1st February 1998

Step by step of diplomacy

By Louis Benedict and Ameen Izzadeen

Independent Sri Lanka's first prime minis ter D. S. Senanayake, admired or sometimes ridiculed as 'Kele John' for his magnificent obsession in clearing jungles and developing agriculture, may not have had the diplomatic skills of our golden jubilee foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar. But with the wisdom that comes from the grassroots and based on experience rather than ideas, D. S. Senanayake worked out a vision and goals for Sri Lanka's foreign policy and international relations.

At that time the prime minister was also in charge of defence and foreign affairs. Essentially, D. S. believed that Sri Lanka's foreign policy should be based mainly on the country's national interest, especially in economic terms and in the long run it should create a situation where Sri Lanka was a friend of all and enemy of none.

Fifty years later, through trial and error, Sri Lanka appears to have achieved that goal though there were aberrations and misadventures — the worst being the Indo-Sri Lanka crisis of the 1980s. In the 1970s we also saw the breaking of diplomatic relations with North Korea after Kim Il Sung's men here took out full page newspaper advertisements which allegedly contained coded messages between the lines for JVP rebels.

On a smaller scale, we also saw a break with Israel though that was more an international than a local problem while the tendency to win Muslim votes here cannot also be denied. Furthermore, the links with Israel were often on a "come and go" basis — so near at one stage and so far at another. In the traditions of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is today so bankrupt that he is quoting 'kingdom-come' fundamentalists in America, Israel at one time provided commando training to the Sri Lanka army while at the same time it also trained LTTE guerrillas.

In more recent times, we saw a hiccup with Britain when the then President Premadasa declared British High Commissioner David Gladstone as persona non grata for interfering in local elections. But the mediatory role played later by junior minister Liam Fox and the visit of Prince Charles for Wednesday's golden jubilee ceremony are indications that ties between Britain and Sri Lanka are back on a mutually beneficial course.

Dr. Fox, a junior minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, made secret visits to Sri Lanka last year during which he held secret talks with Foreign Minister Kadirgamar and Opposition UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. It led to an agreement between the ruling PA and the UNP to work for bipartisanship, that is to rise above party politics, in finding a just solution to the ethnic conflict.

Even though it may be a new phenomenon in local politics, bipartisanship appears to have been a strong underlying force in Sri Lanka's foreign policy, providing what international affairs expert W. M. Karunadas describes as "continuity, consistency and bipartisanship.

The time of a jubilee is a time for positive thinking and time to count our blessings. So we need to see the positives in some principal features of our foreign policy and relations during the past 50 years.

Many analysts, especially those in the socialist camp would undermine D. S. Senanayake as a neo-colonial 'kalu sudda' with top hat and tail coat, who pandered to western whims and demands. One area of widespread criticism is the agreement he signed with Britain at Independence for defence and external relations. While some saw it as continued enslavement, others close to the thinking of DS said his principal aim was to protect Sri Lanka's air and sea routes to facilitate its exports and imports. They say, he tied up with British missions abroad so as to gain full advantage for Sri Lanka in trade and economic terms.

His successor Sir John Kotelawala, ridiculed as the 'Bandung Booruwa' is widely thought to have been a western stooge. When he blasted the red colonialism of the Soviet empire, Sri Lanka for the first time hit the headlines in the US though for dubious reasons.

Though outwardly wayward and pro-western, Sir John for the first time gave a regional dimension to Sri Lanka's foreign policy when he convened a meeting of Asian foreign ministers which eventually led to Bandung and then to the Non-aligned Movement.

Between DS and Sri John the short premiership of Dudley Senanayake was largely seen as being insignificant in terms of foreign policy. But if economics is the basis of international relations, then the Rubber-Rice Pact with China during Dudley's term must rank as a landmark. For decades, Sri Lanka benefited immensely from the rice we obtained from China and the rubber we sent at reasonable prices. Until 1968, every Sri Lankan got two measures of rice free for a week and that meant some 25 million measures a week. If Sri Lanka had bought all that rice at world market prices, the economy would have gone to pieces.

The United States strongly objected to the deal with Mao's China, because relations between those two big powers were still at a powder keg situation in the background of the Korean war.

Yet Sri Lanka took a bold step and much credit must go to Dudley along with his cousin the then Trade Minister R.G. Senanayake.

In 1955, a part of a deal in a game of big power political chess Sri Lanka was admitted to the United Nations. It was the prelude to a major change.

In 1956, with the social revolution of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike Sri Lanka also saw the emergence of a foreign policy of positive neutrality with strong ideological and political currents. While there was a shift of emphasis from economic perspectives to political and sometimes prestige value in foreign policy, SWRD maintained the spirit of continuity. For example, he negotiated the withdrawal of British bases but did not seek a review of the defence or external relations agreements with Britain, apparently because he saw the economic value in those. SWRD also established diplomatic relations with socialist countries and provided a third world dimension for Sri Lankan foreign policy in the Suez crisis.

SWRD's dynamic middle path in foreign policy — blending the economic benefits with political or ideological issues — could be best summed up in his own famous words at a reception for Sri Lanka's good friend and ally Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia. SWRD said: " We are not neutralists. We do not adopt a negative attitude. Our attitude is a very positive one, in following our different ways of life in non alignment with power blocs. I do not like the word uncommitted. We are committed to the hilt...''

