Nudging Norway

The flurry of speeches made by a roving President could knock detractors off balance, due to the quantum of diplomatic pitches made from the rostrum. His call was essentially conciliatory, but with that easy-speak, he carried a big stick.

This got the goat of some of his detractors, to put it that way.

When he said that he hopes bi-lateral relations would be enhanced between Norway and Sri Lanka, for instance, that seemed to cause apoplexy in some in known political quarters. Norway could be, and has been accused of showing Viceregal tendencies, but to be accused of being a bad friend?

The record of that meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister in the UN peripheries, if it is to be placed in the crosshairs, paints the exactly opposite picture of a supplicant President.

The Norwegian Prime Minister distanced himself as he can from the pronouncements of various actors who make garrulous statements from their SLMM cubicles.

That distancing was a coup for Sri Lanka, but it was taken as a calamity. This reaction of negativity to the meeting, therefore reeked of an inability to come to terms with reality.

It also showed basic discourtesy on the part of detractors who failed to realise that the President's first major diplomatic foray opened many fronts.

One was to Norway. One was to Switzerland. He addressed also the Pakistanis, and all participants at the democracy roundtable.

This week's issue gives a user-friendly guide to all of the diplomatic overtures that Mahinda Rajapksa made on his first major hearts and minds campaign overseas.

The Norwegians also were at a receiving end of a lesson in gentle assertiveness. The LTTE should not be given parity of status, the President said.

If the Norwegians adhere to such a request, and treat the LTTE as the underling in the peace brokering that is mediated by them, there wouldn't be any reason for a third party to cavil about the fact that Sri Lanka is seeking better bilateral relations with Norway.

Norway should not be like some red Salmon tin label to any tyro in diplomacy. Norway should not be a red flag to any bull at all....

****

A 'peace guerilla'

'The LTTE cannot defeat us by terrorism or by any other means', the President told a packed Asia Society audience, headlined the Daily News...

That should have been a twinned headline with the one that followed the next day in a different newspaper, which said that the LTTE is ready for early talks.

That punctuality is almost knocking us off our bearings. An organisation that has been variously described as being ruthlessly efficient and fascist in its resolve, is not calling but clamouring for peace.

What fathered this schoolgirl primness in the LTTE is the condition described in the first headline in the Daily News.

The LTTE could not defeat the Sri Lankan forces, but seemed coming close to serial defeats that would take the organisation closer to getting defeated by the forces

Without rubbing that reality in, it's also relevant to re-order those words, and place the rider as the first part of the President's sentence. He said '' the LTTE cannot defeat us by terrorism or by any other means'

If he said 'the LTTE cannot defeat us by any other means or by terrorism', he would have placed the accent where it should be, given that his speech was delivered at the fag end of a gruelling diplomatic foray into one of global diplomacy's most coveted political locations.

'Peace' is also a way in which LTTE seeks to defeat the Sri Lankan government, it's one of those other means that provide an exit-way for a terror group that has been partially vanquished.

It appears now that the LTTE is on a peace overdrive converted from a war overdrive that was touted from the time of its leader's last heroes' day speech. Not mere collectors of the news-minutiae but also the uninvolved observer would remember the LTTE leader's grandiloquence when he declared 2005, and then 2006, the LTTE's years for war - the final assault, sometimes dubbed 'the final solution.'

From that rhetoric to genteel dipolmatese is a long sojourn for the LTTE. It's in tandem therefore that President Rajapaksa has switched his own gears.

He went on a diplomatic campaign as if to underscore the fact that anything the Tigers can do, he can do better. He is now a peace guerrilla, in a manner spoken.

That was best shown in his address to the Asia Society at which he balanced the nuances of a peace campaign and an armed campaign to very great effect.