inside the glass house: 

Hameed: a sketch of laughter

By thalif deen at the unted nations

But the cartoon that followed, one of Mr. Hameed's favourites, sketched by Jiffrey Yoonus in the Aththa of November 1978 showed a world-weary foreign minister arriving at the Katunayake airport and innocently asking a passer-by: "My dear man, could you show me the way to Harispattuwa?"

As a frequent-flyer who travelled extensively during his 14 year tenure as foreign minister, Hameed also relished a cartoon which showed him sitting before a huge globe with the caption: "Let me see - what are the countries I have still not visited." 

The late A. C. Shahul Hameed was a rare Sri Lankan politician who had the ability to enjoy the barbs directed at him so much so that he published, at his own expense, an entire collection of cartoons lampooning him.

The cartoons were sketches from some of Sri Lanka's celebrated artistes, including W.R. Wijesoma, Jiffrey Yoonus, Mark Gerreyn and Amita Abeyesekera.

"One of the greatest gifts is the ability to laugh at oneself," said Wijesoma in an introduction to the book titled "Mr. Foreign Minister", " Mr. Hameed is doing just that, and I believe he is having the last laugh."

Oscar Wilde once made the distinction between two forms of torture: the rack and the press. Ask any politician, said Mr. Hameed, and he would opt for the grisly torture chamber over the editorial offices and the news desks in Colombo. 

But he still enjoyed the constant battle of wits with newspapermen - both at home and abroad - spending hours picking their brains and looking for new insights on major international issues.

Whenever he came to New York, Mr. Hameed became an integral part of the political landscape in an institution, which he loved to address - the United Nations. 

The UN, he felt, was the last remaining hope for smaller states like Sri Lanka — and he also made use of his visits to hold bilateral talks with scores of foreign ministers, a tradition followed even by current Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar.

Every year, he made his annual pilgrimage to the General Assembly sessions taking the podium in the company of kings, presidents, prime ministers and oil sheikhs.

The only year he missed addressing the assembly, his eleventh-hour stand-in was Ambassador Ben Fonseka, Sri Lanka's Permanent Representative to the UN and one of the few career diplomats to adorn that chair. 

But the New York Times, which took Mr. Hameed's visits for granted, attributed Ben Fonseka's speech to Mr. Hameed when the Sri Lanka foreign minister was nowhere near the UN. He was spending his time at home trying, as usual, to help unravel one of the many political problems he had been asked to grapple.

As foreign minister, Mr. Hameed ran into the thick of some of the major international political crises of the Cold War era. Since President J. R. Jayewardene remained more focused on domestic politics (and never addressed the UN in his lifetime), Hameed held centre-stage in the international political arena during Sri Lanka's chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during 1976-1979.

Mr. Jayewardene rightly felt that his foreign minister had the legitimate right to speak his mind on behalf of the country — and was confident he would do an excellent job of it. 

As chairman of NAM ministerial conference, Mr. Hameed was constantly called upon to preside over some of the trickiest international issues of the time: which of the two Cambodian factions had the rightful claim to the seat at the UN? Should Egypt, which had signed the Camp David peace agreement with Israel in 1977, be driven out of NAM? And it went on and on: the sharp divisions in NAM over Western Sahara and the split over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

When Sri Lanka handed over the chairmanship of NAM to Cuba in September 1979, he said: "We are founder members of the Non-Aligned Movement. I am glad that, under the leadership of my Foreign Minister Mr. Hameed, we have been able to hand it down to you, Mr. Fidel Castro, untarnished and unaltered."

Sri Lanka's former Ambassador to the US, Ernest Corea, a longtime friend of Mr. Hameed and perhaps the only envoy who addressed him by his first name, said: "Shahul was very proud of this reference."

UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, also a former Sri Lankan envoy to the US, says that despite the cynicism of the political and intellectual heavyweights in the UNP Cabinet, Mr. Hameed held firmly to the principles of NAM and successfully completed Sri Lanka's term as NAM chairman.

Sri Lanka's former UN envoy Daya Perera, who is currently vacationing in New York, said Mr. Hameed had the ability to turn a dull speech prepared by his officials into a masterpiece to suit a UN audience. ''It was a tremendous gift - and he was perfectly familiar with the UN lingo,'' he said.

One of Mr. Hameed's memorable moments was when an Eelam activist from London smuggled himself into the UN building, took his place in the speaker's roster, and tried to upstage Mr. Hameed by walking onto the podium of the General Assembly and letting off a diatribe against the government.

When the president of the Assembly realized he had an intruder in his hands, he cut off the mike within minutes and summoned the security guards to bodily eject the speaker from the hall.

As Mr. Hameed walked up to the podium, there was pin drop silence. The sanctity of the Assembly had been violated. But Mr. Hameed, without missing a beat had the last word: "I want to thank the former speaker for keeping his speech short," he said, as the assembly broke into peals of laughter.

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