Columns

Foreign Minister Mohamed Ali Sabry is a good man to lead a chorus. Never mind what lyrics or melody he is asked to raise his voice to; he will do so with alacrity and sing in harmony.

After all, he is a minister for all seasons, and some time or other the merry-go-round turns a full circle, and there is MUM Ali Sabry back again as Sri Lanka’s voice to the world outside, which eagerly awaits to hear what weird policy is being announced by the clarion callers in the Resplendent Isle or which weirdo is appointed to head some important institution of state.

So Minister Ali Sabry is back in harness and singing like a canary, as they say, this time for President Wickremesinghe, Ali Sabry’s original patron saint, having had to resign prematurely and take to telling tales with a ghostwriter by his side.

No wonder all this sounds so lousy, particularly that overblown conspiracy theory, which has left some readers of this ‘conspiracy’ asking what conspiracy.

After all his earlier glorification in “Gota’s War”, which elevated him to a virtual Achilles (despite his bum heel) that seemed to suggest the aforementioned Gota won that battle against the wily insurgent LTTE almost single-handedly (of course with some help from brother Mahinda), this latest dreary piece of writing blames almost everybody else for Gota’s fall.

Perhaps a new title like “Run Gota Run” might have added a little more pep to a dull narrative which is too preoccupied with apportioning blame.

So with Gota having taken to his heels, or more accurately, to the wheels, MUM Ali Sabry found himself singing in a different chorus with a different conductor holding the baton.

As for President Wickremesinghe, he does not mind having a ragtag of accomplices and intended converts following him on his seemingly unending world travels, which some claim, perhaps unfairly, is part of his search for a position to fill in some international or Western institution where he would not have to worry about recalcitrant and upstart believers in their own brand of “Yukthiya”.

Surely all that shaking of hands with some of the world’s leaders and misleaders, dictators and so-called democrats in the last two years or so must bring payback.

The problem for Foreign Minister Ali Sabry is that he finds himself back in a bunch of very vocal individuals determined to sing their own songs, which makes this chorus more like the Tower of Babel than a cabinet of ministers sworn to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Not too long ago, the foreign minister hummed an entirely different tune before the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), at selective media gatherings, as happened last year in Geneva, or back on home terra firma.

Readers might recall that some inventive genius among this country’s collective of political/bureaucratic masterminds came up with the idea of fiddling with the votes as our fiddlers of the past had done, not only with ballets but ballet boxes too.

It was such simple arithmetic that one wonders why the ancient Egyptians, who did so much to put together a mathematical system, had not thought of it.

But then ancient Egypt did not believe in the franchise and elections, so they did not have to do what Junius Richard Jayewardene or his nephew Ranil Wicks did, like cancelling elections or postponing them until the citizenry felt that waiting for Godot was more productive than waiting for Ranil.

It might be recalled that at a recent vote in the UNHRC on a Western-sponsored resolution highly critical of Sri Lanka, 22 member states voted in favour of the resolution, 11 states opposed it, and 14 states abstained.

It was one of Ali Sabry’s predecessors as foreign minister, Dinesh Gunawardene, who attended the same college as his president, and some of their cronies, who seem to proliferate in state positions, who thought of juggling with the figures.

Whether he was applying what he had learnt or not, it is hard to say. But what one could say with certainty is that he added the 14 abstentions to the 11 Sri Lanka managed to obtain and claimed that our country like no other, defeated the resolution by the neo-colonial upstarts by 25 votes to 22.

That was sheer genius. Not only had Ali Sabry grabbed this with both hands subsequently—possibly for lack of any other argument to convince his countrymen—it seems to have been practised with some minor adjustments recently on some other occasion, which raised widespread disgust that is still resonating.

But what was emerging to be like a compulsive need for the deceit of its people is not dead as a dodo. So Foreign Minister Ali Sabry has had to pick on something new to divert attention.

Now he has fallen back on a slogan that dates back to the anti-colonial struggles. What is new is that he is using it to attack pro-Western nations, including those currently member-states of the UNHRC, for what Sri Lanka seems to perceive as anti-Colombo hysteria.

The double standards minister Ali Sabry and the country’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, Himalee Arunatilaka, have been repeating like a music record stuck in a groove at the recent 55th of the UNHRC appeared to allude to the pro-Israeli stance of many Western nations led by the US, over Israeli atrocities and the death and destruction it has unleashed on that strip of land called Gaza.

There is, of course, much truth in this approach to the unbending attitude of the Netanyahu government and Washington’s use of its veto at the UN in New York to stifle resolutions damning Israel.

But if some Western nations were engaged in pursuing double standards, then Sri Lanka’s doublespeak around the same issue is equally, if not more, regrettable.

The stance of a Western superpower such as the US is not surprising, for Washington has been and still is Israel’s guardian angel and protector in a desert surrounded by Arab-Islamic countries, which have seen three wars since Israel’s independence in 1948.

Sri Lanka plays no such protective role, and Washington’s stance on Israel has been obvious over the decades.

What is irksome, however, is the current Colombo government’s doublespeak on this same issue, which makes it open to the same accusation of double standards in its own foreign policy dealings.

Space limitations restrict me from setting out in detail doublespeak we have heard from this government since President Wickremesinghe first announced that a Sri Lanka navy vessel will join other naval ships of several other nations on alert around the Red Sea and its mouth to protect maritime trade routes from Houthi rebels.

Still, I draw attention to my column on January 14 headlined “Red Sea alert: Standing foreign policy on its Head,” which began thus: “Was the Sri Lanka government’s decision to throw in its lot with the US-led initiative against the Houthis in the growing conflict in the Red Sea just a knee-jerk reaction or a considered, well-thought-out one?”

I need to leave it at this except to say that following that first diplomatic faux pas, attempts at course-change and not antagonising the Arab world, whose support we needed at the UNHRC, only made matters worse with more doublespeak and even the irrepressible US Ambassador Julie Chung making public Sri Lanka navy ship’s participation in the US-led maritime Task Force 153, which our navy was trying to cover up from the public and the world.

(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.)