Features
Tissa Wijeyaratne at the foreign office and briefing on the KGB in London
(Excerpted from the autobiography of MDD Peiris, Secretary to the Prime Minister)
The Prime Minister had brought in Mr. Tissa Wijeyaratne, a lawyer, and one who had long antecedents in the Communist Party as the Additional Secretary Foreign Affairs, in the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Affairs. Tissa had a good mind and was a witty speaker. I remember once. when I was an undergraduate at Peradeniya University, Tissa addressing a packed “Room A”, the largest hall in the University on some political topic.
Most of the undergraduates were almost equally divided between Communists and Trotskyites during this time, so that Tissa was well aware that his audience consisted of a large number of Trotskyites. His opening sentence was “Trotskyites of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your brains!” This was of course an invitation to pandemonium, which duly reigned for quite sometime, until a harassed presiding officer restored some degree of order and silence. That was Tissa.
I was wondering how he was going to fit into a bureaucracy. He was brought in partly due to the coalition politics of the day, but partly also to give a complacent Foreign Ministry a bit of a shake up. Tissa started in characteristic style. He told a meeting of officers of the Foreign Service that the Ministry was Foreign because the behaviour and attitudes of members of the diplomatic service were foreign to Sri Lanka. He went on to add that he would initiate a scheme whereby those returning to the country, particularly after an assignment in a Western country would be posted to a Kachcheri where he or she would be exposed to a dose of grass-roots District Administration.
He went further and said that he intends to make posts in the Foreign Service and the domestic Administrative Service interchangeable. All this was stirring stuff and it certainly created the stir that Tissa probably intended and without doubt enjoyed. Tissa was voluble and ebullient. WT Jayasinghe the Foreign Secretary was his complete opposite. He was taciturn and laconic. It was a most interesting mix, but a mix that the Prime Minister thought after some time to be unsustainable. She developed a fear that Tissa would bulldoze WT, and craft his own agenda which could possibly lead to our having two foreign policies!
She thereupon told me that she was going to institute a Committee on Foreign Affairs consisting of W.T, Tissa, Alif, the Secretary to the Cabinet, and myself. The Committee was to clear any important foreign policy issue before it reached her, and also to engage in a considerable degree of formal planning and forward thinking. She wanted me to Chair this Committee. Long before the concept of a neutral umpire evolved in the game of cricket, my role was to be a neutral umpire in the overall management of foreign policy.
I had serious doubts about the practical working of this Committee. I was of the view that many of the problems that the Foreign Ministry should deal with in the course of their ordinary work, would be shunted to this Committee. Given the busy nature of the duties of the members and their already heavy responsibilities, I felt that the Committee could become a bottleneck; and most importantly I was of the view that the Foreign Secretary’s position should not be devalued.
I discussed all these matters with the Prime Minister. It led to her modifying the role of the Committee to being more of a think-tank, and she agreed that WT should Chair it. But WT strongly proposed that I should Chair it. He was sensitive to Tissa’s presence, and he was quite certain that I, with the weight of the Prime Minister’s office behind me should be the best person to Chair the Committee. I reluctantly acquiesced. The Foreign Service supported me fully. They also felt that in the context of things, the Secretary to the Prime Minister was the best person to Chair this group. They also paid me the further compliment of stating that my personal qualities also ideally suited me to the task.
I got on well with Tissa. I was never put off by the surface noise. I always looked for underlying meaning. Tissa appreciated this. Alif as usual was very balanced and helpful. Together, we were able to restore the kind of balance that the Prime Minister wanted. I was especially careful to encourage Tissa to speak out. Our mandate from the Prime Minister was to restore balance, not to establish a dead conformity or to prevent the articulation of differing views.
Amidst all this, I was invited by the United States Embassy in Colombo to Chair the Joint Committee of Sri Lankans and Americans to select a person for the Eisenhower Award. This was a prestigious award which takes the awardee to the United States for a period of some months, and an opportunity for him or her to engage in high level intellectual and social activities. This meant meetings of the Committee leading to the final selection by interview.
