Why Foreign Minister GL Peiris Can’t Succeed

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

In an address to the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, Prof Neelika Malavige, member of the WHO-Sri Lanka convened Panel of Experts, disclosed that (among much else) Sri Lanka’s Case Fatality Rate (CFR) which is the percentage of deaths in relation to numbers of confirmed cases, is by far the highest in the world (https://youtu.be/X3Sd3b7ZPn8).

Listening to her ‘Master Class’ which segued seamlessly into public policy, I’d say the fact that she isn’t heading the anti-Covid Presidential Task Force, is a symptom of the underlying structural and systemic sickness at the core of the current dispensation.

Humanitarian Operation?

When President Gotabaya Rajapaksa addressed the nation on August 20 however, he did not express his sadness about the deaths nor did he condole with the families of the victims. There was no sense of tragedy, empathy or sympathy in either his message or his delivery.

Clearly he had agreed to a limited lockdown due to near-unanimous social and political pressure from the most diverse sources, including the members of his coalition government. This is something he should have done before traders associations in towns run by the SLPP started shutting-down those towns out of the need for self-preservation, and the Opposition trade unions gave an ultimatum with a deadline of Monday August 23.

A passage in President GR’s speech was most revealing: “Most of the people who passed away from COVID-19 were over the age of 60. The majority of people out of them had been suffering from chronic diseases for a long time and they had not been vaccinated. People with these chronic diseases should seek treatment as soon as they develop COVID-19 symptoms.”

In most countries, the vaccination program not only began earlier than ours, but, as we saw on TV, precisely with the elderly. If the over-60s weren’t vaccinated, it is hardly their fault, but the fault of bad policy.

In his speech President GR warned the citizenry about the need to prepare for sacrifices. This echoed Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s exhortations during the OPEC oil price hike of 1973 and after. The voter-citizenry responded by gritting its teeth while tightening its belt (as instructed) and giving the Opposition a landslide victory at the General Election of 1977.

The President will find it is difficult to convince the citizenry that a shortage of food, a rise of food prices, and plummeting of rural incomes was due to Covid-19 and a longer lockdown rather than his policy of abruptly banning chemical fertilizer, pesticides and weedicides.

If Minister Prasanna Ranatunga secures a 50% cut in the pay-packets of public and private sector wage-earners, the government should brace itself for a General Strike.

The ‘five great forces’ which SWRD Bandaranaike, DA Rajapaksa, Philip Gunawardena et al brought together in 1956 which have undergirded the SLFP-SLPP electoral base, are for the most part disaffected. I refer to the Sangha (bhikkhus), Guru (teachers) Veda (native physicians), Govi (peasants), Kamkaru (workers). They comprised Mahinda Rajapaksa’s voter-base, the majority of which never left him even in defeat in 2015. Now, they have been alienated by the President GR’s policies and posture.

Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that a majority or even a large minority of Tamils and the Muslims, will vote for the regime. The August 21 Black Flag protest signaled the loss of the Catholic and the overall Christian vote. Only the military, ex-military, Police and hardcore ultra-nationalists seem to remain.

UNP’s Geneva 2015

Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP played its part in the entrapment of Sri Lanka in Geneva and was severely punished by the people in consequence. The authorship and co-sponsorship of Resolution 30/1 with its ‘foreign judges’ clause by the Sri Lankan government in Geneva 2015 was a political disaster. It contributed to the UNP’s electoral elimination—as I can attest since I not only kicked-off the public campaign against it but also reinforced President Sirisena’s misgivings and reluctance to implement it.

There were easily avoidable historical parallels and warning signs which were ignored. Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s signing up to the lopsided Norwegian-facilitated CFA with Prabhakaran led to the UNP’s defeat in 2004 and 2005.

The Sir John Kotelawala-Esmond Wickremesinghe ‘Dullesian’ line at Bandung 1955 (‘Bandung Booruwa’) helped trigger the ‘silent revolution’ of 1956.

GL Gambit

The Gotabaya administration has attempted to turn the page with the appointment of Prof GL Peiris as the new Foreign Minister. Though the most learned member of the government and its most sophisticated interlocutor with the world community, Prof. GL Peiris, who returns to the post of Foreign Minister, will be unable to turn things around in Geneva and more generally.

I found it easy to work with a man of his intelligence when as Minister of External Trade, he visited Geneva, and later when he visited as Foreign Minister while I served in Paris.

However, Sri Lanka’s successive defeats in Geneva and shrinkage of global space took place on Prof Peiris’ watch–though his were sins of omission, not commission.

The two personalities most responsible for the loss of Sri Lanka’s international space, through the non-implementation of its pledges to the international community starting with its neighbour (which both had committed to as members of the wartime ‘troika’ interfacing with Delhi), and its unilateral embarkation on a totally contrary postwar agenda and trajectory (currently culminating in alignment with China) were Gotabaya and Basil Rajapaksa. They exercised a de facto veto at the time, over the implementation of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s wartime and postwar pledges. Symbolically and symptomatically, they also abolished the Peace Secretariat and the Human Rights Ministry.

Today Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the President, and Basil Rajapaksa, the most powerful Cabinet Minister. The personalities, mentalities, policies and factors operating backstage in the postwar Mahinda Rajapaksa presidency, especially its second term, that caused the shrinkage of our international support as manifested in the triple defeats in Geneva in 2012, 2013 and 2014, are now firmly at the pinnacle of power.

Foreign Minister Peiris has very little elbow room to turn things around. He will not, unlike his most illustrious predecessor and former Cabinet colleague, the late Lakshman Kadirgamar, “speak truth to power” (i.e., to the President).

Prof Peiris is the Westernized mask of a Sinicizing oligarchic-autocratic project.