Sinhala speaking Russian PM looks for Syria’s smoking-gun

Amid the resounding victory for the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) in the Northern Provincial Council election comes the story of a political muddle.

A UPFA candidate distributed roofing sheets to voters in several areas. The man who made speeches in Tamil told them " Veetukku Podunga." A literal translation would mean "put it for the house."

The candidate who failed to win a seat learnt from one village that he had made a mistake in making that remark. Most voters had cast their votes to the ‘house’, the symbol of the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK). Little wonder he lost.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was in the news last week over the breakthrough agreement with the US on the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons, was a onetime junior diplomat in the Russian Embassy in Colombo in the early 1970s.

According to a former UN Tass correspondent, who was also based in Colombo at that time, Mr. Lavrov was so fluent in Sinhala that one of his duties was to translate key political stories from Sinhala newspapers into Russian.

Later, the affable, chain- smoking Lavrov was Russia's Permanent Representative at the UN. And by a coincidence, he was a contemporary of Peter Burleigh Snr, former US Ambassador in Colombo. Mr. Burleigh was another Sinhalaspeaking foreign diplomat, who served in the Security Council along with Lavrov in the 1980s.

When former Secretary-General Kofi Annan tried to impose a no- smoking rule in the UN building, Mr. Lavrov was defiant. Asked by reporters for his response, he pulled out a cigarette, lit it up outside the Security Council chamber and said: "This building does not belong to Kofi Annan, it belongs to member states." And he was right.