Sunday Times 2
The day Sri Lanka outsmarted the UN at a General Assembly session
View(s):By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS – When Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) addresses the high-level UN summit on September 24, he will be one of more than 150 world leaders commemorating the 80th anniversary of the United Nations.
Come September, virtually every Sri Lankan president or prime minister has routinely visited New York to address the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly.
Lakshman Kadrigamar: UN should stick to malaria and mosquitoes
In the case of the Bandaranaikes, three generations addressed the General Assembly, including SWRD Bandaranaike (1956-59), his wife Sirimavo Bandaranaike and their daughter President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK).
But they were not the first “first family” to achieve that distinction: India joined the privileged ranks with the Nehru family, with Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64), his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi standing at the UN podium.
In September 1988, President CBK, to the delight of feminists at the United Nations, was the only female head of state to address the male-dominated UN General Assembly session that year.
But her unique presence also prompted a question from a female CNN reporter who asked her at a UN press conference: “As a woman and a Head of State, what is your view of the Clinton-Lewinsky affaire?” (President Bill Clinton’s much-publicised affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.)
For a moment the briefing room remained silent. But far from being rattled, the president smiled at the reporter and said it would not be appropriate for her to make any comments. And then, with characteristic diplomacy, she added, “I think it is a matter for the American government and the American public to decide.
Incidentally, just for the record, CBK was the only Sri Lankan head of state who braved reporters at the clubhouse of the UN Correspondents’ Association (UNCA) on the third floor of the UN Secretariat.
Meanwhile, in accordance with existing practice at the general debate, a voluntary time limit is observed since the long list of speakers is prepared on the basis of a 15-minute statement by each delegation.
ACS Hameed: Pipped at the podium
But as tradition and protocol demand, it is member states, including political leaders and ambassadors, who reign supreme at the United Nations, not the Secretary-General or senior UN officials. And no president of the General Assembly, the UN’s highest policy-making body, has the right to curtail the prerogative of a president or prime minister to speak uninterruptedly—at his or her own pace.
In a bygone era, the UN installed a light on the speaker’s rostrum that kept flashing when a head of state or head of government went beyond the 15-minute time limit.
President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who was apparently alerted about this, pulled out his handkerchief, covered the flashing light and continued to speak amidst laughter.
The following year, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, known for his long-winded speeches, pulled off the same stunt with a dramatic flair, waving the handkerchief as delegates cheered him.
The two political leaders had momentarily outsmarted the UN bureaucracy.
Still, despite limitations, the longest speech before the General Assembly was delivered by President Castro on September 26, 1960. The speech lasted 269 minutes.
However, the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations was over 8 hours long, given by India’s V.K. Krishna Menon during a Security Council meeting in January 1957.
Meanwhile, when Lakshman Kadirgamar made his annual visits to the United Nations in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, he used the world body as a platform to continue his intense diplomatic campaign to have the LTTE banned—particularly in the US, the UK and other European countries.
And it was also during his tenure as Foreign Minister that the United Nations gave its collective blessings to his proposal to declare an annual “International Day of Observance for Vesak”.
President Premadasa addressing the UN General Assembly. Pic courtesy UN
Still, Kadirgamar remained sceptical about the UN—even though it was his primary battleground, as he shunted in and out of closed-door meetings while holding court in the diplomatic lounge with an endless parade of foreign ministers.
When I interviewed him at the UN Plaza Hotel back in September 1999, he lambasted the UN for its “humanitarian intervention” in the domestic affairs of member states—and particularly in Sri Lanka.
Since the primary mandate of most UN agencies is socio-economic—including poverty and hunger alleviation, reproductive health, the environment, and healthcare—the foreign minister said the UN would be best advised to “stick to malaria and mosquitoes” and “leave us to resolve our own political problems.”
That was a contemptuous rebuke by someone who once held a senior UN position as head of the Asia Pacific Bureau of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
As he pitched into UN officials for shooting their mouths off in public, he dismissed a former UN official, who was based in Colombo, as “a pompous ass” who was told in no uncertain terms where his authority began—and ended.
Meanwhile, every Sri Lankan delegation included the country’s Foreign Minister, some impressive and knowledgeable and others not-so-impressive and ignorant of international affairs.
At least one foreign minister was caught fast asleep on his wife’s shoulder as he occupied the Sri Lankan seat in one of the front rows in the General Assembly hall—an act considered a diplomatic insult, and more so because the speaker at the podium was the foreign minister of India.
But what our Foreign Minister did not realise was that several news photographers, located high up in the Assembly Hall, were taking shots with telephoto lenses. When a Japanese newspaper ran the photograph, all hell broke loose at the Foreign Ministry (or, as the Americans say, the s—t hit the fan). And the then Director of Public Relations, Kshenuka Senewiratne, was assigned the unenviable task of appealing to newspaper editors in Colombo to kill both the story and the photo. She did an admirable job because only one newspaper ran the photo—but it was buried in one of the inside pages.
And then there was a story of a foreign minister summoning an urgent meeting of his senior staff to cope with a hostage crisis, of all places in Siberia, where our workers were being held for ransom or in danger of being killed. But the puzzled officials looked at each other. Siberia? Sri Lankan hostages?
It apparently didn’t make any sense until one of the officials who had read about a hostage crisis in Africa asked the minister, “Sir, are you sure it was Siberia and not Liberia?”
“I say, Siberia? Liberia? What’s the difference? They are all the same,” he retorted.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister ACS Hameed had one of his memorable moments when an Eelam activist and lawyer from London, Krishna Vaikunthavasan, surreptitiously gate-crashed into the UN and tried to upstage Hameed by walking onto the podium of the General Assembly hall and momentarily taking the speaker’s slot.
The incident, perhaps a rarity in the history of the UN, saw the intruder unleashing a diatribe against a member state, accusing it of genocide and lambasting the government for committing war crimes against the Tamils fighting for a separate state in northern Sri Lanka.
When the president of the Assembly realised he had an interloper on his hands, he cut off the mike and summoned security guards who bodily ejected him from the hall and banned him from the UN premises. And as Hameed walked up to the podium, there was pin-drop silence in the Assembly Hall.
As a member of the Sri Lanka delegation at that time, I was seated behind Hameed. But the unflappable Hameed, unprompted by any of his delegates, produced a riveting punchline: “Mr President,” he said, “I want to thank the previous speaker for keeping his speech short,” he said, as the Assembly, known to suffer long-winded speeches, broke into peals of laughter. The intruder was, in effect, upstaged by the Foreign Minister.
Hameed’s canny sense of humour also went far beyond the confines of the UN. When he came under attack for staying in five-star luxury hotels during the UN General Assembly sessions in New York, he fired back at the Opposition MP in Parliament with a rejoinder dripping with sarcasm: “Where do you want me to stay when I travel overseas as the Foreign Minister?” he asked. “In thosay boutiques?”
(This article includes excerpts from a book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That” authored by Thalif Deen and available at the Vijitha Yapa bookshop and on Amazon. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/)