Features
UNESCO and having a good time in Paris with Lankan friends

Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama auobiography
“Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations for peace should be sought’
UNESCO Motto
At the age of 43 I became a senior official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Is a specialized body of the UN on a par with FAO, WHO and ILO. After the war, by common consent, the UNO was located in New York, while the other four agencies were set up in three major European cities – FAO in Rome, WHO and ILO in Geneva and UNESCO in Paris. Needless to say the relevant host countries were happy to accommodate the UN and provide many local services as part of their responsibility.
A large number of nationals provided basic services while the professional staff represented the UN’s global membership. The first Director-General of UNESCO was the British scientist Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous, who is credited with writing the motto quoted at the head of this chapter. He established the ground rules of the organization which were very British in character. The DG in my time was Mahtar M’Bow from Senegal who, though alleged to favour Africans, made an attempt to have a fair distribution of positions.
The fact that Sri Lanka was not over represented unlike the Indians and Bangladeshis may have been an added factor in my favour when I became a candidate for the post of Director of the IPDC. India had a strong candidate for the post in Unnikrishnan who was the Managing Director of the Press Trust of India. I knew Unni when he was the PTI correspondent in Colombo before he was promoted to be its General Manager.
He had invited me for some PTI seminars held in Bombay after I became the Secretary of the Ministry of State. I was
lodged in a hotel in the heart of the city which had been the haunt of Krishna Menon when he was a member of the Lok Sabha and Minister in the Nehru Cabinet. The hotel was close to the PTI office. That honour did not work for me since I came down with viral hepatitis after my stay in Bombay.
There was also a whole host of African candidates including a well-regarded Professor of Communications from a Nigerian University. As mentioned earlier, on being selected I was asked to assume duties at the earliest possible date. I replied that I will be available from September 1, 1982.
UNESCO Headquarters is located in two buildings which are close to each other in a salubrious quarter of Paris. The main building designed by Le Corbousier with sculptures by Henry Moore outside and paintings by Picasso inside, is in Place de Fontenoy facing the main entrance of the French Ecole Militaire which is the legendary army school in which Napoleon was trained.
Close-by across the road is the newer ‘Batiment’ [building] built in Brutalist style which houses the Culture and Communications division and branch offices of the embassies of the countries represented in UNESCO. In the basement is also the duty free commissary which is well patronized by the staff and is invariably choc-a-block, particularly on Fridays when the ever thirsty officials stock up for their weekend parties.
The DG, M’Bow, the former Minister of Education of Senegal, was located in the Fontenoy building which had a floor for his administrative staff. He also had an apartment on the top floor in which he lived with his wife and where occasionally he invited us for dinner particularly if it was in honour of a visiting dignitary from our part of the world. Once he invited the visiting Balangoda Ananda Maitriya Thero for a ‘dane’ in his residence, where we were the helper. The reputed monk was very old and not in his proper senses. In his ‘anusasana’ he said that the world was held aloft by tortoises. My friend an Indian architect who translated the priest’s words into French told me that he had edited out a lot of the gibberish so that the highly educated audience would not laugh at the old monk.
Another dinner was held for a few of us who were to accompany M’Bow to New Delhi to participate in it seminar on communication and also meet Indian PM Indira Gandhi. Indira was a fluent French speaker who had represented India in the Governing Council of UNESCO when she was a member of Shastri’s cabinet. So no translators were needed and our DG, who was always nervous about his poor English, had a long and pleasant conversation with the Indian PM.
Secretariat
The IPDC office was located in a tower in the new building in Rue Miollis. Top levels of the tower was occupied by the communications division of UNESCO. Gerard Bolla as ADG ruled the roost from the topmost floor. In the floor below were the ‘intellectuals’ led by Antonio Pasquali [Venezuela] and Alan Hancock [UK] who together with us at IPDC, dealt with the conceptual issues of the New Information Order.
