Columns

I wonder how many remember the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II way back in 1953. My memories are somewhat vague about it. But one thing comes to mind.

Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, a dominion in the British Commonwealth, sent its only ship to Britain in 1952 to represent the Royal Ceylon Navy at the fleet review for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. But it could not take part because the ship had to undergo repairs. We are still under repairs, but now, more than 70 years later, the whole country is under repairs, including our system of governance.

As HMCyS “Vijaya,” as it was called, if I remember correctly, sailed into Southampton Harbour, the Southampton Post newspaper carried a frontpage picture across eight columns with the caustic headline “The Fleet’s In,” which might have given the Brits a brief laugh, but it apparently did not go down well, back in Colombo.

Naturally, our post-independence leaders were more than hurt. Here we send our only ship—from where we got it, I really don’t know—to Our Majesty’s coronation preparations as a faithful dominion, and all we get is a sarcastic headline from the British press.

They did not have Channel 4 those days, but it seems that nothing has changed as they continue to turn more than their humour on our poor island nation.

At least Britain should have remembered the ship was named after our first king, Prince Vijaya, who long preceded the British Queen and could have taught the Brits some Royal (no, no, not that school in Colombo) manners.

After all, Vijaya came from good stock—so history tells us, though we know that history depends on who writes it—even though the poor chap was put on a ship along with his followers and sent sailing, ending up in this “Resplendent Isle”.

The Brits should be thankful that Vijaya—the prince, not the ship—did not land in Southampton, which surely would have changed history, not to mention British asylum policy.

What brought these thoughts of Ceylon’s efforts to take some part in the Queen’s coronation, British sarcasm and the only ship breaking down long before the crucial ceremony, and somebody having to lend a ship to represent the Royal Ceylon Navy, is the recent announcement that Sri Lanka will build a school in Gaza to compensate for the unbelievable devastation Israel has caused in the Gaza Strip in the last three months.

At a briefing for Colombo-based West Asian envoys to explain Sri Lanka’s decision to be a part of the US-led maritime coalition to counter Houthi attacks on Israeli-connected shipping, President Wickremesinghe promised to build a school in Gaza.

Far more diplomatic than some of our ministers and some officials, there was no mention of how the envoys reacted to what the President’s Media Division would usually have called a “significant” announcement—a weathered word which even the PMD seems to have dropped in recent days.

Nothing is known of the reaction of the envoys—whether they laughed or snorted all the way to their embassies or carried a diplomatic smile right into their offices until they sat down to dictate their reports back to their capitals with some caustic addendum—has been reported.

Unlike the diplomatic leaks that happen in our missions, the chanceries seemed to have maintained a studied silence until one day they appear in some collection of hilarious anecdotes, as in my onetime Lake House colleague Thalif Deen’s book titled “No Comment… And Don’t Quote Me on That”.

What came as a sheer surprise was this offer of a school to the people of Gaza, all “summa” (free) from the government of Sri Lanka that has been struggling to pay its huge loans to virtually all and sundry and just two years or so ago was teetering on the edge of an abyss and raising its hands in surrender.

Ten nations were present at the presidential briefing. Among them were some of the richest countries in the world, all of them much closer to the battered Gaza than Sri Lanka is in nautical miles.

In fact, some of them are oil-rich nations, to which our own Foreign Employment Minister Manusha Nanayakkara is striving to send our people to labour under trying conditions so that he can claim that his efforts resulted in millions of dollars or dirhams being repatriated to this cash-strapped nation.

As though we are not getting more and more enmeshed in a foreign policy mess, Minister Nanayakkara is planning to send some 15,000–20,000 Sri Lankan workers to Israel to replace the Palestinian workers there who have been driven out of the country.

President Wickremesinghe’s diplomatic briefing mentioned above was to set out why Sri Lanka had decided to send one of its navy vessels to join the US-led maritime coalition to counter Houthi threats to international shipping in the Red Sea, which the Houthis’ claim is only aimed at ships bound to Israel or shipping connected with Israel alone.

By joining the US-led coalition, which very few other countries have done and not one single country in our part of the world has contributed to by deploying naval vessels, the Houthis and countries that support them interpret this as a gesture of support for the US and, by extension, for Israel.

This view is strengthened by Minister Nanayakkara’s efforts to send workers to Israel, surely a diplomatic faux pas at this moment. But diplomacy—if he has any idea of it—is not what concerns him.

He relies on increased inward remittances as a sign of his success, while Sri Lankan workers in Arab countries now expose themselves to possible repercussions because of the ill-considered and shortsighted decisions of this government, which is conducting foreign policy on the hoof, as it were, or at the behest of some external powers to whom we have become beholden with new alliances.

The other day, State Minister of Defence Pramitha Tennekoon defended (in keeping with the title of his portfolio, perhaps) in parliament the government’s decision to join the maritime coalition, saying Sri Lanka should fulfil its “global responsibilities”.

If Mr. Tennekoon spends some time studying the international obligations we have undertaken by researching just the international covenants and conventions Sri Lanka has signed and ratified, he will find there are many obligations we have failed to keep and continue to do, as our recent legislation shows.

In the meantime, Sri Lanka, in desperate need of more revenue, appears to be making money out of transhipments in Colombo, while companies that keep a close tab on shipping, including the Red Sea, report that sailings there have not been seriously affected, especially since not all international shipping is threatened.

For lack of space, let me briefly raise two other issues. If the current confrontation escalates into a wider and longer conflict, how long are our naval vessels going to hang around when they are not armed to meet present threats, and at what cost?

Of Gaza’s 2.2 million population, already 1.9 million have been displaced by Israel, and maybe Prime Minister Netanyahu will clear that land of Palestinians, which he would like to do, and pack them off to some African country under some deal, like the UK tried to do under this Conservative government.

If so, for whom is this school going to be built? And who is going to construct it, and with materials from where? And if we leave it to our administration, which grinds extremely slowly, if at all, by the time it is finally built, they will have to modernise the curriculum.

That will not be difficult. The intelligence of some of our politicians is artificial anyway.

(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.)