Columns

So President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has completed his Indo-Pacific official tour with visits to India and China.

It is now very much a habit for Sri Lanka’s presidents and prime ministers to head for the two countries once they have been anointed with the powers of office. It would not come as strange to some, for history records that lesser or smaller countries have been subjugated by the big or have paid tribute to more powerful nations in their time.

After all, it is not that ancient Lanka has not done so now and then when threatened or subject to greater force by neighbouring powers. Even those mighty White races have kowtowed to Chinese emperors from time to time.

Today India and China are Sri Lanka’s strongest allies, not because they love us, as some would say not without cause, but because this island nation is of geopolitical and geostrategic importance to them in their quest for power.

This is so as the two powers muscle for dominance in the Indian Ocean and are in increasing contention while we wonder how to respond to competing forces, sometimes inclining towards one, at times the other, often depending on who is in power in Colombo.

Those who favour India are naturally bent on supporting a greater Indian physical presence or influence, while others might throw their weight behind China for varied reasons.

So, Sri Lanka is caught in a cleft stick, as it were, though India’s geographical proximity—and so its military presence—to Sri Lanka gives it a distinct advantage over China. Still, China’s commitment to Sri Lanka in times of need, particularly in times of the Korean War and much more recently during the LTTE insurrection, has not been forgotten by most Sri Lankan leaders and people.

Yet Sri Lanka’s foreign policy cannot rest on two prongs as though the rest of the world is of little or no significance. The importance of other nations, however small and economically backward they may be, cannot be ignored in these times of global change when new alliances are formed and modern groupings emerge to safeguard their future against competing big-power interests.

It is this change in the world order that requires small and economically less advanced nations to get together and act in defence of their common cause or stay out of conflicts that involve military and economically strong major powers.

What brings this to mind is not just the fact that Sri Lanka needs to steer clear of the big power contentions that are clearly manifest in the Indian Ocean and particularly in waters around us but farther afield.

Most of all, we need to avoid entangling ourselves in wars and conflicts that do not concern us or drag ourselves into unnecessarily.

It is a lesson that President Dissanayake and his NPP might well learn from the recent past when his presidential predecessor almost had us dragged into the Israel-Hamas conflict that had all the signs of expanding into a wider war involving more nations than a mere limited military
confrontation between two long-time antagonists.

It was a little over one year ago when the Palestinian group Hamas launched a sudden attack on Israel, killing hundreds and leading to a conflagration that burst into a major Israeli retaliation that led to the blocking of international sea lanes and endangering shipping.

While it is true the widening and escalating conflict did cause dangers to maritime shipping and the movement of goods that affected many countries in the central and eastern Indian Ocean, the United States launched a multinational maritime fleet to defend shipping and sea lanes, particularly in the Red Sea, against Houthi militants operating in the area.

Much as the United States expected NATO and Western nations to contribute to the multinational fleet, the response was meagre, with some nations like France joining in but their vessels coming under French command while several Western and NATO powers kept away, though they were part of the fleet in name.

So was India’s fleet in a way, while only two other
Asian nations—Seychelles and Singapore—joined in, but
only in name.

In such circumstances, when Western nations, especially those that supported Israel, stayed away, so to say, why small Sri Lanka,
with a navy that lacked the type of naval ships to combat the Houthis armed with more deadly weapons, should throw itself into this kind of battle that did not concern us remains a mystery.

More so at a time when the country was struggling to drag itself out of an economic crisis, and the cost of deploying a single naval ship would cost Sri Lanka US $250 million every two weeks by President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s estimate.

The only reason one could see
for Wickremesinghe’s decision seemed to be his pro-Western, especially US, proclivity and wanting Sri Lanka to be counted as an ally in keeping with his ideol
ogical inclinations.

But one supposes that he did not anticipate the reactions of the Arab-Islamic states, with their ambassadors based in Colombo showing obvious displeasure, leading Ranil Wickremesinghe to try to counterbalance his
decision by offering to build a school for Palestinian children in Gaza, a promise that appeared rather vague.

For a country that had for decades supported the Palestinian cause, especially when Sri Lanka pursued a strong non-aligned foreign policy, Wickremesinghe’s decision-making in support of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people, killing many thousands, seemed lacking in candour.

But then to abandon or discredit long-held policies as a leading member of the non-aligned community came as no surprise.

It was not that President Junius Jayewardene (Ranil Wickremesinghe’s uncle) was hardly committed to non-alignment. It was non-existent I realised the day he told me while he was still chairman of NAM, having replaced defeated Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike, that there were only two non-aligned countries in the world—the USA and the USSR—to employ his own words.

Having realised his terrible faux pas, particularly as chairman of NAM and months before the summit in Havana, he told me, “Now don’t write that. I will lose my job”. Which job he did not say but then it might not have been a bad thing as others were to say in later years when Sri Lanka went through Jayewardene democracy.

There is more, of course, to the Wickremesinghe story that has not been sufficiently emphasised. It was during his regime and with the help of his Foreign Employment Minister Manusha Nanayakkara that Sri Lanka started packing off Sri Lankan migrant workers to Israel.

There is nothing wrong in sending migrant workers to other countries. But the initial large-scale migration to Israel was to replace Palestinian workers from Gaza coming to work daily in Israel, which Netanyahu banned, depriving Palestinians of jobs.

So here was Nanayakkara and fellow travellers revelling at their ability to send Sri Lankans to Israel to replace Palestinians who had been deprived of their jobs.

The irony is that now Israel has cancelled the permit granted for some thousands of our people to work in Israel because the people they have sent, probably at the behest of local politicians or at the payment of large sums as bribes, have been found unfit for their jobs.

That, dear friends, is Israel’s payback time for all our help to eliminate the people of Palestine. President Dissanayake and his frontliners should learn to play with people their own size and not mind the store for the big and the mighty.

(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).