Sunday Times 2

Sri Lanka’s former Foreign Secretary H.M.G.S. Palihakkara delivered the inaugural Jayantha Dhanapala memorial oration organised by the Bandaranaike International Diplomatic Training Inistitue on May 27 at its premises. The following is an edited version of the oration.

Today marks the first year since we lost that voice of reason and warmth—our dear friend and respected senior colleague, Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala. The person as well as the persona of JD, as we used to call him fondly, meant many things to most of us in the Sri Lanka Foreign Service: a guru, mentor, counsel, intellectual test bed, career pathfinder, role model, and much more. Many, if not most, from that clan present here today would have benefited from that caring Dhanapala touch in one way or another. I certainly did.

I was fortunate to work with him in different capacities during some of the most testing times for Sri Lankan multilateral diplomacy. That was when the armed conflict was in full swing in the country spinning off unprecedented challenges for governance and diplomacy. The joint brief we developed to handle this intermestic challenge was based on the premise that fighting terrorism and fighting for human rights are not mutually exclusive; that no elected government can do as they wish with their citizens disregarding what national and international laws say, and expect no national and international consequences. The diplomats’ job was to so advise the government.

It was, therefore, no surprise that he remained a strong supporter of the LLRC—a ground-breaking commission on which I had the honour to serve as a commissioner. That commission produced, more than a decade ago and for the first time in Sri Lanka, a comprehensive set of recommendations towards post-conflict peacebuilding, reconciliation and accountability that enjoyed wide confluence and acceptability nationally and internationally. We were among many frustrated citizens who were deeply disappointed and even angry when the then government and indeed several successive governments, and even shadow governments callously disregarded or defaulted on implementing those recommendations.

That deficit continues to expose the country to many adversities—multiple crises including the current one, intrusive external interventions unworthy of a long-standing democracy, and most importantly, it denied closure and justice to conflict victims from all communities as well as to those soldiers who acted lawfully and died honourably.

Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala was an outstanding practitioner and promoter of multilateral solutions to global issues, especially in the peace and security domain. The lion’s share of his ambassadorial diplomacy was dedicated to multilateralism at its post-war epicentre—the United Nations, where he rose to the level next to the Secretary-General.

Why multilateralism? What is there for smaller countries? This is indeed a good query to raise.

The world is globalised and interdependent. And yet, it remains a complex mosaic of asymmetries. The best way—perhaps the only way—to peacefully convert these fraught asymmetries into mutually rewarding complementarities will be through enlightened multilateralism.

However, the scorecard of the post-war multilateral system spearheaded by the UN turned out to be a mixed one.

Some praise it as a collective for preventing or ending wars, ensuring human rights, and meeting humanitarian needs. Others critique it as a house of selectivity and organised hypocrisy, even where things are driven by the strategic priorities of a powerful cabal and not necessarily by the lofty principles enshrined in the Charter and follow-up treaties and resolutions. The culpable cabal is, of course, none other than the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the so-called P5. They also happen to be the ‘legitimate’ nuclear weapon powers, who seem to earn that status more by power and less by legitimacy. The well-known ‘multilateral’ analyst, Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, sums this up, saying ‘in all multilateral processes, there is a constant tension between power and justice’. In theory, multilateral diplomacy should perform certain functions and deliver certain global goods for the benefit of all and not act as a means to the major power’s ends.

In practice, however, Mahbubani says, “Power usually trumps principles and ideals.”

Consequently, the overarching question faced by the UN multilateral system is the challenge of relevance. How can the UN multilateral system remain relevant in a conflictual world where the powers-that-be continue to sideline or bypass the very system they themselves created when making decisions about war and peace?

The peace-making and peace-keeping history of the UN is replete with episodes depicting this deficit. Glaring and heartbreaking current examples of this challenge continue to unfold on a daily basis in the ongoing carnages in Gaza and Ukraine. Having failed to deter or prevent it from happening, the system is unable or unwilling to take the initiative to even de-escalate or negotiate a pause to the carnage, let alone end this conflict. Just the other day, Israel yet again ignored the International Court of Justice’s order to stop the Rafah offensive. The UNSC, which has the sole authority to enforce compliance with the ICJ order, remains silent. Strategic calculations by pro-Israeli parties to the conflict have trumped principles again. The UN system is reduced to a virtual bystander status with only minimum access even to humanitarian assistance. Humanist USG Jayantha Dhanapala would surely have decried this situation from within the system.

UN-centric multilateralism, of course, is confronted with many more challenges. I will briefly refer to a few.

Acclaimed Israeli scientist and anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari—in his best-selling book 21 Questions for the 21st Century—flags three threats faced by humanity: climate change, nuclear war, and potential abuse of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These are not new concerns, but their evolving dynamics suggest that they can become existential threats if concerted multilateral efforts do not facilitate targeted and time-bound mitigation measures and solutions. Questions have been raised about whether, as a result, humanity is destined to face extinction sooner than previously estimated! Only time will educate us on this.

