The Government’s farcical international relations

The traditional Sinhala press has failed to report on the unmitigated farce that constituted the President’s recent visit to New York and the United Nations and the dire state of Sri Lanka’s international relations and diplomacy in general.

My article brings out some of the salient points. For example, that friends and relatives of the President’s wife and the Foreign Minister were also part of the President entourage, the exact number of which is still unknown. What is known however is that the entire motley posse stayed at the Ritz Carlton, where a standard room costs upwards of SLR 100,000 a night.

Many in the group went for private visits and were not seen remotely close to the annals of the UN. This was an all expenses paid trip – down to mobile phone calls.

The President and a group of 20 then went to Los Angeles and stayed at the Beverly Hills Peninsula Hotel, where a normal room costs upwards of SLR 67,200 and the President’s suite a staggering SLR 448,000 a night.

Tragically however, the President was denied an audience with anybody of significance in the US Administration. Yet, Sri Lankan’s have to foot his multi-million ruppee bill.

My article goes on to explore how this government, through a very limited vocabulary of rabid accusations and vicious denial, have ridiculed all concerns raised by high ranking officials from the UN and other international agencies on human rights and humanitarian work. It has also extended to the public ridicule of the present French Foreign Minister, before he was elected to office.

The schizophrenia that defines our foreign policy was evident in the President’s appeal to the UN to help secure Sri Lanka’s human rights, forgetting perhaps that his government repeatedly called USG Sir John Holmes a terrorist in the pay of the LTTE!

Clearly, it’s not surprising at all why the President was inconsequential in the US.

Read my article in full, in Sinhala, on Vikalpa here.