Two floors below were taken by the `engine room’ which comprised of media specialists who provided training and advice to national media institutions of the ‘Third World. They were basically technicians who could fix practical problems of the media. They were led by Pierre Naveaux, a hard drinking Belgian who had been the head of a Film Unit there and his assistant Frank Goodship [Canada].
There were also numerous broadcasters who were led by a Philipino ‘Choy’ Arnaldo. Choy had been with Radio Veritas, the Catholic Broadcasting station located in Manila.
Later Lakshman Rao [India] joined Hancock on a short term assignment. They were a motley crew who were somewhat nervous about the interest in a new Information Order by member states and the establishment of IPDC. Earlier they had an easy time girdling the globe advising radio stations and film units. My challenge was to coopt their services and their budgets to achieve the objectives determined by the Governing Council of IPDC which were to create a transformation in global media capability and its practice.
In the IPDC secretariat I was assisted by Claude Ondobo from the Camaroons who had his work cut out because of the demands of the emerging African countries for both technical assistance
and training. The majority of African members in our governing council came from authoritarian states which were getting a ‘bad press’ in western media and wanted IPDC to do something about it.
Since our focus was on developing countries I encouraged Claude to increase African participation in IPDC activities and also sought funding for those projects by creating ‘funds in trust’ with money from
Scandinavian countries.
Our ADG Bolla also made sure that the IPDC had good secretarial assistance. The leader of our support staff was the experienced Madame Hoareau, an English woman married to a Frenchman, and who had earlier been Bolla’s private secretary. It was a kind gesture on his part to help me who was new to the UN bureaucratic practices which entailed a lot of form filling. I also had the feeling that this placement helped the ADG to keep tabs on the activities of the IPDC.
The UNESCO establishment from M’Bow downwards was apprehensive that due to political interests, IPDC could function outside their chain of command. I am sure that Hoareau would have given good reports about us because Bolls soon began to treat us as his favourites. The second secretary of our office was Nadia, a friendly and capable lady of emigre Russian stock, who by a happy coincidence was earlier married to a Frenchman named Jacques Renault whose family had tea plantations in Talawakelle.
Jacques was close to Sri Lankans in Paris and would unfailingly attend our embassy parties. Nadia had visited Talawakelle as a young bride and had good memories of Sri Lanka though by this time she was divorced and Jacques had married a well-known artist who too was a regular participant at our embassy soirees. Once, when on holiday back home, I visited Jacque’s tea property. The present Tea Research Institute is located on lands acquired from his company before they were restricted to fifty acres by land reform.
There is a beautiful old church on this property, but it is badly neglected now. In addition to the regular staff we also had a young French `stagiare’ who helped Claude with his African projects. This over allocation of resources to IPDC was queried by UNESCO’s staff management committee of which Ananda Guruge was a member. Bolls and I appeared before them and after listening to us the committee decided to approve the current allocation of staff. That was the only time I had to cross swords with the management reviewers of UNESCO.
Paris — `The City of Light’
Right from my school days Paris was the city of my dreams. That fascination may have begun with the stories which Mr. Kannangara, our middle school teacher had spun for us – tales of the Count of Monte Cristo. Once a week he transported us to pre-revolutionary France when narrating the adventures of Jean Valjean and his adversaries. At about the same time we saw films about the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ who spirited noblemen away from Paris and the guillotine.
In our University days we were inspired by the French Trotskyites and as supporters of the LSSP read every instruction sent to our leaders by the ‘revolutionaries’ of the Fourth International based in Paris. The struggles between the different lines’ espoused by Trotskyite intellectuals within the Fourth International as played out in LSSP tactics on the ground in Sri Lanka, which varied from time to time, were diligently explained to us by Doric de Souza in his weekly clandestine lectures to us in Peradeniya. As the poet Wordsworth said of the French Revolutionary era, which may well be used to describe us in our youth; “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; but to be young was very heaven”.
