Features

Paris and some of its habitues and JRJ, Cyril Mathew and their storm troops

Published

3 years ago

2023/04/2

Thilina Walpola

Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography

(Continued from last week)

As a member of the Sri Lankan delegation I began to attend the meetings of the Communications sector of UNESCO. International meetings of this group were held in Paris while regional meetings were held in Bangkok and New Delhi. As mentioned earlier the Paris meetings were the main driver of the global debate. Special attention was focused on the African countries which were lacking in both manpower and technical resources.

Increasingly what was highlighted was the imbalance in news flows between the developed and developing countries. The answer was to transfer technology and training opportunities to the developing countries through funding from multilateral and bilateral sources, basically coming from the industrialized countries. From this stance came the call for setting up a new institution in UNESCO for the promotion of Communication Development. It was to be called the International Programme for the Development of Communication [IPDC] with its own Governing Council, Director and Secretariat.

Our annual visits to Paris for UNESCO meetings which usually lasted about a week with a weekend in between was a good opportunity to savour the life of that beautiful city which has been called the ‘City of Light’. We were lodged in a hotel close to UNESCO in Place de Fontenot’ in Paris 16, which was the elite district or arondissement. It was close to the Eiffel Tower and Ecole Militaire which is the major military school for the elite officers of the French Army.

A stroll after meetings took us to the most ‘posh’ areas of the city including the Invalides – the Military Museum -mostly devoted to Napoleon. We could also walk in the numerous immaculately maintained parks close to the tower and the Invalides. A longer walk would take us to the famous `Pont de Paris’ or Paris bridges which spanned the river Seine and linked the right Bank with Left Bank [Rive Gauche].

One day while the meeting was going on we received news of the death of Jean Paul Satre and his funeral the following day at the cemetery at Montparnasse which was not too far from Place de Fontenot’. That afternoon I excused myself and with Navaz of our tourist office in Paris joined the thousands of mourners who assembled near the entrance to the cemetery to bid farewell to France’s best known intellectual.

Many who flocked to the cemetery were the young people of the sixties, now close to middle age, who had been inurrectionists against the De Gaulle regime. They came to pay homage to an older man who had taken their side and marched with them in the Quartier Latin. Though Satre was a thorn in his flesh, De Gaulle, in a typical Gallic gesture, had ordered the police not to touch the philosopher-hero. He remembered that Satre had encouraged ‘the resistance’ when France was under Hitler’s jackboot and Frenchmen looked to De Gaulle as their savior.

We had to push through the teeming crowds to follow the black hearse carrying Satre’s remains to his final resting place. At the last minute there was a hush and a famous film star Simone Signoret, came to place a bowl of roses on the coffin which was then slowly lowered into the open grave. Whenever I visit Paris I go to the Montparnasse cemetery to pay my respects and also rekindle my memories of a city I knew so well a long time ago.

At that time the Sri Lanka Embassy in Rue D’Astorg was our home away from home. The Ambassador was Vernon Mendis who was a very senior Foreign Service officer who had managed the administrative side of the Non-Aligned meeting in Colombo. But as soon as he reached retirement age he was hired by UNESCO to be their representative in Cairo. The Director-General of UNESCO M’Bow was well known for his patronage of Ambassadors who were loyal to him.

Mendis was succeeded by Balasubramanium who too was a senior in the service. But Bala too was at the end of his career and was ill with a terminal disease. Most of the relations with the French public was handled by Manu Ginige who was a fluent French speaker and a Francophile. Manu who became my very close friend was a legendary character among the Sri Lankans abroad. A graduate of Peradeniya he followed up on his fascination with international politics by joining Air Ceylon as their representative in Paris.

An ardent Trotskyite in Peradeniya he had a wide circle of leftist friends. Among them was Ratnasiri Wickremanayake who was a law student in London at that time. Ratnasiri had cut short his stay in the UK because he was summoned to contest the Horana seat in the 1960 General Election. His elder brother Munidasa, who had been Philip Gunawardene’s MEP candidate, had been killed a few months before the election. Ratnasiri won the seat, crossed over to the SLFP and later became the Prime Minister.

