Columns

It is bad enough when Sri Lanka’s image in the outside world has been blackened increasingly over the last couple of decades or more.

With corruption, bribery, and political chicanery ruining a country that once stood tall on the world stage and earned encomiums for its diplomatic dexterity, Sri Lanka is today grovelling in the dust, though not many countries are saying so publicly.

But talking to diplomats and commentators over the years, one can discern what is said in the official reports from the chanceries of Colombo-based diplomatic missions to their capitals around the world.

The government’s spin doctors would like the Sri Lankan people to believe that strutting around the world at public expense, especially when we purportedly had little or no money, and shaking hands with leaders of other nations is the epitome of diplomatic achievement.

If that was so simple, Sri Lanka would fill the UN Secretary-General’s seat the next time around. Alas, two of our best diplomats tried and failed because there is more to diplomacy than shaking hands. Ambassador Shirley Amerasinghe, for instance, never put his name into the ring, although he had evinced an interest, because the Western powers led by the US considered him strongly pro-Palestinian and anti-Western and would campaign against him.

“There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Hamlet said.

Today’s political frontrunners and their advisors think that one handshake with Joe Biden or Xi Jinping is sufficient to bind our nations in an inexorable relationship. That would be more like Diana Gamage telling the media that she would be packing her bags soon to head out to the US to negotiate the opening of a Disneyland in Hambantota.

But it never happened, and that is not because the grey wild elephants in the area protested against another white elephant in Hambantota encroaching their territory with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse tagging behind dear Diana, who later took to promoting Ganja (marijuana), for which even President Wickremesinghe seems to have fallen.

Did not “Ranil baba”, as he used to be called during his early student days, make mention in one of his budget speeches that the government is looking at the possibility of growing Ganja—apparently on a large scale?

That did warm dear Diana’s fast-palpitating heart, as she implied in parliament. But that would have strangled in the womb the “Alas Alles” and police chief Deshabandu’s joint master plan called “Yukthiya” to wipe clean the country’s ‘drug’ peddlers and such other riff-raff like crooked politicians off the streets while crooked cops had a good laugh over a drink (one?) at the officer’s mess.

When I last read, their “wipe Sri Lanka clean” had rounded up some 150,000 people, but it could be an exaggeration. Whether they were ever brought to justice, one does not know, but it sure did leave a nasty smell in the international community, particularly after Minister Alles urged his khaki-clad stormtroopers to use the weapons they carried.

If more than some believed that it did smell much like Hitlerian tactics or those pursued by other authoritarian regimes, they would not be far wrong, as there was no comment from the government that it was not the administration’s position.

Instead of Ganja and a midnight economy to titillate the spasms of thousands of tourists who have already learnt a bitter lesson queuing up at BIA only to be asked to pay several dollars more, dear Diana seems to have vanished from hearth and home—or so we have heard from the CID, which is said to have deployed two sets of sleuths to trace the elusive former State Minister.

But then she does turn up one day at the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court as though she had been terribly wronged when here she was a true British citizen whose faults, among others, were to obtain a Sri Lanka passport—well, one or more.

Instead of Sri Lanka singing hallelujahs for returning to her land of birth and having applied for a local passport—never mind the way they were obtained and having Immigration and Emigration Department heads who have serious lapses of memory unable to recall.

Moreover, the haste with which the Wickremesinghe government has rushed through legislation that has curbed the fundamental rights of the citizens and curtailed peaceful demonstrations has aroused the ire of many, including that of international human rights bodies.

With this record in three years, Foreign Minister Ali Sabry has the gall to speak about Western double standards. There is truth in that accusation.

But if those like Ali Sabry wish to see such allegations minimised, if not ended, then this government should put its act together and stop hollering about its democratic record and its commitment to the rule of law.

It should start with cleaning up the country’s low and odour and acting against public officials who behave as though they are above the law.

Some believe that a change of government in a few months would bring about the fundamental changes that this clean-up badly requires. Whatever it takes, it needs to be done.

Even the IMF’s 16-point Governance Diagnostic Assessment, which calls for clamping down on bribery and corruption, has not bestirred this government to move.

(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.)