The candidates were finally pared down to two, Mr. K.H.J. Wijayadasa of the Administrative Service and formerly of the Civil Service, and Mr. Mangala Moonesinghe a Member of Parliament. After interviewing both candidates, the Committee was of the view that it was virtually a dead heat. But Mr. Moonesinghe was finally selected, because no member from the legislature had gone on this award previously, and it was thought that with such a good candidate, it was time this happened. We also identified an appropriate award for Mr. Wijayadasa to go on, later.
Senior Security Administrator’s Course – London
In June 1974, I had to leave for London to attend the “Senior Security Administrators’ Course” organized by the British authorities. The Inspector General of Police Mr. Stanley Senanayake strongly advocated that I should attend this course. I certainly did not wish to stand in the way of someone from the police going for this, and I suggested to the IGP that he select one of his senior officers. But the IGP said that this course was more tailored towards high officials from Prime Minister’s offices; Cabinet offices etc, and the course content dealt substantially with matters such as security of documents; security of information flows; issues pertaining to electronic surveillance, etc. I therefore went.
It was certainly very useful. During a week, I learned so many aspects that I was not aware of before, and refined my thinking on some of those which I thought I already knew. The preponderance of attendance encompassed senior civilian officials from the Prime Minister’s offices; Cabinet offices; and Ministries of Defence. There were many participants from African countries. Some of them irritated the course directors, because of their habitually late attendance, and visible drowsiness after lunch. The British were as usual polite, but in the case of one recurring offender they resorted to understated sarcasm, about his constant late attendance.
The rapier in this instance was met with a club. The gentleman concerned stated with a note of surprised indignation, that the course started too early in the morning (9 a.m.); that the course hours were too long; that this did not provide any time for shopping! And that in any case when they came out to London, his government expected him to do other work as well. This statement also received sympathy in some quarters of the room.
The British course directors were speechless. Apparently, no previous experience had prepared them for such a confident assertion of chaos as far as their course was concerned. But they had to patiently deal with the problem. As far as I was concerned, as I have mentioned previously, I was schooled in a tradition that underlined that when you go abroad you represent your country, and that you must do nothing to bring discredit upon it. I was therefore always punctual, and temperamentally since I didn’t much care for visiting Soho by night, managed to get sufficient sleep, and was therefore fairly alert during the day.
This did not go unnoticed and resulted in the development of considerable rapport between the course hierarchy and myself. I was introduced by them to an intelligence operative, who was working on South Asia, and whose responsibilities seemed to include keeping track of Soviet KGB operations in the region. In the course of conversations, he gave me details of a senior KGB agent working under cover in the Soviet Embassy in Sri Lanka. This was quite important. Sri Lanka as a non-aligned country having good relations with all did receive sensitive information from diverse sources. The Soviets would tell us about CIA and other Western agents, and the West would periodically tell us about Soviet agents.
Although I had nothing to do with this particular field, I was aware it was happening. I thanked the British for the information and said I would take it up when I got back. In the meantime, our interesting course continued. Being a British course, naturally almost the sole emphasis was on KGB activity, KGB penetration and KGB methods. On one occasion we were put into different syndicate groups and each group was told to identify the security threats to the countries of group members.
We had members from Asia and Africa in most groups, and my group also had the Cabinet Secretary of the Bahamas, an intelligent and articulate gentleman. In the confidentiality of group discussion, he said that the biggest security threat to his country was from the CIA! He was certainly not going to come out with it however, on a British course. Most of us had similar difficulties, for we were aware that we were subject to intelligence surveillance and action including funding of local groups by agencies of both East and West. The British may not have been so naive as to expect candor from us. Perhaps, they were just testing our reactions.
Domestic political compulsions rather than those stemming from foreign policy considerations probably account for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s decision to clamp ‘emergency martial law’ on his country but recent developments in the East Asian theatre could very well have impacted the decision as well. For instance, a few thousand North Korean soldiers are reportedly in the Ukraine, fighting alongside Russian state troops.
