Ravi misses vital BIMSTEC meeting, Wasantha rushes to Kathmandu
Foreign Minister Ravi Karunanayake resigned from his portfolio on Wednesday, just hours before he was scheduled to board a flight to Bangkok and thereafter catch a connecting flight to the Nepali capital of Kathmandu.
He was to lead the Sri Lanka delegation to the 15th ministerial meeting of BIMSTEC -- the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi- Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). The meeting was inaugurated on Thursday by Nepali’s Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba.
Mr. Karunanayake was expected to meet the South and South East Asian Foreign Ministers, including India’s Sushma Swaraj and Nepal’s Krishna Bahadur Mahara. The Kathmandu meeting, among other matters, was to discuss the formation of an Eminent Persons Group, a Free Trade Agreement among BIMSTEC members and a Memorandum of Understanding for a Grid Interconnection. The four-day meeting was also to review the progress and achievements in the identified fourteen areas of cooperation and discuss the ways to accelerate cooperation under the BIMSTEC process.
Mr. Karunanayake’s resignation placed Foreign Ministry officials in a quandary. Who would represent Sri Lanka at the event? It turned out that the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Wasantha Senanayake was away in the Philippines. He was attending the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) Regional Forum meeting in Manila. Several foreign dignitaries including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took part in the event.
That meeting had ended by the time it became necessary to cancel travel bookings made for the then Minister Karunanayake and his officials. State Minister Senanayake was tracked down in Singapore and was asked to proceed for the BIMSTEC event in Nepal. He boarded a flight and arrived in Kathmandu just in time for the event.