Sunday Times 2
Sri Lankans who graced the UN hierarchy in a bygone era
View(s):By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS – Dr Gamani Corea, whose 100th birth anniversary was commemorated in early November, held one of the highest-ranking jobs at the United Nations: Secretary-General of the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
A product of two prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge, he was known in UN circles for his in-depth knowledge on development financing and his hard-hitting comments.
When there was widespread speculation that he was planning to run for the post of Secretary-General, I interviewed him in the UN delegate’s lounge and pointedly asked him to confirm or deny the rumour. “I don’t think anyone in his right mind will ever want that job,” he declared.
Fast forward to 2025.
As a financially stricken UN is looking for a new Secretary-General, who will take office beginning January 2027, Gamani’s remark in a bygone era was a reflection of a disaster waiting to happen.
The current Secretary-General is facing a daunting task battling for the very survival of the UN, with a hostile White House forcing the world body to sharply reduce its staff and relocate several UN agencies and move them out of New York because of drastic funding cuts.
A former senior deputy governor of the Central Bank in Sri Lanka and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Plan Implementation, Gamani was also one of the harshest critics of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Addressing a luncheon at the UN delegates’ dining room, he castigated the two Bretton Woods institutions for their obsession with laying down stringent conditions—euphemistically called “structural adjustment policies”—in return for concessional loans to the world’s poorer nations.
The tragedy of it all, he said, is that virtually all of the crisis-stricken Third World nations have a common finance minister: the International Monetary Fund.
As if to reaffirm his contention, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recounted in his book on globalisation an anecdote about a newly appointed Indian finance minister being congratulated by a friend. “Don’t congratulate me,” he tells the friend. “I am only half a minister. My other half is in Washington (read: IMF).
Meanwhile, when the IPS news agency launched a daily conference newspaper at the 1982 Earth Summit in Rio, we were desperately chasing diplomats to get a sense of what was going on, mostly behind closed doors, with the 134-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing nations, expressing disappointment at the absence of any major pledges for funding.
As I was doing a wrap-up of the two-week-long conference, I approached Gamani for a final comment. “We negotiated,” he said with a tinge of sarcasm, “the size of the zero,” as he held out his fingers to indicate the zero.
At the United Nations, most of the high-ranking jobs go by favour—monopolised by the big powers, including the five permanent members (P-5) of the Security Council, namely the US, the UK, France, China and Russia, followed by some of the major contributors to the UN budget, including Japan and Germany.
The yardstick was either big power politics or the power of the purse. The exceptions included countries such as Brazil, Bangladesh, Switzerland, Norway, and Austria—with Sri Lanka a distant third and punching above its weight.
Meanwhile, when future historians take stock of Sri Lanka’s enduring contributions at the United Nations, they may realise that our political legacy spanned both the upper and lower limits of the universe: the sky above and the oceans below.
Shirley Amerasinghe was not only elected President of the General Assembly in September 1976 but also chaired the historic Law of the Sea (LOS) Conference, which produced the ultimate treaty governing the ocean seabed and the high seas.
And both in 1982 and 1999, Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, an international expert on space law, was named Executive Secretary of the second and third UN Conferences on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE II & III) that laid down the laws governing the heavenly skies, preventing a possible arms race and a futuristic “star wars”. Hollywood-style
Still, between the deep blue sea and the wide-open skies, there was plenty of room for Sri Lankan success stories in terra firma.
In the UN hierarchy, the Secretary-General reigned supreme as Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), followed by his deputy. Next in the power structure were the Under-Secretaries-Generals (USGs), and further down were the Assistant Secretaries-Generals (ASGs).
Besides Gamani, the USGs included Jayantha Dhanapala, Radhika Coomaraswamy and Christopher Weeramantry, a judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The ASGs included Raju Coomaraswamy, Andrew Joseph, Kanni Wignaraja, Tarzie Vittachi, Kumar Chitty and Ambi Sundaram at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva.
Incidentally, the post of Head of the Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific at UNDP was long considered the intellectual birthright of Sri Lankans. The post was held first by Raju Coomaraswamy, followed by Andrew Joseph, and now Kanni Wignaraja.
Jayantha was USG for Disarmament Affairs, and Radhika was USG and UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict. Jayathma Wickramanayake, the Sri Lankan former UN Youth Envoy, held the official title of UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth.
Both Shirley and Jayantha ran unsuccessfully for the post of Secretary-General.
Jayantha, a relentless advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons, was the recipient of the 2014 International Achievement Award for Nuclear Disarmament sponsored by the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.
“Short of actually dismantling nuclear devices himself,” said Dr Randy Rydell, former senior political affairs officer at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), “he has contributed enormously in constructing a solid foundation upon which the world community will one day fulfil this great ambition.”
A one-time president of the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (since 2007) and a former Sri Lankan ambassador to the United States, Jayantha played a crucial role in the 1995 Conference of States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Radhika was the first Sri Lankan woman to rise to the higher echelons of the male-dominated UN Secretariat. If one is to take account of the genetic factor, she is perhaps a product of designer genes: her father, Raju Coomaraswamy, retired as an Assistant Secretary-General and head of UNDP’s Asian Bureau in the 1980s.
Armed with superlative academic credentials, Radhika was one of the few—or perhaps the only—Sri Lankan triple Ivy Leaguer. A graduate of the UN International School in New York City, she received her B.A. from Yale University, her J.D. from Columbia and her LLM from Harvard.
Tarzie Vittachi, a legendary Sri Lankan newspaper editor and one-time deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, once recounted the story of an African diplomat who sought his help to get coverage in the US media for his prime minister’s address to the General Assembly.
The diplomat, a friend of Vittachi’s, said the visiting African leader was planning to tell the world body his success stories in battling poverty, hunger and HIV/AIDS. “How can I get this story onto the front pages of U.S. newspapers?” he asked rather naively.
Vittachi, then a columnist and contributing editor to Newsweek magazine, jokingly retorted, “Shoot him – and you will get the front page of every newspaper in the U.S.” As the old tabloid journalistic axiom goes: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
When Dr Palitha Kohona was Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN (2009-2015), he was elected Chair of the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee (Legal), was co-Chair of the UN Working Group on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, and inherited two other chairs: Chair of the UN Committee on Israeli Practices in the Occupied Arab Territories and Chair of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace.
So, when I spoke at his farewell dinner at the Harvard Club in New York, I jokingly predicted (amidst loud laughter from ambassadors and senior UN officials) that “if this trend continues, the UN will soon run out of chairs.”
(This article contains excerpts from a book on the UN titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That” authored by Thalif Deen. A Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree (MSc) from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he twice shared the gold medal for excellence in UN reporting awarded by the UN Correspondents’ Association. The book is available at Amazon and at the Vijitha Yapa bookshop.)