Thus has the Cold War atmosphere in the region heightened greatly besides aggravating already strained relations between the two Koreas. Regardless of which set of factors has mattered more to the South Korean President, there is no disputing that increasing moves on the part of North Korea in the external policy sphere, that could be seen as hostile by the South, have progressively driven South and North Korea apart over the past few years.
Reports of inducting North Korean troops into the Ukraine to help in fighting President Putin’s war, if substantiated, raise the spectre of heightening proxy wars which were a defining feature of the Cold War confrontation between the US and the USSR. Accordingly, considering that South Korea has been a firm ally of the US in the post-World War Two international order, the commentator cannot be faulted for observing that as far as East Asia is concerned we are, to some extent, having a replay of Cold War politics. But as to whether external threat perceptions have mattered decisively in the South Korean President’s decision, only the future would fully tell.
Meanwhile, if US President-elect Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements are anything to go by, the world in the next few months would be an increasingly tense place to live in. ‘There will be hell to pay if captives in the Gaza are not released’, he reportedly fierily warned recently in the lead up to his installation as President on January 20th, 2025.
However, Trump has not indicated which group of captives he has in mind when he bellows in this fashion: Is it the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, the Palestinian captives in the hands of the Israeli state or both? Besides, what means would he be adopting to meet these ends; military or diplomatic? Thus, the world is kept in ‘the dark’ as to the true import of the President-elect’s words.
If Trump intends to help free the captives by diplomatic means, he would need to exercise considerable pressure on the Netanyahu regime in the process. Is he prepared to do this in the face of the possibility of earning the disfavor of pro-Netanyahu and staunchly pro-Israeli sections at home? Would he be prepared to compromise traditional US policy on Israel in these efforts? These and many more matters remain open questions at the moment.
On the other hand, a decision by the incoming Trump administration to deal with the issue militarily would in all probability prove disastrous for the US. Such moves would be met with fierce resistance by Palestinian militant groups and their foreign backers and pave the way for a prolonged military quagmire in the region for the US. Moreover, the Middle East conflict would be further compounded and we would see a vast escalation in anti-US sentiment in particularly the South.
Besides, the US would not be having the backing of China and Russia in its efforts to resolve the hostage crisis militarily. The West has thus far not prevailed over Russia and China on a number of contemporary issues relating to international law and order in the UN Security Council and the commentator cannot see an overcoming of these divisions in the foreseeable future. The issues pertaining to Ukraine are cases in point. As a result, the world would need to come to terms with the possibility that it would be having international instability on its hands indefinitely.
The US President-elect’s recent statements on matters relating to international economic policy are added proof that, going forward, the world is likely to be an increasingly unstable place to live in. There is, for instance, Trump’s threat that he would be clamping a 100 percent tariff increase on goods and services coming into the US from countries that are seen as attempting to divert from the US dollar in world trade. This is seen as an oblique reference to the perceived threat emanating from the BRICS countries to the US’s dominant position in the international economy.
If Trump’s words are taken at face value, the inference is inescapable that the stage is also being set for renewed trade wars between the US and China in particular. Such battles bode ill for the rest of the world since US-origin products and services would, generally, prove more costly for it. Besides, Chinese exports to the world would come at exorbitant prices, to consider just two possible consequences of these trade wars.
The South, in particular, would be badly hit in such trade strife. The developing world could opt for closer economic links in these circumstances with the BRICS grouping but such ventures are of a long term duration, if at all they prove feasible. In the short and medium terms, there could be no relief for the South. Moreover, the BRICS is yet to consolidate fully into a predominant economic grouping that could face-off with the West.
As pointed out in this column often, the safest course for the South at present is for the latter to strengthen intra-group solidarity in the economic and political spheres. It would need to ensure that it would not come under the suzerainty of either the East or the West. The empowerment of their peoples should be the uppermost consideration for the political and economic decision makers of the South. It would be simplistic to assume that the latter aim could be arrived at through mere formal alignments with the major powers and their alliances.
While we are witnessing trends in global politics at present that are similar to those that arose in the immediate post World War Two decades, in that they are suggestive of Cold War politics to a degree, the current international situation should also be seen as far more complex and unpredictable than the world of those times. Consequently, going forward, the developing world would need the services of perceptive political leaders and economists, besides other relevant personnel.