He never went back to his studies and Europe but maintained his links with his London comrades. These friends formed a trio – Ratnasiri, Willa Wickremasinghe and Manu Ginige. After leaving Air Ceylon Manu joined UTA, the French airline that flew to Colombo, on the invitation of Minister Leslie Goonewardene of the LSSP who was the Cabinet Minister of Transport and Aviation.

Through Air Ceylon and UTA Manu became indispensable to any one with connections to Colombo and Paris because air travel was their lifeline. After the fall of the Bandaranaike regime in 1977 he left UTA and freelanced for a while and even spent some time in Cologne with his German wife and daughter. He came back to Paris as Hameed’s interpreter and confidante.

When our delegation comprising Esmond, Arthur Clarke and myself went to Paris for UNESCO meetings he was our liaison with the secretariat as he was fluent in French. He became indispensable to Esmond and with Hameed’s backing became a crucial member of our Embassy having lived in Paris for over 20 years. Chandrika Bandaranaike and her friends who had moved with him closely in Paris were angry with him for serving the UNP regime but Manu was a professional officer who gave his services to the country by working in the Embassy.

He maintained the friendships of his younger days and remained a close friend of Ratnasiri. Only a few close friends of Ratnasiri hailed him by his pet name ‘Danu’ and Manu was one of them. Very few know that when Dr. N.M. Perera visited Europe for the last time, after he was diagnosed with a cancer, he wished to make a sentimental visit to Paris with Dr. Dora Fonseka who was known to be his girlfriend.

It was Manu who arranged this visit and made his apartment available to them. To the last he retained his radical views. When I stayed in his apartment in Paris I requested him to arrange meetings with the Trotskyite leaders who were our icons in our University days. We met Michel Pablo. It was a secretive meeting which I will describe in the next volume of my autobiography.

Manu and I followed the cortege of Trotskyite ideologue Ernst Mandel in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in North Paris together with a dwindling gathering of old men of the Fourth International who soldiered on. Distancing themselves from these superannuated ideologues a new group of young Trotskyites emerged in the Universities and workplaces and one charismatic young leader even contested the Presidential election though he was only an ‘also ran’.

Violence

JRJ claimed to be a Gandhian who believed in ‘Non-Violence’. But as Clifford Geertz has written in his essay on Gandhi, ‘non-violence’ can only succeed if the Satyagrahi has the potential of unleashing violence as an alternative. Without that fear the opponent does not take the challenger seriously. Thus nonviolence becomes a part of the power game. As Geertz writes, “The argument that a sacred pledge to abstain from the use of force can have moral reality only with respect to people who have a genuine possibility of effectively using force is surely correct”.

JRJ was a Gandhian who always kept his ‘Powder dry’. Once in power he ceased to be a Satyagrahi. One highly disconcerting fact about the JRJ administration was its condoning of violence. When his plans met with organized resistance JRJ had no hesitation in bringing in his thuggish Trade Unionists under Mathew to attack his opponents. Though during the times of previous regimes there were incidents of violence directed at ethnic groups such as the 1958 riots, well described by Tarzie Vittachi, the state did not encourage it.

For instance the Government Agent of Polnnaruwa, Derrick Aluvihare, confronted the rioters, blocked their path with police and Army assistance and prevented a bloodbath. Lakshmi Naganathan, daughter of Federal Party leader E.M.V. Naganathan, told me that when her father and his comrades were bundled up from Galle Face green and incarcerated in Galle Face Hotel, Mrs. Bandaranaike on the PM’s instructions, had sent him food cooked in the Bandaranaike kitchen.

When Mrs. Bandaranaike lost the election only Lakshmi of all the Foreign Service officials went to her home to bid their former Minister and PM goodbye. I had personally seen Left firebrands like Philip and Colvin restraining their supporters from getting into fights. In fact it was the left that was set on by Goonesinha and Kotelawela’s goons. In fairness to the so-called LSSP and CP revolutionaries, not one of them encouraged workers to attack others in the workplace or outside.

