Thoughts from London

Even a joke could be a serious thing, no
Is this a joke of some sort or is the man really serious?
Last Sunday this newspaper carried some tittle-tattle circulating in a small circle in Brussels.

Whether anybody swallowed this self-idolatry nonsense is not immediately known. But it is worth repeating just for the laughs. Unless, of course, there is some truth in it. Then it becomes a serious thing.

Readers will recall that in recent weeks Brussels had been very much in the news because of discussions within the European Union about imposing sanctions against the LTTE for its acts of violence and terrorism and for thumbing its nose at the UN by continuing to recruit child soldiers.

So anything that happens in Brussels these days is read with avid interest, particularly if it has even the faintest Sri Lankan connection.

After the weeks of serious political debate in the EU by officials of the 25-nation organisation and in the Working Group on Asia and speculation in Sri Lanka on how the EU would act, this gossip from Brussels provided a comic sub plot.

Now I have no idea where The Sunday Times picked up this piece of gossip but there it was in that column called Odds and Ends. Personally I thought it was an appropriate corner to chuck it in seeing how odd the whole thing appeared to be. And I hope it ends there and we do not end up with another faux pas to our credit.

The item headlined “How many Lankans for the top UN job”, would have left little doubt in the minds of readers why our credit rating is so low.
According to this gossip emanating from Brussels that one Niranjan de Silva Deva Aditiya has been telling friends — and I suppose anybody within “hoo-kiyana” distance — that he would be Sri Lanka’s nominee for Kofi Annan’s job when Ranil Wickremesinghe becomes president of the country after next month’s election.

The story goes on — and I have no way of knowing if it is true or not — that Deva Aditiya has already got the assurance of Wickremesinghe that he will be Sri Lanka’s nominee.

If this is the same Deva Aditiya chap who was once a Conservative Party MP and sought refuge in the European Parliament to escape the possible wrath of his original constituents and now and then conducts himself as though he was the Sri Lanka’s envoy to the Court of St James, nothing would surprise me about his ego.

If I remember correctly this was the same person who Ranil Wickremesinghe took along to New York as an advisor to the Sri Lanka delegation on that inglorious occasion when Wickremesinghe purportedly supported the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq during his General Assembly speech.

Having made that horrible gaffe and shocked many delegations by what seemed like Sri Lanka’s pro-western, particularly US, stand, the explanation offered in defence was even more puerile.

It was said that Wickremesinghe’s speech had to be hurriedly rewritten after Kofi Annan’s address and the error was grammatical not semantic. As I wrote at the time there was no inordinate hurry to rewrite given the considerable time gap between the two speeches. Even if it was rewritten — the actual reference to Annan’s speech was minimal — it could have been done sensibly.

The important question here is whether Deva Aditiya had a hand in the rewriting of that speech. After all there was Charlie Mahendran, a retired senior diplomat reemployed and sent as our Permanent Representative to the UN, at hand.

So whoever was ultimately responsible for this awful diplomatic howler, like in Cabinet government the principle of collective responsibility should apply, especially if such unnecessary baggage (intellectually speaking of course) as Deva Aditiya was part of this delegation.

If Deva Aditiya’s boast is not hollow, then it appears that Ranil Wickremesinghe is in the throes of making another unpardonable faux pas.
But could he be so insensitive as to make yet another gaffe? First the Wickremesinghe government allowed then Foreign Minister Tyronne Fernando to make an absolutely premature running for Annan’s post as secretary-general even before the current holder of the post could get into his second term stride.

Now if Tyronne Fernando wanted to make an ass of himself flying round the world not for the sake of the country but in an effort to satiate an ambition way above his station, that is fine as long as an overburdened tax-payer did not have to pay for it.Then what happens. Tyronne Fernando ditches Ranil Wickremesinghe and crosses the political barricades and blots his already smudged copybook.

Even more curious was the Wickremesinghe government’s handling of the upcoming vacancy for the position of rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission, a post that would have been vacant with the departure of Malaysia’s Param Coomaraswamy.Dr Nihal Jayawickrama an academic and jurist with long experience in the human rights field, was billed to fill the post with backing from the Sri Lankan foreign ministry that had lobbied for him. There was no other candidate.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the government nominated Desmond Fernando, a former president of the International Bar Association. No wonder the international community was taken aback by the immature antics of a national government. Given the Wickremesinghe government’s commitment to private enterprise and emulating the marketing techniques of supermarkets enticing customers with the “buy one get one free” sales slogan, Sri Lanka decided to go one step farther and offer the UN Human Rights Commission two for the price of one.

Naturally the world community had a good laugh and chose a Latin American who was not even in the race originally. If what Deva Aditiya has said has a modicum of truth, then Sri Lanka is preparing to get more egg on its face. We already have a good, internationally known candidate in Jayantha Dhanapala. If he should be replaced by some international nonentity whose claim to any international recognition is surely elusive, it would be a supreme joke.

As a farce it would, of course, surpass the other diplomatic gaffe of nominating the Commerce Department head as our ambassador to Brussels. Never in the history of our diplomatic service have two officials of the Commerce Department been head of mission and Number Two in the same embassy.

K.J. Weerasinghe who is tipped to be ambassador to Brussels might be a good technocrat and know the intricacies of WTO rules and regulations. But as recent events have proved, Brussels is politically important for Sri Lanka.

Moreover the Ambassador in Brussels is also accredited to Belgium, Luxembourg and Portugal. To have two trade officials as the top two in a mission whose political work is, at least, as important as its trade functions, is the height of insanity. It is the work of immature minds.
It is surprising such things should have happened while the foreign minister was somewhere in the stratosphere and foreign even to the foreign ministry.

When A.C.S. Hameed was foreign minister in the J.R. Jayewardene government, the people of his constituency, Akurana, used to gaze at the sky every time they heard the sound of an aircraft overhead, thinking that their MP was in it.

Maybe the present foreign minister will out do Hameed — not for the frequency of the foreign visits but for the numbers of days away from the country.

Not for long though, opposition supporters say. Meanwhile imagine a Malvolio trying to run the Glass House in New York not Colombo.

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