That’s the subject being discussed at the moment, and for good reasons, as well.
When one talks about National Costume the reference is obviously to clothing that represents a country’s culture, history, and people. It can also reflect a country’s industry, beauty, and character.
National costumes, traditionally worn by people from a particular country, especially on special occasions, or for formal ceremonies, can be a source of national pride and can provide clues about a country’s heritage, geography, and history.
However, the National Costume section, in these beauty pageants, for both men and women, has given a new meaning to this attire, and many are of the opinion that it would be appropriate to rename this section as Most Creative Costume.
According to Google, the usage of the term ‘costume’ is more limited to unusual or out-of-date clothing and attire intended to evoke a change in identity, such as theatrical, Halloween, and mascot costumes…and, I would add, a fancy dress parade or, in our part of the world, perhaps even a devil dancing ceremony!
And the weight of some of these costumes, where even the contestant finds it difficult to move about freely, trying to keep the headgear and other accessories from falling apart, does take its toll on the wearer, and it happened at the recent Mr. World 2024 contest held in Vietnam, when Vietnam’s representative collapsed backstage and required assistance from his team to remove the costume he was wearing for the National Costume segment.
What’s more, beauty pageants are popping up like mushrooms here and quite a few of them are unheard-of. What a waste of money, time and energy.
I’ve also been told that some of the local winners have to fork out quite a tidy sum to go for the international event.
I believe local beauty pageants should have some level of centralization and coordination, laws, regulations and industry standards.
Of course, there are local pageants that are well organised, and done in a very professional way, and kudos to the people responsible for such pageants.
What also caught my attention, on social media, was a visual referring to child modelling.
Kids need to be in school, LEARNING, and not being groomed, at this tender age, to be a model.
What are the Education authorities doing, and also the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs, and the National Child Protection Authority?
Let’s hope the new setup will move into action before it’s…yes, what comes to mind is the late Desmond Kelly’s ‘Too Late for Regrets.’
I had a good response from readers to my Beauty Tips column, last week, dealing with Fine Lines and Wrinkles.
With my readers in mind, I thought this week, too, I should tackle this wrinkle problem.
The following natural methods could help reduce Wrinkles Around the Neck…
* Olive Oil:
Olive oil is rich in antioxidants and vitamin E that can help reduce the appearance of wrinkles on the neck. Massage a small amount of olive oil into your neck before bed and leave it on overnight.
* Lemon Juice:
Lemon juice is a natural astringent that can help tighten the skin on your neck and reduce the appearance of wrinkles. Mix equal parts lemon juice and water and apply to your neck with a cotton ball. Leave on for 10 minutes before rinsing off.
* Honey:
Honey is a natural humectant that can help keep your skin hydrated and reduce wrinkles on the neck. Apply a thin layer of honey to your neck and leave on for 15-20 minutes before rinsing off.
This is for those concerned about Wrinkles Around the Eyes…
* Cucumber: Cucumber is a natural anti-inflammatory that can help reduce the appearance of wrinkles around the eyes. Cut a cucumber into slices and place them over your closed eyes for 15-20 minutes.
* Green Tea Bags:
Green tea is rich in antioxidants that can help reduce wrinkles around the eyes. Simply steep a couple of green tea bags in hot water, let them cool, and then place them over your closed eyes for 15-20 minutes.
* Almond Oil: Almond oil is rich in vitamins A and E that can help reduce wrinkles around the eyes. Simply apply a small amount of almond oil to the skin around your eyes before bed and leave it on overnight.
And this is for Wrinkles on the Hands…
* Sugar:
Sugar is a natural exfoliant that can help reduce wrinkles on the hands. Mix equal parts sugar and olive oil and massage into your hands for 2-3 minutes. Rinse off with warm water.
* Banana:
Banana is rich in potassium, vitamins A and E that can help reduce wrinkles on the hands. Mash up a banana and apply it to your hands, leave it on for 15-20 minutes before rinsing off.
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