Sunday Times 2
The day Sri Lanka was denied admission to the UN by a Soviet veto
View(s):By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS – Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Jayantha Jayasuriya, a former Chief Justice, is planning to commemorate the country’s 70th anniversary at our UN Mission next week—bringing back memories of a bygone era.
Going back to past history, our former Ambassador to the US, Neville Kanakaratne, later a high-ranking UN official, would recount that our application for membership was vetoed by the then Soviet Union on the ground that we still had a defence agreement with the United Kingdom (and that Trincomalee was a naval base under the control of the British, despite our independence in February 1948).
Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike during his visit to the UN to address the General Assembly in 1956. Credit: UN photo
The erroneous charge was that we were NOT a truly independent nation state—but still a British colony.
Therefore, the Soviets wrongly argued, Sri Lanka did not warrant a seat in the world body. The truth of the matter, however, was that we were caught up in the politics of the Cold War and were victims of a Soviet ideological battle with the West. The Western powers in turn kept vetoing Soviet allies, barring them from UN membership.
Our first attempt at seeking membership was in May 1948—three months after independence. The application was signed by D.S. Senanayake, the country’s first Prime Minister, who also held the portfolio of Minister for External Affairs.
The application was rejected by the Security Council, where the USSR used its veto against us. The Council resolution said it “resolves to postpone” the decision of our admission until there is “sufficient proof that Ceylon is a sovereign and independent state.”
Sensing the deadlock, Prime Minister Sir John Kotalawala handpicked Esmond Wickremesinghe, a media mogul and a consummate political power broker, anointing him as a Special Envoy with a single-minded mandate: to lobby US and Soviet diplomats for a politically smooth passage for admission to the world body.
Esmond, father of former president Ranil Wickremesinghe, was not only a highly influential press magnate of outstanding stature but also a political kingmaker and a skilled behind-the-scenes negotiator. With strong support from R.S.S. Gunewardene (who later became our first Permanent Representative to the UN), Esmond played a key role in successfully negotiating a “package deal”.
Ernest Corea, a former editor of the Ceylon Daily News and the Observer, who worked closely under Esmond at Lake House, said Sir John rewarded Esmond with an offer of a knighthood: the deserving title of Sir Esmond Wickremesinghe. But Esmond turned it down. R.S.S. Gunewardene, later Sir Senerath Gunewardene, was knighted.
As part of a package deal, however, we gained admission in December 1955 in return for the US holding back its veto on Soviet allies such as Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, who eventually made it to the UN the same day as we did. Although we were knocking at the UN door since 1950, it took five long years to gain admission.
Sir John, unfortunately, did not get to make the planned “grand entry” at the UN because the UNP was swept aside by a political landslide in 1956, and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the new SLFP prime minister, headed the country’s delegation to the 1956/57 sessions of the General Assembly.
And according to Ernest, Bandaranaike made his first and last appearance at the UN, where he had the distinction of speaking ex tempore before an Assembly where most leaders read out a prepared text.
Ernest, later a Sri Lankan ambassador to the US and the first Sri Lankan journalist accredited to the UN, covered the first General Assembly sessions for the Lake House group of newspapers in late 1956. He recalled the inspiring, off-the-cuff speech made by Prime Minister Bandaranaike when he led the first Sri Lankan delegation to the UN in November 1956.
He said that many delegates were astonished by the Prime Minister’s eloquence. “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.”
The swift admission in 1955, however, took the government by mild surprise, with no immediate office space to house the new Sri Lanka Mission to the UN. We were literally homeless.
The good Samaritan came in the guise of Lawrence Gunatilaka, a trailblazing Sri Lankan who had arrived in the US in the early 1950s and who offered his apartment in the service of his country.
Gunatilaka’s apartment on West 73rd Street was the first home of the Sri Lankan Mission to the United Nations. The mailing address of the apartment even adorned the first set of letterheads printed by the mission.
Ambassador Kanakaratne said, “Lawrence’s apartment was the headquarters for about two to three months until we found a brownstone in Sutton Place.”
The first Permanent Representative to the U.N., Sir Senerat (RSS) Gunewardene, had to shuttle between New York and Washington DC because his assignment as ambassador to the U.S. took precedence over the United Nations.
We were perpetually short of delegates during the annual General Assembly sessions. And there was a joke that our diplomats stood outside the UN on First Avenue and grabbed the first Sri Lankan they encountered on the street—and anointed him as a UN delegate.
But by the late 1970s, however, we had a glut of delegates, with hordes of MPs and politicians arriving in New York as part of a refresher course in international politics.
Incidentally, Shirley Amerasinghe was the first Sri Lankan who made himself available for the post of UN Secretary-General back in 1971.
But according to speculation, Amerasinghe was branded as “too pro-Palestinian” and therefore unable to win the support of the US and other Western powers. When the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was burnt, triggering protests against Israel, he was one of the keynote speakers during the Middle East debate in the Security Council.
He later became the first chairman of the three-member Israeli Practices Committee (which documented Israeli human rights violations in occupied territories). That perhaps was one of the final blows that gutted his chances in the run-up to the election for a new secretary general in a country where the Israeli lobby reigns supreme.
Incidentally, when the second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden died in a mysterious plane crash in the Congo in 1961, Ambassador Kanakaratne was a legal adviser in the Secretariat. Hammarskjold’s troubleshooting UN team to Congo was to have included a legal adviser.
At the eleventh hour, Kanakaratne decided to back out of the trip because he thought his knowledge of French was relatively poor compared to that of Vladimir Fabri, another UN legal adviser. Fabri took Kanakaratne’s place on that fateful plane that crashed in the Congo, killing the entire delegation.
As Kanakaratne told me, the ‘Ceylon Observer’ ran a lead story with the headline: ‘Was Our Man on the Death Plane’
“Somebody had taken the newspaper to my mother—and she almost collapsed,” Kanakaratne recalled. Within 24 hours, the record was set straight by our Permanent Representative at that time, Ambassador Gunapala Malalasekera (1961-1963).
Speaking of newspaper headlines, the first reporter to cover the UN back in 1956 was Ernest Corea, onetime editor of both the Daily News and the Observer, and later Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the US.
Ed Kerner, a former Sri Lankan Director of Tourism in New York, covered the UN in the early 1970s for a short-lived Hong Kong-based newspaper called the “Asian”, edited by the legendary Tarzie Vittachi, a long-time editor of the Observer.
Tarzie once offered me a piece of advice: “Don’t ever join the UN,” he warned, “They will take a journalist and make a bureaucrat out of you.”
Still, he himself fought against that very bureaucracy and was one of the few—or perhaps the only high-ranking UN official who continued his journalistic career, as a columnist for Newsweek magazine, even when he was Deputy Executive Director of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, holding the rank of a UN assistant secretary-general.
As a strong advocate of development journalism and supportive of a Third World news agency, Tarzie backed the IPS news agency to the hilt and provided a strong partnership with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) when he was Director of Communications there.
After his retirement, he was a frequent visitor to our office. During one of his visits, he was very critical of the Sri Lankan government at that time and lashed out at some of our leaders. As he was leaving our office, he turned back, looked at me while seated at my desktop, and said, “When you are writing my obituary, make sure you mention that.”
And I did.