Though I settled down in Paris in 1982 I had visited ‘The City of Light’ every year since 1977. From my first visit in the 1960s I had attended several meetings in Paris and also spent time with friends there. For instance I was in Paris in 1981 when the French Socialist Party won the Presidency with Francois Mitterand as its candidate. We joined in the partying on the Left Bank which went on till morning and saw red roses, the attractive symbol devised by the ‘avant garde’ marketeers of Mitterand, that were strewn everywhere.
On another occasion, as I have related earlier, I joined the multitude of young men who accompanied the cortege of Jean Paul Sartre for burial at the cemetery in Montparnasse. I had witnessed the massive May Day rallies organized by the CGT or the Communist Party’s Trade Union as it wended its way from the heart of Paris – the Bastille. Equally impressive were the military parades marking the Fourth of July. I naturally looked forward to an interesting stay not only in my new job but also in the wonderfully artistic city which had been mercifully spared the bombings which had obliterated cities like Berlin, Dresden and parts of London.
My first task was to find lodgings till I could get more spacious accommodation when my family arrived. I was lucky in that my many friends helped me to settle in comfortably. Three of my best friends in Paris – Manu Ginige, Premachandra and Navaz – were all living in apartments in a building in Rue de Lilas in Paris 19, close to the Buttes Chaumont. This had been once the Bohemian quarter of Paris and was now a Communist stronghold.
Premachandra was a Communist who had as a young man first migrated to Moscow from Colombo. After some time there he had crossed over to Paris and married Irene, a girl of Greek nationality .He had raised a family of two girls and a boy and was working as a ‘cordon bleu’ chef in Radio France. He was missing Sri Lanka badly and had managed to persuade his friends, Ginige and Navaz, to occupy flats in his building. There was another vacant flat in the building and I rented it.
Our presence was duly noted by other flat mates, many of them Communists, who jocularly called our building ‘Maison Sri Lankaise’ or Sri Lanka House. Prema and his wife loved to cook and most evenings were spent in his or Manu’s flat eating, drinking and discussing politics. Any Sri Lankan politician coming to Paris – but particularly Dharmasiri Senanayake their long standing friend – was entertained by the Premachandras.
All the visitors were asked to bring along were Sri Lankan newspapers and ‘pol’ arrack which he shared with us. Since Prema was a practicing chef who used to cook for the bigwigs of Radio France, he would try out his classical French menus on us. Needless to say we were happy to oblige him and compliment him on his mastery of French cuisine. On some Sundays we would go with him to the local arrondissement market to see him buying fish and poultry after examining and prodding the product.
The local charcouterie staff reserved special cuts of meat for him and the butcher was happy to be complimented by a cordon bleu chef. After about six months in Rue de Lilas all of us began to put on weight because of Premachandra’s sauces and sugary confections. Prema who was smoker into the bargain, got a heart attack to which he succumbed several years later. His only exercise was a Sunday stroll in the nearby park selling the Communist Party newspaper, ‘Le Humanite’.
Another visitor to Prema’s apartment was Esmond Wickremesinghe. He too was fond of good food though he had been warned about his health. Later we arranged an apartment for him with cooking facilities, close to UNESCO headquarters. A staffer from the embassy Abeyratne would cook his cholesterol and sugar free meals as ordered by the doctor. Whenever I hosted a party in my apartment I would invite Ananda Guruge and his wife Sujatha as well as Daniel Lefevre of UTA who also loved good food, to join our gang.
Since Manu and Navaz were embassy staffers at that time I would invariably join them in their soirees. Duty free liquor flowed freely at these parties and friends of Sri Lanka from all professions would congregate to support the embassy. Among the regulars were Bernard de Gaulle, a nephew of the famous leader, Jacques Renault and his wife who were artists, Daniel Lefevre and local heads of travel Companies like Neckermann, Club Mediteranee, UTA and Accor.
