The corona mystery: Lanka squanders opportunity to head vital body
The Trump administration has continued to fuel a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus is a biological weapon which leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
But a credible response to that theory may eventually have to come from the Geneva- based Biological Weapons Convention ( BWC ) Implementation Support Unit which was to have been chaired by Sri Lanka from December 2019 to November 2020.
Sri Lanka's Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador A.L.A.Azeez, who was elected as chairperson last year, was recalled to Colombo in February 2020 with no designated successor from Sri Lanka to chair BWC till November 2020.
However, the Foreign Ministry, for some unexplained reason, officially informed the BWC in Geneva that the elected Sri Lankan chairperson would not be available to offer his services -- even without double checking with the ambassador about his availability.
The alternative could have been to nominate the new Sri Lankan envoy in Geneva to be the new chairperson or even nominate a senior Health Ministry official to take over the post since it legitimately belongs to Sri Lanka.
This was a missed opportunity to boost the successes of our President’s Task Force in controlling the Covid19 pandemic at a time when Sri Lankan leaders are lamenting that they are not getting wider international recognition the country deserves for its success in battling the spreading disease.
Harking back to a similar diplomatic debacle of a bygone era, Sri Lanka’s then Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Shirley Amerasinghe, was a key figure and chairman during the drafting of the historic Law of the Sea treaty back in the 1970s. But when there was a change in government in Colombo, he was ousted as our Ambassador.
When the drafting process continued through the 1980s, the Sri Lanka government, for personal or political reasons, refused to give Mr. Amerasinghe even an official status as a delegate so that he could have continued to chair the meeting.
But in a re- sounding slap to the then government, Mr. Amerasinghe was re- elected chairman in 1980 by the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea— despite the fact he had no credentials as a national delegate of any country, least of all Sri Lanka.
Perhaps it was one of the first such re- elections in the history of the world body.