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All Party Conference of 1989-90

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President Premadasa with an LTTE delegation in Colombo in 1989. Picture credit Tamilnation. org

Continued from last week

Unfulfilled Undertakings Lead Once More to War Getting the legislation through Parliament, with a two-third majority where the repeal of the sixth amendment was concerned or even a simple majority where the dissolution of the NEPC was concerned, was taking its time. The LTTE was becoming increasingly impatient and alleging that they were being led into a “peace trap”. The hope for dividends of peace were not forthcoming, or not fast enough to satisfy them.

Moreover on the ground, in the absence of any mutually agreed plan, the Sri Lankan security forces were moving in to fill the security vacuum and replace the departing IPKF. I feared that the way incidents were building up would soon lead to a head-on collision.

In May 1990, in a deteriorating situation, Premadasa dispatched ACS Hameed on two urgent and dangerous missions to meet the LTTE leadership and defuse the situation. Two abortive ceasefires were announced but the buildup of incidents continued. On 11 June, over an incident in Batticaloa involving the arrest and assault by the security forces of a Muslim tailor whose job it apparently was to make uniforms for the LTTE, open conflict broke out again.

Hundreds’ of policemen, mostly Muslims and Sinhala, who had been posted to the Kalmunai, Akkaraipattu, Potuvil and Samanthurai police stations were asked to surrender and most of them murdered in cold blood. Apparently the IGP, Ernest Perera had ordered the men to surrender rather than fight back on being informed that the police stations had been surrounded by the LTTE cadres. The call to surrender by the government and the subsequent murder of the policemen continued to be presented in the media from time to time as indicators of the government’s callousness and the LTTE’s untrustworthiness.

The war had restarted. Ranjan Wijeratne reflected the mood of the country when he said in Parliament, “No half-way house with me. Now I am going all out for the LTTE. We will annihilate them.”

Premadasa did not involve the two Cabinet ministers – Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali who were centrally involved in the negotiations preceding the Indo-Lanka Accord of July 1987 – at any stage in the current round of discussions. This was a deliberate policy on the part of Premadasa as he recalled their overall pro-Indian stance and close association on this matter with President J R Jayewardene.

Premadasa’s relations with the Indian high commissioner too, was very different from that which had prevailed earlier. While J R had been all grace and informality with Manie Dixit whom he would entertain to Cuban cigars and the best of French brandies at his personal residence in Ward Place, Premadasa would be formal and officious with both N N Jha and Lakhen Mehotra who succeeded Dixit. I became a close friend of Jha and Mehotra who were both very courteous, suave and able diplomats and often secretly commiserated with them on the indignities they had to endure on account of Premadasa’s often rough and peremptory manner in his dealings with them. Sometimes I felt that he was only acting, and being the skilled actor he was this was quite possible. The only problem was that he was so good that one could never know when his petulance was real, and when feigned.

The All Party Conference of 1989-90

There was another public forum which Premadasa initiated and structured to carry through his 3-Cs concept. There were a large number of registered political parties in the country but not all were represented in Parliament. To give these bodies a chance to express their views on important issues of the day, Premadasa felt an institutional form should be devised which would provide a forum for them as well. This was his thinking behind the All Party Conference which would be a permanent one, sitting in the chamber of the old Parliament which was in fact the presidential secretariat. He felt that the location would give it the necessary status and that the staff of the office could also man the APC when it sat.

Accordingly he made me the secretary-general of the APC, adding to my work but also providing a very refreshing, mostly provocative and invariably alternative view of the way public issues might be handled. It was a pleasure listening to the many illuminating expressions of the position of the smaller parties by speakers like Chanaka Amaratunga from the Liberal Party and the extremely reasoned and lucid contributions of Neelan Tiruchelvam who represented the TULF. Premadasa himself, whenever he could find the time, and when the topic was important, would chair the meetings. At other times A C S Hameed, who I soon discovered was very careless with his notes although he made-up for that with his phenomenal memory, would deputise.

A major purpose of the APC was that of having the LTTE interact with the rest of the political parties in the country and come in to the mainstream, even symbolically. The All-Party Conference which he convened at the BMICH on 12 August 1989, was to introduce the LTTE, or its political arm, the PFLT (Peoples Front of Liberation Tigers) to the other political parties registered in Sri Lanka. It was very interesting to see the curiosity and the evident warmth with which the LTTE members, particularly Yogi, who could converse fluently in English, were being greeted that morning. Yogi, who told me that he had come back from Britain to join the movement had given up the chance of becoming an engineer. He was, I noticed, becoming quite popular among the young Tamil female community in Colombo.

The S L F P led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike came for the first two meetings but the party did not participate thereafter. The other parties however continued to attend and involve themselves as the topics such as the follow-up to the Youth Commission’s Report, were highly relevant and illuminating.

The broad agenda of the APC, derived through consensus, was to deliberate on ways to resolve the many serious crises the country was facing both in the north and the south. There were 20 critical issues” finally selected. President Premadasa regarded the LTTE’s presence at the APC — albeit for a limited time and with hardly any participation — as a signal achievement in his endeavour to get the LTTE to participate in mainstream politics. It was also noteworthy that at the time the EROS (Balakumar-wing) which was a close ally of the LTTE, was in Parliament as well. By this, Premadasa was attempting to legitimise the LTTE as a political organisation and not merely a militant group.

International Relations — In the Broadest Sense Although his major preoccupations were domestic, Premadasa, as president took a great personal interest in Sri Lanka’s relations with the world outside. He kept himself informed about events that were occurring globally through a regular and continuing contact with the officials responsible for foreign affairs, particularly with Bernard Tillekeratne, his secretary for foreign affairs, and through direct communication, usually telephonic, with our heads of missions abroad.