NM was the quintessential patient and analytical trade union negotiator. Every year NM would spend a few months in the UK in the company of Dora Fonseka. Even Capitalist negotiators knew that he would skillfully wind up his bargaining just in time to catch his flight to London. Bandaranaike loved to give tongue lashings but except when he praised the ‘Imbulgoda Veeraya’ for obstructing JRJs march, was a peace-loving leader who tolerated the taunt of `Sevala Banda’ which was later adopted even by his murderers. In all his speeches he never accused the Tamil leaders of provoking the Sinhalese.

JRJ on the other hand, for all his lip service to non-violence used violence as a political weapon. As an admirer of Napoleon’s tactics he must have thought that controlled violence was a useful tool for governance. Having I 1977 won a five sixths majority fair and square, be sought to preserve it with unacceptable means. His ‘Major Domo’ was Cyril Mathew who was also the boss of the UNP trade unions.

Mathew proceeded to staff his numerous Boards with his violence prone unionists who in turn packed them with party working class stalwarts. The big state Corporations were seething with tension because of the opposition of leftist workers who had earlier ruled the roost. The Left also made a mistake which they later acknowledged, of forcing a showdown with JRJ early by calling a general strike, with a demand for all-round higher wages. With Thondaman on his side JRJ was spoiling for a fight. He wanted to teach the leftist workers a lesson they will not forget.

JRJ was supported to the hilt by Premadasa who wanted to stuff the Government offices with his own fanatical supporters from Colombo Central. The Marxist theory and practice of the general strike is clear. It should only be a struggle of the last resort because there is no possibility of further escalation. It is a question of win or die for a workers’ party. Indeed the call for a strike by the Left leaders was designed to play themselves back into the game after the disastrous results of the 1977 election where they could not win a single seat.

I was in my office on the day of the general strike. Mathew’s goons led by the UNPs trade Union the JSS launched a murderous attack on the strikers near the Lake House roundabout. They had come armed with clubs, knives and knuckle dusters. One worker was killed and the others ran helter skelter to escape the killers. Alavi Moulana and Sarath Muttetuwegama ran into my room in the ministry on Sir Baron Jayatilaka mawatha as they were being pursued by murderous thugs. I immediately shut the door and got my two friends to sit down and drink a cup of tea while their tormentors on the street rushed past us.

Alavi’s shirt was drenched in blood, and I got my driver Fonseka to bring him a new shirt. Then I smuggled Alavi and Sarath into my official car and had them driven safely home. The Lake House roundabout was like a war zone with placards, shoes, slippers and files strewn all over. I must say that both Alavi and Sarath did not forget this adventure and when much later in the Mahinda Cabinet there were disagreements with Mahinda, Alavi and Dinesh took my side and resolved controversial issues.

Cyril Mathew’s goons did not stop there. They launched an unprovoked attack on distinguished cultural personalities who were critical of the open economy. Popular culture, especially with the coming of TV, that was growing after 1977 was a threat to their sensibility as well as social position. They launched a well-supported opposition to the open economy and its cultural effects. Even their moderate and sensible arguments irritated JRJ and Mathew who knew only too well that the debacle of 1956 started similarly with cultural and religious opposition to the UNP.

There is no doubt that JRJ was behind these attacks. The meeting held at the Buddhist Congress Hall under the leadership of Maduluwawe Sobhita and Sarachchandra was attacked and the two leaders were hospitalized. What was more disconcerting was that ministers, save my minister Anandatissa, were gloating about the discomfiture of the cultural icons. Ananda and I went to see Sarcthchandra who was not seriously hurt. But this jubilation about use of violence which seemed a way of currying favour with JRJ had grave consequences, particularly on the ethnic issue.

There is no doubt that JRJ was behind these attacks. The meeting held at the Buddhist Congress Hall under the leadership of Maduluwawe Sobhita and Sarathchandra was attacked and the two leaders were hospitalized. What was more disconcerting was that ministers, save my minister Anandatissa, were gloating about the discomfiture of the cultural icons. Ananda and I went to see Sarathchandra who was not seriously hurt. But this jubilation about use of violence which seemed a way of currying favour with JRJ had grave consequences, particularly on the ethnic issue.

(To be continued)

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Features

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

Published

1 day ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

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

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

1 day ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

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

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/12

Sahan Weerasooriya

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.