What is clear, however, is that since all these threats or concerns are borderless in form and content, negotiating solutions and mitigation measures must, of necessity, be multilateral.

Clearly, some progress has been made in addressing climate change under the auspices of the UN multilateral system. More challenging work, however, remains on the critical issue of building common ground between past and present polluters on funding mitigation and sustainable practices. That again is a formidable multilateral challenge. Failure here is not an option. That is because all polluters, past and present, small and big, are at a climate change inflection point.

If we continue business as usual, we poise ourselves to cross the tipping point of global temperature rise at 2 Celsius. If, however, the incoming US administration decides to follow the former Trump administration’s policy of walking away from multilateralism and undermines the remaining joint funding action to tackle this global issue, an avoidable climate calamity will certainly become an inevitable one. So multilateralism has its work cut out there.

As for the other two challenges on the Harari list demanding multilateral attention, viz., nuclear war and artificial intelligence, Ambassador Dhanapala played pivotal and pioneering roles in paving ways forward. This work he did as a visionary first responder long before the best-selling books of the likes of Harari made headlines.

On the nuclear war danger, the consensual outcome of the 1995 NPT Conference in New York, masterfully led by Jayantha Dhanapala as its president, was the first ever and by far the only international consensus on the bitterly contested nexus between nuclear non-proliferation and a nuclear weapons-free world. The idea that nuclear non-proliferation cannot live in a nuclear disarmament vacuum was captured for the first time in that historic consensus. It remains the political and diplomatic foundation and the guardrail agreed by the nuclear and non-nuclear states for future multilateral negotiations towards realising what President Barack Obama once embraced as a worthy goal for humanity—a world free of nuclear weapons.

However, the stark reality is that currently there are no negotiations, bilateral or multilateral, taking place anywhere in the world on any nuclear arms control or arms reduction issue, let alone on disarmament.

To make matters worse, nuclear powers have suspended negotiations and withdrawn from some treaties. What is more, irresponsible nuclear sabre-rattling in America, Russia, and North Korea has assumed dangerous proportions.

Multilateral negotiation forums of the UN—like the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva—remain paralysed. This is because the nuclear powers reserve for themselves the exclusive right to talk or not talk about nuclear weapons, even though they acknowledge that nuclear war could pose a terminal threat to humanity.

Reconciling this contradiction through a broad-based process of negotiations based on the 1995 consensus remains a difficult but indispensable task for the international community. Failure to do so in the current adversarial environment of rising nuclear tensions throughout the world could ignite a nuclear exchange by accident or miscalculation, leading to terminal planetary damage.

Given the fast-spreading nuclear capability and irresponsible advocacy of the utility of these weapons of mass destruction in the security doctrines of all major powers, solutions by definition have to be found through multilateral negotiations.

On the third challenge of AI, there is an animated ongoing discourse about the vistas of material advances AI promises as well as the dangers it can morph into. The human penchant to weaponise almost every technology they invent is well documented. The spectrum of potential war-making applications AI seems to offer is vast and even bewildering. The AI weaponisation appears to be well on track already. The handy work of the AI-drone combination in causing loss of life and material devastation in the current theatres of war in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere is proof enough.

Tech giants predict a microchip will be available for less than $5  sooner than later. Cheap drones are already in destructive business. These two technologies represent a weapon of choice for state and non-state actors. Given the strategic and tactical leverage offered by AI, big tech companies and their host governments will have significant financial and strategic stakes in developing regulatory or oversight regimes in this domain. These then have to be negotiated and administered by multilateral means. The preliminary exploration of this issue under UN auspices does not seem to have made much headway.

As one of my dialogue partners from across the Palk Strait commented in a lighter vein, the multilateral system needs to respond quicker before the AI-equipped cheap drones can become the poor man’s weapon of mass destruction!

Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapla was an early responder to this menace long before it manifested on ongoing battlefields.

All this will put to the test the relevance and role of multilateralism in a world buffeted by conflict and multiple shifts in alliances and power centres, while the order that is emerging is increasingly multipolar. Many strategists have opined, however, that a multipolar world and an order that was in flux needed more multilateralism than ever before.

A series of resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council since 2018 have sought to reiterate commitment to multilateralism, the central role of the UN therein, and the need for reinvigorated multilateralism to address emerging challenges.

The clear message is that multilateralism and related systems remain at the core of the rules-based international order.

These declarations of good intentions in and of themselves represent good paperwork. However, they are too feeble, in my view, to address the underlying structural and strategic issues contributing to persistent inertia within the system.

The conduct of multilateralism is supposedly based on the principle of sovereign equality. However, the veto-dominated decision-making in the UNSC is clearly unequal. That process is dictated by the self-interest of one or more of the five veto wielders and not necessarily by the Charter-mandated principles. The annals of the Security Council are littered with many such vetoes. Two of the latest examples, quite frankly, are diplomatic abominations. They are the Russian veto of resolutions condemning its own blatant aggression in Ukraine and the American veto of resolutions asking Israel to briefly stop obliterating Gaza and the Gazans by dropping US-supplied 2000-pound bombs on these hapless people.