Some of the big wigs of French companies operating in Colombo were also present sometimes with their Sri Lankan representatives who were visiting Paris. A smattering of Asian ambassadors and local businessmen were also invited. Though usually it was bitterly cold outside the parties suitably fuelled by hot drinks and chillied curries went on late into the night. Sri Lankan parties were popular since unlike the Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis we served vintage scotch and champagne at our parties.
After Ananda Guruge became the Ambassador he stopped serving liquor and attendance dropped dramatically, especially from among the foreign guests. In Paris there were Embassy parties almost every evening as most countries were represented in France. Each Embassy wanted to outdo the other in attracting the Parisian elite. Good champagne and top of the order whiskeys were a great incentive for inveterate party goers who went from one embassy to another and were not averse to bad mouthing the poorer embassies.
Features
The Truth will set us free – I

Sri Lanka becoming a Macbethian sick state?
The traditional ritual of anointing medicinal oil (or ‘hisa thel gaema’ in Sinhalese, literally, applying oil to the head) is unique to the Sinhala Aluth Avurudda observances. This year, the ritual was performed at the auspicious moment of 9:04 a.m. (Sri Lanka time) on Wednesday April 16. It was observed at appointed venues across the country at the same time. The anointing was done, as usual, mostly by Buddhist monks in their monasteries.
Where they were not available for the purpose, a senior citizen would do the needful. The oil anointing ceremony was held to invoke blessings of good health on all the individuals who subjected themselves to the ritual. Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya was shown participating in the oil anointing ceremony at the historic Kolonnawa Raja Maha Viharaya. There were many social media videos showing similar oil anointing scenes that included even elephants and hippos in a zoo receiving the compassionate treatment; this is not seen as going too far with traditions, for extending loving-kindness even to animals is taken for granted in the majority Buddhist Sri Lanka. Watching this ritual (that used to be so familiar for me in my childhood and youth) from abroad I couldn’t help my eyes filling with tears, feeling kind of homesick, in spite of me having spent more than forty-three years of my adult life living and working away from my Mother Country Sri Lanka.
Though usually Buddhist monks do the anointing, it is not considered a religious practice by the ordinary Buddhists. It is only a part of the completely secular Sinhala Aluth Avurudda festival. The most important annual religious festival for the Sinhalese (especially Sinhala Buddhists) is Vesak, which will be held next month. However, the oil anointing ceremony impresses on the Avurudu celebrants the great importance of maintaining their physical and mental health throughout the coming year, reflecting the high level of attention that our traditional culture pays to that objective.
However, the actual discrepancy that is noticed between the ideal and the reality in the mundane world, as in other countries, is a different matter. Shining beacons like ideals of a long-evolved culture are important for what they are; their importance doesn’t go away because those ideals are only imperfectly realised by the people of that culture. But the values endure.
The news of this happy occasion and my awareness of a deepening political and cultural malaise in my beloved Motherland back home reminded me of a book I read during the Covid-19 lockdown period of 2020-2022: OUR MALADY by American historian and public intellectual, the Yale University professor Timothy D. Snyder published in 2020. The book, whose subtitle is ‘Liberty and Solidarity’, is about the weakness of the American healthcare system that he himself got a taste of, privately.
Professor Snyder came to know first-hand how America failed its citizens in the public healthcare sphere as an inmate of a hospital ward, where he was admitted to the emergency room at midnight on December 29, 2019. He was complaining of a condition of severe bodily ‘malaise’. Doctors later told him that he had an abscess the size of a baseball in his liver. The emergency operation to remove the abscess was done after seventeen hours of his having had to wait confined to a hospital bed!
‘Rage’ is the word he repeatedly uses to describe how he felt during his hospitalisation. He was not raging against God or any particular person or a group or the bacteria that caused his illness. ‘I raged against a world where I was not’, Snyder writes in the Prologue to the book (implying how much he was angry about there not being a healthy enough healthcare system to look after Americans who fell ill like himself. The book grew out of entries he made in a diary that he maintained while recuperating in hospital. Proficient in a number of European languages including English, French and Polish, he adopts a sort of poetic idiom to deal with his naturally dull subject.
