Sri Lanka’s Neutral Foreign Policy
LANKA COURIER FEB 08, 2021
The following article has been adapted from the address by the President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the general debate of the 75th Session of the United…
Features ….. Foreign Relations of Sri Lanka
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Admiral Columbage’s Interview in his capacity as Secretary for Foreign Affairs has drawn a Sharp Critique from Daya Gamage and an Interpretative ‘Dogfight’ between Gamage and Chandre Dharmawardena ….. so this presentation of the FULL COLUMBAGE INTERVIEW is food for thought ….and perhaps more sabre rattling. .… Editor, Thuppahi
Core-group working on SL seeks consensual resolution at UNHRC – Foreign Secretary Admiral Prof. Jayanath Colombage: The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) will have its 46th session between February 22 and March 19. Sri Lanka is on the agenda this time and will come under review based on the resolutions 30/1 adopted in 2015 and two other subsequent rollover resolutions. Sri Lanka co-sponsored these resolutions under the previous government. However, the new government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa withdrew from co-sponsorship in March, last year. Against the backdrop, Foreign Secretary Admiral Prof. Jayanath Colombage shares his views with Daily Mirror on the preparation for it. Excerpts of the interview with him:
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Gerald Peiris in Kandy, in Email Note dated 25th January 2021:**
“Yes, Michael, ……………… I agree. There is a lot of overlap between what I have been trying to convey [in public and/or govt forums] and what young Shukra is supposed to have said (though I didn’t see her perform).
You are probably aware that downtown Kandy has a fairly large Muslim presence. I got to know some of them in the course of my fieldwork for ‘Planning for the Future of Kandy’ (2019). They were very cordial and cooperative, and fluent in Sinhala. A few of them are grandchildren (now in middle age) of my contemporaries at Kingswood in the ‘50s. Their clientele consists almost entirely of Sinhalese.
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Neville Weeraratne, being Chapter IX in his opus, entitled “Collette’s Cullings. The satirist’s fine line”
COLLETTE: Cartoon comment in the Observer following a ‘43 Group exhibition.
Everybody enjoyed Aubrey Collette’s work though he would not have satisfied every political aspiration. You turned to him for your reading of the day, originally in the Times of Ceylon, later in the Observer, and then as ‘Spur’ in a series he did for the Daily News as well. He gave a sharp edge to his drawing which, indeed, was capable of cutting deeply but never maliciously. Collette had the rare and splendid gift of observation: to remember a foible, to swiftly size up a characteristic, and enjoy having summed up the hapless one who had fortuitously wandered into his sights. To have been noticed by Collette was itself honour enough, and those who had been so distinguished by a portrait, as in Collette’s 1954 FACES – a collection of seventy-three pastel studies – soon bought them up, more for the immortality it conferred on them than for the fear of what their enemies might make of the caricatures. Collette very simply had the gift of showing some how others saw them, bestowing upon them the poet’s wish. You might have rejected these insights as subjective had you not yourself been drawn inevitably into the process of assessing the subject.
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A gutted building that is near the beach on Mount Lavinia has been an eyesore for the last 33 years. It was once the Tilly’s Beach Hotel, which was owned by a Tamil businessman. The hotel was a favourite among residents of Colombo as well as German and Russian tourists. Colomboites would enjoy the Sunday Lunch Table Buffet, while many tourists had a mad crush on the handsome head chef, a culinary genius who understood Russian and German besides his native Tamil, Sinhalese and English.
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Uditha Devapriya who notes that the article that followw here was published in two parts by “The Island” in its “Midweek Review” of December 2 and December 9, 2020. It has since been edited to incorporate information which at the time of writing the author was not able to add.
Napoleone di Buonaparte
I: Viewed in retrospect, the yahapalanaya regime seems almost a bad memory now, best forgotten. This is not to underrate its achievements, for the UNP-SLFP Unity Government did achieve certain things, like the Right to Information Act. It soon found out, however, that it couldn’t shield itself from its own reforms; that’s how 2015 led to 2019. Despite its laudable commitment to democratic rule, the yahapalanists reckoned without the popularity of the man they ousted at the ballot box. November 2019, in that sense, was a classic example of a populist resurrection unparalleled in South Asia, though not in Asia: a government touting a neoliberal line giving way to a centre-right populist-personalist.
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VISIT https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/83263 ………………. Michael Roberts. Oral History Project : 303
154 interviews by Michael Roberts of retired public servants who had served in Sri Lanka (mainly in the Ceylon Civil Service), politicians and other notables.
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An Introductory Note from Michael Roberts, 30 September 2020
This ramified tale begins with the wedding photograph sent to me my old playmate Adrienne Ranasinghe nee Conderlag displaying the elegant couple and entourage in front of the All Saints Church in the fort of Galle. This spark has set Joe Simpson, a Galle lover who taught at Richmond College for a while and is back in Canada now, off-and-running. He saw that the best man at the wedding was Louis Joseph and sent me an old article he had composed on the Joseph family. This essay is now adorning the Thuppahi web site as well.
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Udith Devapriya in Daily Mirror, 15 August 2020, where the title reads “Four lessons from my father”
My father was the first in his family and my mother’s, to foretell Mahinda Rajapaksa’s rise to power in the 1990s. At the time the man was in charge of Labour and Vocational Training, a threadbare though challenging ministry if ever there was one. Challenging, not because one could not do much in it, but because by then the SLFP’s approach to labour had begun to depart from its traditional vantage point.
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