EDITORIAL : THE DAILY MIRROR, SRILANKA

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Diplo-muts drag Lanka towards disaster   Since the non-violent people power revolution of 1956 brought the S.W.R.D Bandaranaike government to office, the bedrock and cornerstone of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy has been the hallowed, time tested principle of non-alignment. Successive governments of both the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party essentially followed this policy, though we saw tilts to the socialist east block during the Sirimavo Bandaranaike era and to the capitalist western block during the J.R. Jayewardene era when Sri Lanka adapted the globolised capitalist market economy policy for which the people are still paying a terrible price. S.W.R.D Bandaranaike said non-alignment was not just a passive fence-sitting attitude or approach to international affairs but a commitment to the hilt – a commitment to dialogue and accommodation in conflict resolution and to a more equitable distribution of the world’s wealth and resources. Political giants like Yugoslavias Jozef Tito, Egypts Gamal Abdul Nasser and Cubas Fidel Castro played a major role in building and consolidating the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). For Sri Lanka the high point came in 1976 when the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government hosted in Colombo the summit of the 102 nation NAM. In recent months, especially in the aftermath of the report of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s panel of experts who probed alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa Regime appears to be in a foreign policy muddle and drifting away if not damning NAM. Two weeks ago – amidst increasing pressure from the United States, the European Union and even India for the setting up of an international independent court to probe alleged genocide here – President Mahinda Rajapakse visited St. Petersburg in Russia to attend a summit of what appears to be a new Sino-Russian political and economic bloc. While the west and India are often known to play double games or treble games to achieve their own geo-political and economic agendas, the role of China, Russia and other countries may also be the same. The difference is that despite all the deception and double standards in the west, the principals of democracy are kept alive through checks and balances among the executive, the legislature and the judiciary with good governance, transparency and accountability ensured to  a large extent by a vibrant free media. This is not the case in China and Russia. Trade and exports are vital in developing a new Sri Lanka and 90 percent of our trade and exports are with the west and India. The government is also relying heavily on a tourism boom and it must be aware that last year only about 15,000 tourists came from Russia and China while as many as 150,000 came from the U.S and E.U countries. Instead of taking reactive decisions which have dangerous long-term consequences the government needs to work out a clear-cut foreign policy and remain on the middle path of non-alignment.