He imagined he was not suffering in solitude, though. He thought about other Americans in his situation, and empathised with them. The absence of a sound healthcare system is America’s malady according to Snyder. Probably, the current situation in America is different, having changed for the better. We must remember that the time he is talking about was the last year of the first term (January 20, 2017-January 20, 2021) of the 45th US president Donald Trump of the Republican Party.
Currently, Trump is serving as the 47th US president. The ideas that professor Snyder develops in the book have global topical relevance, I think. They are organised into four Chapters or ‘Lessons’ as he dubs them, which in my opinion, have implications that could be utilised even by the citizens of the Macbethian ‘sick state’ that Sri Lanka has become today, complete with a Macbeth (though a muppet) and a shadowy but more determined Lady Macbeth.
Timothy Snyder offers the four Lessons for his fellow Americans, and by extension, to fellow humans around the world including us, Sri Lankans. Perhaps these are uniquely American issues, with little direct relevance to a small country like Sri Lanka with no stake in the international pharmaceutical industry. But then no country can escape from the implications of the following facts (taken from Wikipedia): In 2023, the global pharmaceutical industry earned revenues of US $ 1.48 trillion, whereas the top 10 arms manufacturing companies earned only US $ 632 billion. In the same year, the global life and health insurance carriers industry, which is the biggest industry in the world in terms of revenue, earned US $ 4.3 trillion.
Our own late medical professor Senake Bibile (1920-1977), a pharmacology expert and a rare philanthropist and compassionate social activist of the Trotskyite Sama Samaja party persuasion who always had the welfare of the suffering poor at heart, met his death allegedly in mysterious circumstances in Guyana where he was attending a UN conference, promoting the domestic drug policy that he had developed for Sri Lanka, as a model for use in other countries and by the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) for developing policies for ‘rational pharmaceutical use’.
It goes without saying that Sri Lankans are also highly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of the inhuman excesses of the purely profit oriented international Big Pharma; these harmful consequences get transferred to the innocent citizens magnified several times through the unholy alliance between the local corporate drugs mafiosi and corrupt politicians. Be that as it may, Snyder adds another three equally important related points, covering all four, each in a Lesson that must receive the utmost attention of all adult Sri Lankans: health care for children and children’s education, truth in politics, and the supremacy of the doctors’ role in a malady situation. We will look at these briefly, intermittently taking our eyes off America to reflect on our own country Sri Lanka.
Lesson 1 is ‘Health care is a human right’.
Despite its wealth, professor Snyder complains, America is a sick nation; life expectancy is falling for Americans. Moody’s Analytics suggests that US millennials will die younger than their parents or grandparents, though there is no lack of money spent. What is causing this decline in life expectancy? Snyder’s unsettling answer is that the American healthcare system prioritises profit over people’s lives. America still lacks a universal healthcare system, in spite of being a supporter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and this leads to unequal access to health care, as Snyder asserts.
Exorbitantly priced commercial medicine has a devastating effect on the protection of the health-care rights of the people. It has robbed the American citizens of their health, in Snyder’s view. The American health-care system’s profit-focussed approach and lack of investment in protective equipment for medical professionals jeopardised their safety during the Covid-19 pandemic. In America, 20 million people lost their jobs and over 150,000 died from pandemic. Health insurance became too expensive, and health care unaffordable. Without a diagnosis, many became dangerously ill or unknowingly infected others with the virus.
Though poor, Sri Lanka beats America in respect of looking after public health. It has a better record in providing satisfactory health care for the citizens. The state runs an almost 100% free medicare service for all the citizens. There is a (kind of) parallel paid private hospital system as well, that caters to the better off segment of the population that can resort to it if they prefer to do so. This potentially eases the burden on the free state medical services, which can then focus more on attending to the needs of the economically weaker section of the population.