If 1956 was a revolution, so was 1960 — the dramatic advent of Sirimavo Bandaranaike as the world's first woman prime minister. Perhaps that in itself was a unique contribution from Sri Lanka to a gender balance in international policy making. Sirima's opponents scorned her as having little or no awareness of local affairs, let alone international politics. But she learned fast, perhaps listening much in her first term and rose to the greatest heights on the world stage in her second term.

As the cold war put the world on a volcano with crises in Cuba, Berlin and elsewhere, Sirima Bandaranaike, perhaps partly due to the image of her assassinated husband, was thrust into a major role in the formation of the non-aligned movement. She was a key figure in the preparatory conference in Cairo in 1961 and attended all the NAM summits till her crowning glory in 1976 when she hosted some 60 third world leaders at the Colombo summit. When the Indo-China war broke out in 1962, Sirima was given a mandate by NAM to mediate in the crisis. The close rapport she established with Chinese leaders and India's premier Jawaharlal Nehru during that mediation laid the foundation for close and productive bilateral ties with those two Asian giants.

In the meantime, Sirima caused ripples in the United States by moving boldly to take over American oil companies. So there was a local economic push for her for the building a closer ties with socialist and third world countries. But later in the 1960s. the Dudley Senanayake regime healed the rift with the US while maintaining close ties with the socialist and the third world bloc.

In the 1970s, a confident Sirima took the international stage with strong initiatives for a peace zone in the Indian Ocean and a Law of the Sea Treaty. The man behind her on these issues was one of Sri Lanka's best known diplomats Shirley' Amarasinghe who rose to highest ranks in the United Nations and world affairs till the dirty tricks of party politics turned him into one of those great men who are not honoured in their own homes.

Unfortunately, a similar situation is seen today in the case of Jayantha Dhanapala who was virtually forced to resign from Sri Lanka's diplomatic service though the United Nations has now raised him to the highest levels as Under Secretary General in charge of disarmament affairs. Mr. Amerasinghe and Mr. Dhanapala along with the third world economic prophet Gamani Corea and top UN administrator Andrew Joseph would rank as the Sri Lankans in the highest levels of international affairs during the past 50 years.

During Sirima's regime, besides the growth of NAM we saw Indo-Sri Lanka relations reaching Himalayan heights, largely through close personal ties between Sirima and Indian leaders Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi.

If the stripping of voting rights from hundreds of thousands of Indian voters here soon after independence was the first major thorn in bilateral ties, the process of healing began with the Sirima-Shastri pact and then Sirima-Indira agreements on the so called stateless people.

The dispute over the Indian Ocean island of Kachchativu was also amicably solved in Sri Lanka's favour though some Tamil Nadu extremists are still making jarring noises over it. The close personal relationship between the Bandaranaike and Nehru-Gandhi families was so intimate that it provoked the UNP to resort to virtual slander of the Gandhi family in the run-up to the 1977 general elections here. UNP leader J. R. Jayewardene and R. Premadasa while maintaining close ties with Morarji Desai and the Janata Dal, ridiculed Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay as a 'cow and calf'.

Not only elephants, even Indira apparently never forgot. Those dirty political slogans cost us heavily. As the new Jayewardene govt., with a 'Yankee Dicky' background launched sweeping economic reforms for a free-market which took Sri Lanka closer to the American or Western system, the fuse was set for a political explosion over the Palk Straits. An angry India or essentially Indira, putting aside Gandhian traditions, reacted by bullying and browbeating Sri Lanka. If Sri Lanka's approach was flawed, India's was disgraceful. It is now widely admitted that in terms of the Indira doctrine and for geo political manipulations of RAW, Tamil armed groups were built and bankrolled from Indian funds to destabilise the Jayewardene regime in the aftermath of the 1983 ethnic holocaust.

Indian mediation efforts made little progress and the assassination of Indira Gandhi also brought out little significant change. In l 996, the Parippu drop put ties in a melting pot and the two countries were on the brink of a war till the 1987 Indo-Lanka peace accord which initially many saw as a sell-out or a peace of the graveyard and a capitulation to Indian power politics.

But in hindsight, most people agree that if JR's successor Ranasinghe Premadasa had not thrown the IPKF out in 1989, LTTE Chief Velupillai Prabhakaran would be no more and the war would have ended except for some insignificant pockets of resistance. Mr. Premadasa admitting that he did not know or care about international diplomacy, eventually could not get even a few South Asian leaders for a summit here, a sad picture compared to Sirima's achievement in 1976.

Though the war is still raging and the dream of opening the Jaffna Kandy road for Wednesday's jubilee is still but a dream if not a nightmare, we need to look positively at the blessings.

Ties with India, with South Asia and indeed with all the world, are better than ever before, thanks largely to the vision and commitment of Sri Lanka's widely respected foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, though the absence of the Cold War has provided for him a better environment than the long time foreign minister A. C. S. Hameed had.

Summing up, it is evident that despite periodic flaws or aberrations, the theme and thrust of Sri Lanka's foreign policy has been the hallowed middle path — not only between world power blocs but also between political and economic issues of international relations. In this middle path the spirit of continuity, stability and bipartisanship is the vision that will carry Sri Lanka into the 21st century, hopefully with a regional thrust for gradual economic integration of the South Asian bloc SAARC into an Asian version of the European Union.

Continue to Plus page 7 * Kandy: the roots of the rebellion

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