Over the last decade I have gone, every year or two, through the papers I have collected over the years that bore on my work. This was because I have long felt that we need to maintain records, and often they benefit from substantiation through what was put on paper at the time. This was particularly true with regard to my time at the Peace Secretariat, and even after I wrote up my work in those days I kept the papers because I thought it important to have evidence of what was effected in terms of reconciliation. This was not least because I kept hoping that this would be taken seriously at some stage, and future decision makers and administrators could build on good practices from the past.
In this regard I should note the importance of the information I gathered from regular visits to Divisional Secretariats, which seemed of little interest to anyone else. Ministers supposed to chair consultative committees and ensure action did not bother about these meetings, not at least those in the areas in which I worked. They postponed them at whim, public servants were too nervous to take action on their own, and simple difficulties, with regard for instance to health facilities or transport, which could have been resolved through better coordination, were ignored.
I thought a better system of coordination could be put in place, and I still have the records of what was proposed by a committee set up by the UN, with invaluable input from Asoka Goonewardene, the former public servant who had been the lynchpin of the Finance Commission. We did get a positive response from the then Secretary to the Ministry of Public Administration, P. B. Abeykoon, and he sent out one circular about coordinating committees, but then he stopped working when the silly season of elections set in 2014.
But then I got very optimistic because Maithripala Sirisena had in his manifesto a commitment to make Divisional Secretariats the centre for service delivery, and I was even more excited when he made Mr. Abeykoon his Secretary, and defended him against members of his coalition who had complained that he had served the Rajapaksas. But then I discovered that Maithripala Sirisena had no interest in his manifesto, and Mr. Abeykoon was overwhelmed and did nothing productive. That was one among many reasons for the abject failure of the Yahapalanaya Government, the determination on almost all sides – as Malinda Seneviratne once graphically put it, noting that I was the solitary exception – to work not development and remedying the errors of the last Government, but for winning the election that would follow.
Aware that nothing has moved in this regard for over a decade since Asoka and I and the UN put forward suggestions, and aware too now that I have no further role in public life, I should really throw those papers away. But having once again gone through them, I find the ideas so interesting that I will keep them for perhaps a year or two more.
In the midst of the fascinating record of what I tried to do, in those distant days, there were also other interesting elements, especially evidence of how positively the UN had worked with us during the war. I still have the letter the UN sent to a daily English paper, the editor of which in those days was implacably opposed to the Government and the forces, protesting about a perversion of a statement the UN had made, and objecting to their claim that the UN had called the refugee centres death camps. All that brought back memories not only of how divided the country – or rather Colombo – was about the war effort, but also of how ridiculous we were in not working sensibly with the senior members of the UN who still subscribed to the principles on which the UN had been set up, of national sovereignty.
They did have queries about some things that happened, but we should have addressed these honestly, with respect for their qualms, for they were not prejudiced. But by not doing so, we opened the gates for the prejudiced, the Darusman report, the Petrie report which excoriated the senior leadership of the UN in Colombo, and then the hostility of the world at large, exemplified by India whose genuine concerns we refused to consider.
In this regard I was vastly entertained by a set of minutes of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Foreign Affairs, to which I had not of course been appointed, given G. L. Peiris’ qualms about anyone he saw as a potential rival. Instead the Committee had youngsters with whom he sought to curry favour, and they hardly ever attended meetings, even Sajin vas Goonewardene who had been appointed to monitor that Ministry attending just one of the meetings of those for which I have minutes. The few people who did attend concerned themselves with parochial matters, and though I must appreciate Ranjan Ramanayake’s concern for foreign workers, this should not have been the forum to raise such matters. The Consultative Committee should as the Standing Orders envisaged have been about policy, and monitoring the output of the Ministry, while as had it in my proposed amendments to Standing Orders, details should have been looked at in a monthly meeting held on the Ministry premised, when concerned officials could have been summoned, without them all wasting time by trotting along to Parliament, where they never had more than half a dozen Parliamentarians to raise issues.
Interestingly, when the storm broke, Basil Rajapaksa did make an effort and, realizing that the Consultative Committee was not a useful instrument, proposed sub-committees of Government Parliamentarians to make suggestions as to how to positively influence different regions. He actually overcame his suspicions of me enough to suggest I draft some concept papers, and I started on this, but when the members of the sub-committees were announced, it turned out that GL had struck again, and I was dispatched to Siberia. Still, since I had been given Russia and the confederation, I did make an effort, but we never met. I pushed for a meeting, and one was fixed, and the Foreign Secretary, Amunugama in those days, came to Parliament, but the Minister did not, and sent word that we were not to meet until he was present. And of course he did not come, and that was the end of the initiative.
Reflecting on all this, one can only laugh, though I fear that, as when the Pope considered Atticus, one is close to tears, given all the opportunities this country has missed.
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