The maintenance by the state of such a public welfare-based healthcare system is desired and supported by our dominant socio-cultural background that strongly resonates with the humanistic spirit of the Aluth Avurudda that prioritises health over all forms of wealth. This is embodied in the principle Arogya parama labha ‘Good health is the greatest wealth’, the antithesis of the American attitude towards citizens’ health.
Sri Lanka was among the handful of countries that contained the Covid-19 pandemic most efficiently, minimizing deaths, whereas in America, according to Snyder, flaws in the healthcare system were aggravated by the contagion. This led to more deaths in America than in other wealthy nations like Japan and Germany. But the not so well-to-do Sri Lanka escaped with a minimum number of Covid-caused fatalities amidst obstacles mounted by antinationalist ill-wishers as I saw it at the time. That is Professor Snyder’s Lesson 1, which is about the human right of easily accessible health care. Sri Lanka is actually ahead of America in this respect in spite of relative poverty.
by Rohana R. Wasala
(To be concluded.)
Features
Four-day work week; too much rigidity; respectful farewell

I received a video that announced Japan was considering changing to a four-day work week. Suspicious of such news in my cell phone, I googled and found that certain countries had already opted for work weeks of four days and thus three-day weekends. This change too is a consequence of closedowns of work due to the Covid pandemic.
“Several countries are experimenting with or have implemented four-day work weeks, including Belgium, Iceland, Spain, the United Kingdom and Portugal. Other countries like Germany, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the US have also shown interest in, or have tested the four-day work week model.”
The video I got was about Japan changing its government work week to four days from mid-April with many projected objectives. One is to improve government employees’ work-life balance and to address the country’s declining birth rate. Also, the hours of the work day are to be reduced so parents can spend more time caring for their kids termed: ‘Childcare partial leave’. Flexible work hours for women to be implemented so choosing between careers and family will not be necessary.
In Germany experimental trials were carried out in 2023-24 involving 43 companies; 73% plan to continue with the new work structure. Noted for productivity and efficiency, Germany has in addition to one day less working, on average only 34 hours per week. A five-day week of 9 to 5 has 40 work hours per week. Fewer hours at work has been found to promote smarter and more focussed effort with employees happier and more engaged.
Long ago in the 1970s Cassandra shifted from employment in the private sector to a semi government job. She was shocked at the laissez faire attitude of her co-workers in an information centre. Most came to work at around 9.00 am: discussed the bus journey and home; had breakfast; read the morning newspapers; did a bit of work and were ready to have lunch by 12.00 noon. Two hours for this and half for a small snooze. Work till 3.30 pm or so when books/files were closed and grooming selves commenced, to depart at 4.30 pm sharp.
The work ethic in a remote government school and a private school in a city were as opposed to each other as the proverbial chalk to cheese. Do minimum against teaching; don’t care attitude to dedication and commitment; take leave to maximum vs hardly taking leave in consideration of the fact parents of students pay fees; non disciplining principals to dedicated pedagogues who set an example.
Cassandra supposes, and correctly, that with the change of government and a system change, even though many offices are overstaffed, employees put in a solid day’s work. The public is better served, most definitely.
Hence how would it be for Sri Lanka to lop off one work day a week? There will certainly be benefits, but aren’t many of us complaining about the presence of too many public holidays; we enjoy 24 to 30 a year including every full moon Poya Day. A travesty!
The utter mayhem of Poya weekends
Those who lived through the period when the calendar in this overzealous Buddhist country went lunar (sic) and made the four Poya Days of a month and half the pre-Poya Day as the country’s weekend. It was a total mess since many a week had more than five week days in it till the moon changed from one phase to another. Ceylon was completely out of sync with the rest of the world. That was in 1966 with Dudley Senanayake as Prime Minister. Mercifully, in 1970, the Saturday Sunday weekend was reverted to, and sanity regained.
