Thoughts from London

Kofi Annan taken for a ride
Ill winds are blowing through the United Nations. Even distant Sri Lanka is beginning to feel it. The man at the epicentre of the storm is its boss Kofi Annan. The Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has brought Annan to centrestage after a recent investigation by a panel headed by Paul Volcker found serious wrongdoing by the head of that programme.

Annan himself has vowed to clear the name of the United Nations and in the process save himself from being tainted in these last couple of years of his stewardship.

To Sri Lanka, it is not the Iraq-linked scandal that matters so much as the attempts by the UN and its personnel based in Colombo to intrude into our internal affairs and compromise our national sovereignty.

Hard on the heels of that attempt by the UN office in Colombo to have Annan visit the LTTE-controlled areas during his recent visit to tsunami-affected countries, comes this utterly unexpected and unprecedented message of condolence at the killing of Ilayathambi an Lingarasa known as Kaushalyan.

Kaushalyan himself might be one who wanted peace instead of perennial conflict. But that is hardly the point. The condolence message was unprecedented. One cannot recall a UN Secretary-General making such a public show of sorrow at the killing of a member of an organisation banned by several countries as a terrorist organisation and which has, over the last 25 years not only murdered leaders of other Tamil groups but also led an armed rebellion against a sovereign state.

There could be only two possibilities for Annan's strange behaviour and what seems like a radical departure from tradition. Either the UN boss knew the man personally and felt that condolences were due as he failed to meet Kaushalyan in Sri Lanka. Or else the poor man was beautifully set up.

The first does not seem plausible. After all who is the high-up in New York who knew Kaushalyan well enough to swing this?
That leaves us with the only other option. Somebody misled Annan, and for what purpose?
If one accepts the second option then the field is considerably narrowed as we search for the culprits who took Annan for a ride on the back of a tiger.

There could be two sources. One, that this was planned and executed in New York by a person or persons who wanted to embarrass the secretary-general, already facing the slings and arrows of a Bush administration keen on giving him a premature shove.

The other, of course, is it was a deliberate plant by the UNDP office in Colombo headed by Miguel Bermeo.
For quite some time now the talk in Colombo circles has been about the LTTE sympathies of UNDP office. Backed by requests from the LTTE and its supporters the UNDP was keen to have Kofi Annan visit Tiger-controlled areas.

It was all done under cover of humanitarian gestures and relief. But most observers are aware that before long the LTTE would have turned that visit into a propaganda weapon, imparting even more spin than the combined talents of Muralidaran and Shane Warne.

New York sources say Colombo initiated the idea of a condolence message. It is possible that somebody in New York also had some role in it. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how it got past the secretary-general's gate-keepers.
Some conspiracy theorists already say that this could well be part of a general plot to embarrass Annan and make a contribution to Washington's end game - the ouster of Annan who dared declared the war on Iraq illegal, and undermine the UN.

What should concern us more is the role of multilateral organisations, diplomatic missions and the like that operate in Sri Lanka as though they had majority equity in the place.

If every Tom, Dick and Miguel armed with a diplomatic passport now believes that they could rule the roost, it is because the previous Ranil Wickremesinghe government allowed foreign missions a diplomatic licence and latitude that undermined national sovereignty and turned Sri Lanka into a colonial outpost, with even hired foreign speech writers.

Just this month this column argued that the government should place constraints on the activities of these missions and some NGOs. It is the job of the Foreign Ministry to do so. If heads of missions and their underlings behave in ways detrimental to the authority, security and the integrity of the state, then the countries or organisations they come from should be told politely but firmly to remove their officials from our territory.

President Premadasa had the then British High Commissioner David Gladstone moved out for interfering in the conduct of our elections. The UN Secretariat, especially its officials posted to small developing nations, try to exceed their mandate. The UN is a servant of its member-states. But some UN officials behave as though we are the vassals of the UN.

One of the problems with the UN is that so many mediocrities creep into it because of the job quota system that ensures each member-state a minimum number of posts. Those who have had to associate with UN officials over the years would know the poor quality of some of those holding jobs in the UN and its many agencies.

The result is that often such officials try to lord over those in the country of posting, overstepping their remit and even interfering in domestic politics. Perhaps the UNDP has forgotten the Secretary-General's message that the fight against terrorism is a crucial UN goal as expressed through the Millennium Declaration and 12 well-subscribed treaties.

We know that some member-states such as Australia, India, Malaysia and Israel would throw the book at the UN and its officials if they dared infringe the sovereign rights of their nations. Why are we kowtowing to these foreigners as though they have descended from Olympus?

In former times the role of the UNDP here was clearly worked out in discussions with the External Resources Division of the Ministry of Planning. Later External Resources came under the Finance Ministry during Ronnie de Mel's long years as finance minister.

I suppose it is still under the Finance Ministry. Wherever it is, the government must now clearly demarcate the UNDP's role in Sri Lanka and ensure that it engages in development work and not in political crusades, even if is only writing poor obituaries.

In this 21st century Sri Lanka should not allow itself to be treated like some South American banana republic (perhaps Miguel Bermeo could advise us on this) though the way some politicians love to pay homage to Western leaders one could be pardoned for thinking so.

In the past Sri Lanka has shown its displeasure at the way certain UNDP heads conducted themselves and at least one was consequently withdrawn. If we had been up to it in the past, there is no reason why we should not read the riot act now when the case for it is even better.

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