day.

More recently he was seen greeting the new Australian deputy prime minister in Singapore where Foreign Minister Peiris had turned up to attend (possibly) the Shangri-la Dialogue which I suppose is still sponsored by the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies.

The current government, by whatever name it is called, is really keeping Prof Peiris busy. That comes as little surprise. The president is busy devising ways to keep himself in place for the next two years or more until the adjective “failed” is removed from his title to which trenchant critics have attached it, and engaging in other stratagems to beat a retreat from the more hopeful thoughts that emanated from him such as repealing the 20th amendment and welcoming the return of the 19th amendment he got rid of to accumulate more powers under his belt.

The new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is equally busy with daily commentaries on the state of the State. And even to tell a battered people on how close to our shoreline is the latest ship bearing liquid gas or fuel which will not unload its cargo until some big noise in government waved wads of dollars at them as payment. Or when the next lot of paracetamol would be found at the pharmacies, driving kerosene queues to transform into drug queues.

The next thing one sees is the flying minister in Geneva making oral statements at the June session of the Human Rights Council and some time later another picture of him shaking hands with the President of the UNHRC.

What other hands he shook one does not know but he must surely have made a grab for other members of the 47-member Council knowing only too well that come September the Council would be voting on another resolution on Sri Lanka.

This is not the end of the foreign minister’s travelogue. Though the UNHRC Geneva session is over, he continued to make contacts and try to sell the new Sri Lanka story which is now more subdued and conciliatory than the aggressive presentation he made in reply to UN Human Rights High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s very specific charges made in her Sri Lanka report before and after the Interactive Dialogue in March.

I would bet my bottom dollar (which is possibly more than what the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency left in the country’s foreign reserves, as some might argue) that Minister Peiris will soon be seen at home changing his baggage and picking up a few jars of Siddhalepa before heading out to the airport to enplane to Rwanda for the Commonwealth Summit starting there this week.

With many more hands to shake and Commonwealth members to greet than the other day in Geneva, he would certainly find the local balm useful. For he would not only have to put out his right hand but also the left to seek a few dollars more so that Commonwealth states who are Human Rights Council members will show the empathy that minister Peiris is seeking when it comes to voting for a new resolution on Sri Lanka come September.

Space does not permit recalling at length excerpts from her report or the government’s comeback in reply or GL Peiris’s comments at the end of the dialogue/discussion in March.

But suffice it to say that the March session saw the foreign minister unusually bare his fangs as it were, accusing the high commissioner of being selective in picking on Sri Lanka, of making uncorroborated accusations and of exceeding the mandate of her office.

In a misplaced show of bravado Minister Peiris made specific personal attacks on High Commissioner Bachelet saying, “we are dismayed by the High Commissioner’s unwarranted onslaught on the seminal institutions of our country which function under the aegis of Sri Lanka’s constitution.”

He quoted President Rajapaksa as telling parliament early in 2022 that “we are a nation that respects international laws and conventions”. If the Human Rights Council did not burst into laughter it is because it was a disciplined and diplomatic audience. But whether the remark was greeted raucously or not elsewhere one can only surmise.

Before lecturing others about the sanctity of our constitution, it would be far more prudent, acceptable and appreciated by the world outside if those who rule the country paid more respect to the constitution and abide by it rather than transgress its provisions.

As this is being written, one reads of an application before the Supreme Court challenging the appointment of Dhammika Perera as MP which, it is alleged, violates Article 99A and other Articles of the Constitution.

What is practised is not the rule of law but the law of the rulers. Foreign Minister Peiris’s own attempts at amending the Prevention of Terrorism Act to make it more compliant with international norms have already been torn to shreds not only by Sri Lanka’s own Human Rights Commission but internationally including the European Union on which we are dependent for the continuation of GSP Plus.

Minister Peiris’s combative and even aggressive approach in March, possibly to win domestic applause by showing how Sri Lanka deals with a bullying Goliath, appears to have suddenly changed into a more passive and amenable posture.

A ruling leadership that has successfully reduced the country to penury and brought its citizenry to near starvation seems to have realised finally that its egregiously irresponsible conduct cannot and will not win friends and influence nations, certainly not if it continues to display its unmitigated arrogance.

Within just three months the tone and tenor of Foreign Minister Peiris’s statement to the Council this month is markedly different from his address in March when he challenged the mandate of the Council and cast aspersions at the High Commissioner.

Shaken to the core by the mass protests against President Gotabaya and the Rajapaksa family by essentially youth-led protests, Minister Peiris, for the first time perhaps, mentions the need to pay heed to the aspirations “in particular of the youth.”

That is not all. The minister becomes far more conciliatory. He is even “in agreement with the emphatic remarks by the distinguished High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet…”

The change in the minister is remarkable but not unexpected. Representing a country caught between a vast protest movement that is turning increasing anti-government and one that is compelled to seek help from anybody to rescue a virtually bankrupt nation, Sri Lanka’s mish-mash of a government cannot afford to play a fiddling Nero as it did while the ship was starting to sink.

With another resolution on Sri Lanka expected before the council in three months and the EU likely to be breathing down the government’s neck to mend its ways if it wants GSP Plus concessions, Minister Peiris has a Sisyphean task to convince the world the administration’s intentions are pure.

With a clean suit but empty pockets, he would need to show some humility in his diplomatic dealings.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in
Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London)