Sunday Times 2
Harvard Club farewell for outgoing Sri Lankan Ambassador
View(s):When Ambassador Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka’s outgoing Permanent Representative to the United Nations, was honoured as the chief guest at a formal black-tie farewell dinner at the prestigious Harvard Club in New York last week, speaker after speaker sang his praises singling out some of his remarkable achievements both as an international civil servant and as a Sri Lankan envoy.
“It sounds like a eulogy,” said one guest jokingly, “but the man is still very much alive – and kicking.”
During his five-year career as ambassador, the longest serving Sri Lankan envoy at the UN, he chaired three key committees: the Ad Hoc Committee on the Indian Ocean, the Israeli Practices Committee probing human rights violations in occupied territories, the Legal Committee of the General Assembly – and co-chaired a fourth Committee, namely the Ad Hoc Committee on Marine and Genetic Resources in the High Seas.
“If this trend had continued”, jested one UN official at the dinner, “the United Nations may have run out of chairs.”
At least one journalist at the dinner recounted the ongoing personal relationship he had with the Ambassador who, off and on, tipped him off on a breaking story – but always with a warning: “Not for attribution.”
When he once asked Ambassador Kohona for a comment on a politically-sensitive story, he shot back at the reporter: “No comment”. And then added: “Don’t quote me on that,” as the audience broke into fits of laughter.
Ambassador Kohona arrived at the United Nations back in 1995 armed with superlative credentials earned in three continents: a first class in law from the University of Sri Lanka, a master’s degree in private international law from the Australian National University and a Ph.D in international economic law from one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions, Cambridge University.
As Chief of the U.N. Treaty Section (1995-2006), he was primarily responsible for creating an electronic data base for over 50,000 bilateral and 500 multilateral international treaties deposited with the United Nations.
And he left behind an indelible legacy: at the click of a mouse you can now access all of the treaties, with over 1.5 million hits per month.
Breaking away from the traditional U.N. culture of procrastination, Ambassador Kohona achieved his goal of transferring all of the treaties electronically on a rigid deadline-and long before he left the United Nations for greener pastures home, first as Secretary-General of the Peace Secretariat (2006), and then as Foreign Secretary (2006-2009).
During his professional career, his areas of specialisation were prolific and diverse: trade negotiations, treaty on the ozone layer, renewable energy and international law, dispute settlement, climate change, marine and genetic resources in the high seas and peace negotiations in Geneva and Oslo with separatists engaged in a decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka.
As a member of the Australian foreign service, he was head of the Trade and Investment Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. When he became a career diplomat in 1984, he was the only Sri Lankan to join the ranks of the Australian diplomatic corps, later to be followed by a second Sri Lankan, Roy Clogstoun.
The dinner at the Harvard Club, which was attended by nearly 200 guests, including senior UN officials, ambassadors and Sri Lankan expatriates, was co-hosted by the James Jay Dudley Luce Foundation and Sri Lankan Outreach.
Besides several UN ambassadors, the speakers who paid tribute to Ambassador Kohona included Dr. Timothy Jayasundera, Dr. Anil Vitarana, Mahinda de Lanerolle and Sunil Herath.