Conclusion is that making our week of four days’ work and weekend three days has to be carefully considered, tested and implemented, or kept as it is. Better it would be if government offices were pruned of excess staff recruited on politicians’ orders and genuinely legitimate officers made to work efficiently.
VVIP Mother in queue
A photograph made the rounds on social media of a frail looking, white haired lady in a queue in Kandy moving slowly to pay homage to the Sacred Tooth Relic. It was said to be President AKD’s mother who was hospitalised just a couple of months ago. Admired is her devotion as well as the fact she came incognito; not informing her son of her intended travel.
But Cass is censorious. Here was a genuine case of needing a bit of stretching of points and helping her to fulfil her desire to pay homage with ease. After all, he is working hard and very probably long hours to get this country on an even keel. He needs appreciation and if he refuses advantages, let a less able person benefit.
A truly honourable Pope
Roman Catholics across the globe mourn the death of the 266th Pope on the Monday after the Easter weekend; and the world respects and reveres him. People comment he must have willed himself to live through Easter, even presenting himself to crowds gathered in the huge grounds of St Peter’s Basilica.
Pope Francis was born Jorge Bergoglio on December 17, 1936, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was inspired to join the Society of Jesus or Jesuits in 1958 after a serious illness. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1969, he was the Jesuit provincial superior in Argentina from 1973 to 79. He became the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and was created a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II. He was elected in the papal conclave following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI as head of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of the Vatican City State in 1913, claiming many firsts: a Jesuit becoming Pope; first from America, from the Southern Hemisphere. He chose his papal name in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, kind to all living beings. “Throughout his public life, Francis was noted for his humility, emphasis on God’s mercy, international visibility as pope, concern for the poor and commitment to interreligious dialogue. He was known for having a less formal approach to the papacy than his predecessors.”
We remember his visit to Sri Lanka from January 13 to 15, 2015, when he travelled to the Shrine of Our Lady of Madhu and canonized Sri Lanka’s first saint, Joseph Vaz. He conducted a Mass and bestowed blessings to the multitude at Galle Face Green. As he entered and left the Green, he placed his hands on the heads of infants, children, the very poor, the old and infirm; never mind oil and dirt on heads. A truly great and good person.
Features
Kashmir terror attack underscores need for South Asian stability and amity

The most urgent need for the South Asian region right now, in the wake of the cold-blooded killing by gunmen of nearly 30 local tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir two days back, is the initiation of measures that could ensure regional stability and peace. The state actors that matter most in this situation are India and Pakistan and it would be in the best interests of the region for both countries to stringently refrain from succumbing to knee-jerk reactions in the face of any perceived provocations arising from the bloodshed.
The consequences for the countries concerned and the region could be grave if the terror incident leads to stepped-up friction and hostility between India and Pakistan. Some hardline elements in India, for instance, are on record in the international media as calling on the Indian state to initiate tough military action against Pakistan for the Kashmiri terror in question and a positive response to such urgings could even lead to a new India-Pakistan war.
Those wishing South Asia well are likely to advocate maximum restraint by both states and call for negotiations by them to avert any military stand-offs and conflicts that could prove counter-productive for all quarters concerned. This columnist lends his pen to such advocacy.
Right now in Sri Lanka, nationalistic elements in the country’s South in particular are splitting hairs over an MoU relating to security cooperation Sri Lanka has signed with India. Essentially, the main line of speculation among these sections is that Sri Lanka is coming under the suzerainty of India, so to speak, in the security sphere and would be under its dictates in the handling of its security interests. In the process, these nationalistic sections are giving fresh life to the deep-seated anti-India phobia among sections of the Sri Lankan public. The eventual result will be heightened, irrational hostility towards India among vulnerable, unenlightened Sri Lankans.