It would be interesting to see if a possible resolution to implement the latest ICJ order halting military attacks in Rafah will be vetoed again. This would be a clear case of the high priests of UN multilateralism demolishing the foundation of the Cathedral of Multilateralism—the rule of law.

While the UN Security Council, the apex body of UN multilateralism that is supposed to oversee the so-called ‘rules-based order’, continues to practice the ‘rule of force’, there will be little or no credibility for the rest of the multilateral system to preach the ‘force of rule’ to other member states.

This is a double standard at its worst. Selectively using the rule of force in inter-state relations while selectively preaching the rule of law in intra-state activity will progressively enfeeble the legal and moral authority of the Charter-based multilateral system. Redressing this anomaly of the rule of law vs. the rule of force and the attendant credibility gap will be an essential part of UN reforms. This is a catch-22 situation, perhaps a conundrum beyond resolution, because the reform project itself has long been straight-jacketed by the threat of veto by Permanent Members.

Some analysts ask, perhaps unfairly: Will the UN-centric multilateral system remain a glorified appendage of the balance of power architecture manipulated by the P5 countries? This question has some substance, though. Will major powers continue to bypass the UN to wage war and make peace, as in the case of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine? Will the UN be called upon only to clear the humanitarian debris when the intervening powers declare victory (as in Iraq and now in Palestine or Ukraine) or cut and run (as in Afghanistan)? These are not easy to dismiss as provocative polemics. Empirical evidence stares at us.

However, despite these challenges in certain fields, the UN’s norm-setting and field activity and programmes by UN agencies such as WHO, ILO, FAO, UNHCR, and UNICEF remain great human achievements in a world afflicted by an array of man-made and natural disasters. They have done some sterling work to promote international cooperation in technical, humanitarian, human rights, and socio-economic fields. Our country immensely benefited from these technical inputs, and due in no small measure to that cooperation, we achieved remarkably high human development standards, quite disproportionate to our GDP punch.

It would be fair to say that the UN multilateral system has achieved gold standards in norm-setting and humanitarian affairs but is burdened with double standards in implementation and monitoring. Redressing this contradiction between gold standards in norms and double standards in practice remains a difficult but indispensable challenge for the system.

Loss of legitimacy happens when any entity persistently refuses or ignores to deliver on the mandates it was entrusted with by its constitutive instruments or by its membership. It is a strange logic, besides being a legitimacy deficit, if the Security Council  feels itself insecure to be able to address threats to international peace and security, as has happened in relation to situations in Ukraine and Palestine today and in many other situations in the recent past.

In the final analysis, it is the states which constitute the membership of a multilateral body, that are responsible for inaction, inconsistent action or procrastination bearing upon its efficacy. If theSecurity Council does not act amidst growing threats to international peace and security because of a veto exercised by a Permanent Member, despite the majority voting to act, there is no doubt that it is that member who bears responsibility for its inaction. Often, though, it is the case that the member concerned has no political will to act.

As Gareth Evans, one-time Foreign Affairs Minister of Australia, has commented once, “Political will is never waiting in a cupboard to be found; it has to be nurtured and generated, campaigned for persistently and relentlessly.”

The news about three European Nations breaking ranks with the conventional ‘US-led Western democracy’ posture to recognise Palestine’s statehood perhaps signifies that a ‘will-inspiring Cupboard’, albeit with a lot of skeletons, has at last been found among the ruins and horrors in Gaza!

So the moral of this pragmatism is that despite many deficits inherent in the current UN-centric multilateral system, not even a diplomatic lion’s heart will attempt to look for a better replacement. Given the current state of flux in international affairs, the adversarial trajectory of force relationships, and, of course, the fallible nature of human decision-making, it would be impossible to negotiate a consensus to remake a new UN.

Instead, slow and grinding reforms to the current architecture will likely be the way forward. Predictably, this truism did not escape the seasoned scrutiny of Jayantha Dhanapala. Writing a tribute to him in the Financial Times of June 13, 2023, former US diplomat Dr. Patrick Mendis quotes him as saying in this regard: “I want to be a practical idealist, even if it is an oxymoron!”

For Jayantha Dhanapala, it was a professional journey driven by the ideal of multilateralism. There was a strong, unflinching consensus-building thrust to it as well, which remained the hallmark of Sri Lankan diplomacy back then.

From the NAM stewardship of the 1970s to the Law of the Sea in the 1980s and the NPT in 1995, Sri Lanka had maintained a consistent track record as an international consensus builder in some ground-breaking diplomatic endeavours. It created for ourselves a diplomatic profile quite disproportionate to our GDP punch and our demographic and economic attributes. All this testifies to the kind of diplomacy the young professionals of our generation were field-tested with, using the likes of Jayantha Dhanapala as templates. As we pay tribute to him, I am certain that all of us will recall all that with admiration, gratitude, and professional pride.

 

 

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