ARE WE IN A POSITION TO DENY ALL AWFUL EVENTS???

The SLAS seeks to swallow the Foreign Service.......................by K. Godage
This attempted destruction of the Foreign Service is absolutely scandalous. Having failed to enter the Foreign Service through the front door they, like the proverbial camel, are seeking to enter the Service by other means. Newspapers report that the government has appointed ninety one outsiders to our missions abroad. While it is the prerogative of the head of state/government to appoint heads of missions, but for Dayan Jayatillake and a few others the majority cannot be said by any stretch of imagination to be heads of mission material.

As for the appointments to other posts of friends and relations there are no words in the Oxford Dictionary or the Thesaurus to condemn what has been done. What surprises me is that what has been done is the exact antithesis of what the president himself said should be done in his speech on October 5, 2006, to heads of our missions at a conference in Colombo. The government does not seem to be accountable to anybody.

Just as much as the SLFP, in the words of the president, is not the property of any individual or family, it must be understood that this is also true of the Foreign Service. The president has repeatedly said that he holds office as a trustee. He should not let anyone pervert the Foreign Service to give jobs to friends and relatives so that they can have a good time at state expense, a practice which he himself condemned in no uncertain terms when he addressed the heads of our missions abroad in Colombo.

Most surprisingly we recently had a very senior public official who held important office in the UNP administration, Austin Fernando, writing without any understanding of the problem. He had some first hand knowledge/experience when he wrote ``My belly is white’’ on defence related matters. But this certainly is not the case in his recent foray into the Foreign Service. The man certainly let himself down in the eyes of many. In fact the caption, I hope it was not his —-"Who’s afraid of the SLAS?’’ was downright stupid; there is no one who is afraid of the SLAS which is not even a shadow of the old CCS and according to many an apology when compared with its Indian counterpart.

The reason why we oppose any amalgamation is because these are two different disciplines. Both require separate professional expertise. Austin Fernando waxes eloquent about perks. It is only those of us who have served abroad know of the so-called ‘perks.’ Next this man speaks of the education of children abroad. It was only a few months ago that a young son of a colleague was complaining to me that he has no friends anywhere as he has moved to four different schools during the period that his parent was transferred to various countries. The unfortunate boy’s education has been affected and he hardly speaks to his parent.

This is no exceptional case; there are three more where I am personally aware of children of colleagues suffering depression as a result of having moved from school to school in different countries. So Mr. Fernando should not write hurtful crap without knowledge. He does acknowledge the importance attached to professionalism and specialization but goes on to write with unbecoming spite.

There is no Service in this country which is uniformly good. The Foreign Service certainly has deadwood but this does not mean that we should dump the baby with the bathwater. A very important matter which should be borne in mind by our politicians and the likes of Austin Fernando (who should know better) is that the official unlike the politician, whether he be a diplomat or a member of the home service, should not and does not seek publicity. This is something which the ‘kept’ public servant does to curry favour with the politicians in particular.

Those in the Foreign Service who have many achievements to their credit have not sought publicity for their efforts. For example the ban on the LTTE in Europe came about as a result of much hard, quiet work by officers of the Foreign Service. Fernando has mentioned what the late Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar did to counter the LTTE abroad, I can state without fear of contradiction, for I traveled with him more than ten times both to Europe and the US, that much home work was done and our own missions contributed immensely towards what was achieved.

Mr. Fernando also states that the FS Officers were incapable of countering LTTE propaganda abroad. His is a statement without an understanding of the situation. If there are serious violations of HR in this country, as for instance the wave of kidnappings and extrajudicial killings that took place in 2005 and 2006, and we resort to denying such awful events, or claiming that the government was unable to trace the killers, we lose all credibility in the eyes of the world. What happens here has been reported to their capitals by embassies/high commissions in Colombo and carried by the wire services and other media. International NGOs such as Amnesty International with global credibility have also gone public on these matters. Are we in a position to deny what has happened?

Does Mr. Fernando know of the resources available to our missions to counter the LTTE and the Tamil Diaspora? Please ask Mr. M.D.D. Peiris about the resources available to them. I served on a committee with him, Mrs. Manel Abeysekera and the present Auditor General and we found the situation with regard to funds was pathetic to say the least. Missions were crawling on shoestring budgets enough for salaries and not much else.

I was in Washington DC in 1983. The TV stations carried graphic reports of what happened here in Black July. What does Mr. Fernando expect us to do? Deny that anything serious had happened? We were able to organize pro-Sri Lanka groups in almost 30 States of the US (fortunately for this country we had Ernest Corea as Ambassador, and I have good reason for saying so) to get across to Congressmen and Senators that the killings were perpetrated by criminal gangs organized by a member of the government and that it was neither the policy of the government to attack our Tamil citizens nor was it a mass action by the Sinhalese.

In 1991 President Premadasa wanted increased garment quotas from the EU once again at a time when our HR record was bad. I was head of our mission in Brussels at the time and told the president that we would not even get what we had got the previous year and suggested to him that we put our house in order first and implement at least some of the 32 proposals made by Amnesty International. The president appointed a committee headed, I believe, by Mr. Bradman Weerakoon, with Messrs. Paskaralingam and Milinda Moragoda and they recommended the implementation of almost 30 of the 32 proposals. We were able, after intense lobbying by the mission, to swing it and the country received a 30% increase on the quota. Minister Moragoda and Mr. Paskaralingam came over to Brussels to sign the new Agreement. I received a letter from the President thanking me for my efforts.

Incidentally in the four years following the incidents of 1983, we had no less than 18 resolutions tabled against this country in the European Parliament and it took a lot of hard work on the part of those of us who served in our missions in Europe at the time to have the resolutions ‘softened’ or abandoned. It was not in our grain to seek publicity in newspapers; there are many amongst us still living who are aware of the work that was done silently and discreetly.

It is with utmost reluctance that I have set out some small part of what was achieved by the Foreign Service just to make the point that it is most unfair and unbecoming of persons such as Austin Fernando to write on matters he has not researched and make judgments which only serve to damn him. I do hope most sincerely that he confines himself to writing on matters he understands.

As for the Foreign Service, I hope it is statutorily secured as in most countries and professionalized to save it from scavenging predators. The present system of promotions on the basis of seniority must also be done away with and promotions and appointments made entirely on the basis of merit and achievement or performance.

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