Premadasa had an easy joking relationship with Bernard whose animated conversation and lively anecdotes enlivened the day especially on trips abroad. My acquaintance over many years with Bernard also made my job of ‘presidential advisor on international affairs’ jell easily with Bernard’s own relations with Premadasa as ‘foreign secretary’. With some other as secretary foreign affairs (which was the official title) the often contradictory `advice’ we gave the president could have led to collision. The lack of any abrasion in our relations was largely helped by the fact that my son Esala had married his charming daughter Krishanti a year or two earlier. “A strategic marriage” as one of our European diplomatic colleagues was to aptly, but not accurately, describe it.

Such was Premadasa’s interest in accessing information urgently that he was one of the first in Sri Lanka to have a satellite dish installed at Sucharita, where he had his private office, to have access to CNN’s 24-hour World Service. This served him well, I recall, for he had news of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur in May 1991, some hours before the rest of us knew it. Premadasa realized that a country’s foreign policy was determined basically by domestic needs and interests.

This became very apparent to him in the matter of the IPKF presence in the country which dominated our foreign policy in relation to India. He spent an enormous amount of time and energy in the pursuit of this objective. It involved visits by Ranjan Wijeratne, then his foreign minister to India, on several occasions for discussions both in Delhi and Madras, frequent trips by officials between the two countries and a great deal of telephonic communication in which he was personally involved. Like in all his other activities, once he got interested in a `Project’, Premadasa would want to get totally involved, make even the smallest decision and monitor progress, making course corrections all the way, until the end result was achieved.

It was very much, and I never encountered it before, a total, `hands on’, involvement in policy making and implementation. Once relations with India got better, he embarked on a project of building ‘homes for the homeless’ in Buddha Gaya. Sirisena Cooray who had housing in his portfolio spent some weeks in Buddha Gaya overseeing the construction of one hundred houses for the harijans of Gaya who had converted to Buddhism. Premadasa had them moved from the hovels in which they lived to these brand new cottages at a spectacular ceremony in 1993. The Indian government looked on at this ‘intrusion into their land space’ with indulgent big-brotherliness. Regrettably for all Premadasa’s efforts at providing donor assistance to India, we found on a later visit that the proud owners of the new houses had either sold or rented out their cottages to the ‘middle class’ and gone back to their accustomed hovels.

President Premadasa was not averse to using the unconventional method if it helped to deliver the goods. One such innovation that I recall during this period was an all-party delegation which he brought together under the chairmanship of the speaker of Parliament, my one time golfing partner M H Mohammed, to go round the South Asian countries to present an objective picture of the Sri-Lankan situation at that time.

This delegation which visited India, Bangladesh and the Maldives was composed of opposition leaders of the level of Anura Bandaranaike, Dinesh Gunawardena and Dharmasiri Senanayake in addition to government party representatives. They met abroad with both government and opposition party leaders of the countries concerned. I went along as secretary of the combined delegation which was characterized by lots of warmth and gaiety. The group was wonderful to be with especially after the day’s work was done and the hilarious jokes, many of which they all knew, were being recounted. Mohammed and Dharmisiri Senanayake were outstanding and the repertoire virtually limitless. The innovative idea was typical of Premadasa’s practice of doing something unusual and productive.

In his very forceful and personal conduct of foreign relations, Premadasa never feared being independent or alone in making his position clear. While the general diplomatic, or ‘foreign affairs’ practice would be to look for support and then act, backed up by the assurance of other’s support, Premadasa, more often than not, acted out of the conviction that what he was doing was the right and correct thing. Others could follow him if they liked but he was going to follow no one.

The clearest example of this is possibly the way he dealt with Britain in what has now achieved fame, or notoriety, as the `Gladstone case’12. Where some of our leaders might have been deterred by considerations such as the relative size, strength and importance of the two countries, to Premadasa there was no question but that Gladstone had to go. Some of us close to him attempted to point out the serious consequences that could result from such a precipitous step as the declaration of Her Majesty the Queen’s representative as persona non grata.

But to Premadasa these were secondary considerations. The principle must be established that the diplomatic representative of a foreign country should behave in the correct way. The question he posed to each of us, who attempted to point out that Gladstone might be excused, was what would have happened to our representative in London if he had gone round intervening in a local election in Britain? He had no doubt that such an indiscretion would have received short shrift from the host government.

However, while acting against the person, Premadasa was able to isolate the incident from the gamut of other on-going relations between Britain and Sri Lanka. The incident led clearly to some problems and a period of `stand-off’. But after some months, relations were normalized, the British ‘stiff upper lip’ prevailed and the goodwill and support of the British Government was regained. I had a fair amount of work to do smoothening ruffled feathers in those days. Very few political leaders I worked with would have dared to take the stand he did. It speaks volumes for his courage some may even call it foolhardiness, that he did what he did and was able to see himself vindicated.

Another example of his forcefulness was the way he dealt with the US on the question of the Israeli interests section in the embassy. The Israeli interests section had been in existence for some time. It was rumoured that Mossad agents were advising the Sri Lankan military, and in J R’s time the friendly United States would have preferred it to remain that way. On the other hand, there was growing hostility to Israel in the Arab lands as the intifada deepened and this was being reflected locally through the voices of Muslim protest. President Premadasa was sensitive to all of these concerns and decided to move against the Israeli interests section, knowing full well that dire consequences might ensue.

To be continued

(Excerpted from Rendering unto Caesar, autobiography of Bradman Weerakoon) ✍️


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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18 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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18 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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