Foreign policy cannot be made in the street

by Malinda Seneviratne

(July 18, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) For years the LTTE didn’t have a military edge over the government forces. What it lacked on the ground in Sri Lanka, however, it compensated for abroad in terms of propaganda. And what Sri Lanka had on the ground it compromised with poor communication and diplomatic bungling. That’s an old story that does not require repetition or elaboration. As in all cases, the best we can hope for is that we do our best given circumstances and a set of endowments. That’s the bottom line of what can be called ‘smart engagement’. We might be suffering from structurally produced cramps and this would naturally inhibit movement, but this does not mean we need to shoot ourselves in our feet.

The LTTE threatened our territorial integrity. We had shot ourselves in our national feet time and again for decades. After Mahinda Rajapaksa became President, however, there was a kind of resolve that had been absent; we were determined to give the matter our best shot. We stumbled, we were tripped, but we did not give up and most importantly, we did not shoot ourselves in our feet. We won.

Today, we live in a country rid of the terrorist threat. We live, despite this, in a country whose sovereignty is threatened in numerous ways by numerous forces. Obviously different challenges require different approaches, like in chess, where an opponent’s style and his/her choice of opening prompts strategy shifts. On the other hand, one never compromises the fundamentals and one of the key basics is the determination to play ‘smart chess’. There are tons of ‘legal moves’ available for the player; some strong, some weak, some so-so and some that are monumental blunders.

Wimal Weerawansa blundered. Wimal is not some maverick MP. Neither is he an undergraduate whose mindless and irresponsible transgressions can be forgiven on account of age and immaturity. He’s a cabinet minister. He had a point to make. It was a point that had to be driven home to the general citizenry. There were other ways to do it. There’s been chiding, yes. Lampooning too. He deserves such censure, let there be no doubt on this. He put us on the back foot. And I don’t think anyone described the politics and captured the implications of his pre-fast naadagama as did Dayan Jayatilleka in his column for the Sunday Leader (July 11, 2010) titled ‘Saving sovereignty or shaming Sri Lanka’.

Dayan’s is not one of those typical anti-Mahinda rants. He gives context: ‘There must be zero-tolerance by Sri Lanka of that which violates its sovereignty. There must be a total defence of sovereignty. That defence must not be stupid. Weerawansa’s is. While a state’s external relations must take public opinion into account, foreign policy cannot be made in the street. Diplomacy – including public diplomacy — cannot be conducted on the street or sidewalk, by mobs.’

Such incursions not only harden those opposed to us they in fact persuade fence-sitters to jump into that camp and embarrasses our friends. Dayan paints the picture well: ‘Ban Ki-moon occupies the 38th floor of the United Nations building in New York and the Sri Lankan demonstrators, the area adjacent to the UN office in Colombo. But neither occupies the most important real estate of all: the moral high ground.’

Today, we have lost some ground and even though Ban Ki-moon hasn’t exactly acquired moral real estate of any significance, he can afford to forfeit some square miles. We cannot. The challenge, as Dayan puts it, is about total defence of sovereignty. There’s lost ground to be recovered and more challenges ahead. The need of the hour is sobriety. I don’t know who choreographed the naadagama but it was a poor effort overall. Even if we take as given that politics is spectacle, why get the drama scripted by the incompetent? We can only hope that political theatre unfolds in more coherent and effective ways in the future.

That being said, how about the drama at the world stage? Dayan does like to brag and this takes the gloss off his moments of effectiveness, but I think he is right when he claims, ‘Sri Lanka’s sovereignty must be defended by the broadest possible mobilisation of forces in the international arena; as an ex-practitioner who succeeded in doing just that on his watch, I know that it can be done and I also know that this is not the way to do it.’

Dayan was intelligent. Had he not managed to swing things our way in Geneva, we wouldn’t have Ban Ki-moon breathing his insufferable, selective and unfair fire down our necks; no we would still be dealing with Prabhakaran’s suicide squads. Some say that Dayan was a veritable ‘enemy within’ for antagonising Israel unnecessarily, which in turn persuaded the powerful Jewish lobby in New York to turn Washington against us. There could be some truth to this, but I would like to give Dayan the benefit of the doubt. Dayan took a wrong turn when he started using his designation to plug his outcome-preferences in ways that tweaked mischievously (at best) his mandate. Perhaps he was not briefed properly, perhaps he was not supervised well, but in the end he became so unpredictable and such a loose cannon that he must have been considered a risk we could not afford at the time.

Having said all this, there is no doubt in my mind that we sorely need the kind of experience, knowledge of history, political sense and the kind of pride and controlled belligerence that Dayan took with him to Geneva. Dayan, along with Rajiva Wijesinha, Mahinda Samarasinghe and the top officers of the Attorney General’s Department formed a formidable and articulate team. What they achieved was remarkable. They went about their business intelligently. Perhaps the absence of the LTTE has made us complacent, but we cannot afford to drop our guard for a single moment.

We cannot shoot ourselves in the foot nor have the likes of Weerawansa doing the ‘honours’ on behalf of the entire citizenry. Such scripting as there will necessarily be in the future needs to be handed over to people who have an excellent sense of brinkmanship and the know-how to do it in ways that obtains citizen solidarity without embarrassing the Government. This alone will not do the job. We need intelligence in the diplomatic frontline.

We cannot afford to slip up at the top. We need people who can damage-control when scripts are smudged and replaced with impromptu muttering, egos get in the way of reason, and spectacle slips into naadagam. I can’t help thinking that one Dayan is clearly worth a 100 Weerawansas when it comes to getting things sorted out at certain levels, in certain forums. Mahinda will be friend to friend and will pick up the Wimals who overreach, slip and hurt their behinds, but this will not be enough to save his own rear end. It is time to be smart(er). I urge him to read this article by Dayan Jayatilleka.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malinsene@gmail.com