Nothing new will be said if the point is made that such irrational fears with respect to India are particularly marked among India’s smaller neighbouring states and their publics. Needless to say, collective fears of this kind only lead to perpetually strained relations between India and her neighbours, resulting in regional disunity, which, of course would not be in South Asia’s best interests.
SAARC is seen as ‘dead’ by some sections in South Asia and its present dysfunctional nature seems to give credence to this belief. Continued friction between India and Pakistan is seen as playing a major role in such inner paralysis and this is, no doubt, the main causative factor in SARRC’s current seeming ineffectiveness.
However, the widespread anti-India phobia referred to needs to be factored in as playing a role in SAARC’s lack of dynamism and ‘life’ as well. If democratic governments go some distance in exorcising such anti-Indianism from their people’s psyches, some progress could be made in restoring SAARC to ‘life’ and the latter could then play a constructive role in defusing India-Pakistan tensions.
It does not follow that if SAARC was ‘alive and well’, security related incidents of the kind that were witnessed in India-administered Kashmir recently would not occur. This is far from being the case, but if SAARC was fully operational, the states concerned would be in possession of the means and channels of resolving the issues that flow from such crises with greater amicability and mutual accommodation.
Accordingly, the South Asian Eight would be acting in their interests by seeking to restore SAARC back to ‘life’. An essential task in this process is the elimination of mutual fear and suspicion among the Eight and the states concerned need to do all that they could to eliminate any fixations and phobias that the countries have in relation to each other.
It does not follow from the foregoing that the SAARC Eight should not broad base their relations and pull back from fostering beneficial ties with extra-regional countries and groupings that have a bearing on their best interests. On the contrary, each SAARC country’s ties need to be wide-ranging and based on the principle that each such state would be a friend to all countries and an enemy of none as long as the latter are well-meaning.
The foregoing sharp focus on SAARC and its fortunes is necessitated by the consideration that the developmental issues in particular facing the region are best resolved by the region itself on the basis of its multiple material and intellectual resources. The grouping should not only be revived but a revisit should also be made to its past programs; particularly those which related to intra-regional conflict resolution. Thus, talking to each other under a new visionary commitment to SAARC collective wellbeing is crucially needed.
On the question of ties with India, it should be perceived by the latter’s smaller neighbours that there is no getting away from the need to foster increasingly closer relations with India, today a number one global power.
This should not amount to these smaller neighbours surrendering their rights and sovereignty to India. Far from it. On the contrary these smaller states should seek to craft mutually beneficial ties with India. It is a question of these small states following a truly Non-aligned foreign policy and using their best diplomatic and political skills to structure their ties with India in a way that would be mutually beneficial. It is up to these neighbours to cultivate the skills needed to meet these major challenges.
Going ahead, it will be in South Asia’s best interests to get SAARC back on its feet once again. If this aim is pursued with visionary zeal and if SAARC amity is sealed once and for all intra-regional friction and enmities could be put to rest. What smaller states should avoid scrupulously is the pitting of extra-regional powers against India and Pakistan in their squabbles with either of the latter. This practice has been pivotal in bringing strife and contention into South Asia and in dividing the region against itself.
Accordingly, the principal challenge facing South Asia is to be imbued once again with the SAARC spirit. The latter spirit’s healing powers need to be made real and enduring. Thus will we have a region truly united in brotherhood and peace.
-
Business6 days ago
DIMO pioneers major fleet expansion with Tata SIGNA Prime Movers for ILM
-
News5 days ago
Family discovers rare species thought to be extinct for over a century in home garden
-
Features3 days ago
RuGoesWild: Taking science into the wild — and into the hearts of Sri Lankans
-
Foreign News6 days ago
China races robots against humans in Beijing half marathon
-
Editorial6 days ago
Selective use of PTA
-
News3 days ago
Orders under the provisions of the Prevention of Corruptions Act No. 9 of 2023 for concurrence of parliament
-
Features4 days ago
New species of Bronzeback snake, discovered in Sri Lanka
-
Features5 days ago
The ironies of history