inside the glass house

When little Lanka roared in defence of UN
NEW YORK - When Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was a fledgling member of the United Nations back in the late 1950s, the expatriate community in New York was so minuscule that the Sri Lanka Association could have held its annual general meeting in a street-corner phone booth.

In the absence of a fulltime ambassador, our first Permanent Representative to the UN R.S.S. Gunewardene (later Sir Senerath), had to shuttle between New York and Washington DC because his assignment as ambassador to the US took precedence over the United Nations.

The rumour, as recalled by pioneering expatriates who landed in the shores of this country in the early 1950s, was that even the Sri Lanka Mission to the UN was so woefully understaffed that we were desperately looking for delegates for the annual General Assembly sessions, come September.

According to one anecdote, Sri Lankan diplomats used to hang around the corner of First Avenue and 42nd street, right across from the UN building, and grab the first Sri Lankan who crossed the street -- and forcibly made him a member of the UN delegation -- while he was still kicking and screaming.

But no longer. Judging by our recent performances, we now have an oversupply of delegates to New York every year, including ministers, MPs, career diplomats, security officers, masseurs and even hair dressers.

Ernest Corea, former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the US and longtime editor of the Ceylon Daily News, covered the first General Assembly sessions for the Lake House group of newspapers in late 1956. Corea, now with the World Bank, recalls the inspiring, off-the-cuff speech made by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, when he led the first Sri Lankan delegation to the UN back in November 1956.

He said that many delegates were astonished by the Prime Minister's eloquence. Says Corea: "Then, as now, most UN speeches were bureaucratic, drafted by functionaries and read out by those who cannot function adequately at a podium. SWRD broke that mould. He was an orator rather than a "speaker" or reader. He represented an authentic Asian viewpoint with clarity, sharpness, and wit."

As is today, the Middle East was an international hotspot at that time following Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's decision to nationalise the Suez Canal Company after the US and Britain had humiliated him by blocking a World Bank loan for the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Nasser's decision eventually provoked a strong military reaction from Britain and France, which jointly administered the Suez Canal, forcing UN intervention. And around the same time, the then Soviet Union invaded Hungary provoking an equally strong reaction in the corridors of power at the UN.

The role of the UN came under harsh scrutiny at that time, as it is now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is the UN a helpless giant or a toothless tiger? UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's defence of the UN today may well have come off the pages of Bandaranaike's five-page speech to the General Assembly in 1956.

The events in Egypt and Hungary, Bandaranaike told delegates, had provided a crucial test and an opportunity to the UN. "I should like to say that it is my opinion that the United Nations has emerged out of these crises with its reputation and prestige enhanced. I have heard, no doubt, many people here criticise the United Nations on the grounds that it is slow to act, that when it does act, it cannot act effectively, that it sometimes tends to lose itself in diffused thinking-and still more diffused decisions."

Bandaranaike also said something that Annan keeps repeating these days: that the UN has limited power and authority, particularly in the face of unilateral action by Western nations.

As Bandaranaike put it: "The United Nations is not a super-state possessed of armed forces capable of asserting its authority even over powerful members or non-members who may act contrary to the purposes of the United Nations. It can and does bring to bear a certain collective moral force of the world which, although it may not be expeditiously effective in all cases, commands in certain cases, as it has done in the past, success and in certain others at least a very salutary restraining influence."

In his address to the Assembly, he also had the courage of his conviction to defend Nasser's decision to take over the Suez Canal which rightfully belonged to Egypt.

"The President of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company. I do not find in any quarter a disposition seriously to question his right to do so. Although the manner in which it was done, the time in which it was done, may be considered expedient by some and incorrect by others, the basic fact of his right to do so has not been questioned," Bandaranaike said.

If that is correct, he said, "I consider that it follows as a corollary to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company that the power of operation of the canal should also be vested in Egypt."

In an Assembly where you rarely hear anecdotes by visiting heads of state, Bandaranaike harked back to Buddhist scriptures to fault delegates for launching attacks at each other.

"We gain nothing," he said, "by undue mutual recriminations and reviling. As a Buddhist, I remember the story of Buddha and the answer he gave to an opponent who came before him and abused him for hours."

The Buddha listened to him patiently and said: "My dear friend, if you invite guests to a banquet and the guests do not come, what do you do with the food that is prepared?"

'Oh, my family and I will consume the food," the man responded. So the Buddha said to the man who had abused him: "You have offered me your abuse. I am not accepting it. You can take it yourself."

The average American would have been less diplomatic: he would tell the man to "take it and shove it."

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