It is refreshing during these troubled times to read this volume of selected writings and speeches of the esteemed Sri Lankan diplomat and UN official Jayantha Dhanapala. As noted in the Forward by former ILO senior official Padmanabh Gopinath, “This publication is also most timely. For the pillars of global order, to which he made so significant a contribution, are now being challenged, and its values denigrated”. (i)
For an individual with such a lengthy record of public service, initially to his native country of Sri Lankan then to the international community as an Under Secretary General of the United Nations and finally as an advocate for civil society, both domestically as a peacebuilder and globally via heading the international Pugwash movement, compiling a single volume of writings must have posed a real challenge to the editors. They have responded well to this challenge opting for a thematic classification of his output during the principal stages of his life and orienting the reader with concise introductions to each section.
The themes vary but prominent among them, as the editors enumerate in their Introduction, are “the need to strengthen the international ‘rule of law’; the urgency of meeting development needs; administrative reforms in the UN system, countering terrorism; and the role of civil society … ”.(v) While there is ample evidence of Dhanapala’s rigorous thought and universal empathy in statements on all such themes, for this writer and many others it will be Dhanapala’s contribution to the cause of disarmament that will be pre-eminent.
As President of the 1995 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty’s Review and Extension Conference, he was instrumental in facilitating the conference’s historic decision to extend the treaty indefinitely. In his soft-spoken, measured manner, Dhanapala presided over the “package” of decisions with respect to objectives for non-proliferation and disarmament, a strengthened review process and a resolution on a Middle East WMD-free zone that enabled the conference to agree on the indefinite extension of the NPT. But as the editors remind us, this diplomatic triumph was only one aspect of his dedicated pursuit of “the indefinite extinction of some of the world’s deadliest weapons, a task he pursued as the Under-Secretary General of the UN for Disarmament Affairs from 1998 to 2003”. (vii)
His impressive combination of high ideals and clear-eyed analysis is well demonstrated in the statements selected from this period. He recognized that an international system dominated by nation states would often be in tension with the aspiration to build a more inclusive sense of international community that the UN represented. In the spring of 2001 he wrote “.the nation and its associated ideology, nationalism, continues to provide a formidable obstacle to constructive international cooperation on an enormous variety of common global problems”. (21) He continued however by affirming that “ … we are also seeing the gradual emergence of an awareness throughout the world of our common humanity. The track record indicates that the nation state and globalization are surely not mutually exclusive concepts”.(22) Forever the pragmatist, he recognized that states would have to be persuaded that it was in their interest to take the actions that would benefit the common weal.
This task was probably the most difficult to accomplish in his chosen field of disarmament. Reflecting the development concerns of the majority of UN members, he was conscious of the “opportunity costs” inherent in choosing “guns over butter”. In delivering the Olaf Palme Memorial Lecture in 1999, Dhanapala drew attention to the high levels of military spending worldwide, which he observed was “an alarming figure relative to the innumerable alternative social and economic uses to which even a fraction of that sum could be productively allocated” and pointedly noted that “The annual budget of the UN’s Department for Disarmament Affairs is roughly half the value of one fighter plane”. (58)
Although it would not make him friends in some quarters, Dhanapala was dogged in his espousal of disarmament over alternative approaches. He stated: “We must not seek managed proliferation, nor what might be called ‘the game of arms control’ but disarmament as the destiny for all weapons of mass destruction”.(66) His assessment of what was needed to achieve progress in disarmament is as valid today as it was in November 2001 when he declared: “The key challenges ahead are twofold: to strengthen the political will to achieve disarmament goals, and to strengthen the rule of law to consolidate incremental goals”.(35)
As a diplomat who early in his professional career embraced civil society, Dhanapala encouraged greater public engagement with international security issues. He called for the mobilization of a “disarmament complex to take on the nuclear weapons complex”.(67) Later on, he would continue to embody civil society in its pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons as President of the Nobel Prize winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
The last part of the book chronicles Dhanapala’s return to Sri Lankan where he took up the mantle of the peacemaker after a bloody civil war and as a distinguished exponent of peace building. Although a “citizen of the world” in the fullest sense of the term, Dhanapala never became remote from his native land. In a reflection on the great Chilean poet/diplomat Pablo Neruda, he writes “No diplomat can succeed unless he is deeply rooted in his country and his culture”. (13) This was also true of Dhanapala and this volume’s title clearly reflects the pride of his compatriots for this “Sri Lankan Son”. For many engaged in multilateral diplomacy he will also be remembered as the embodiment of the modest, but deeply devoted international civil servant. The editors have done a great service in bringing this insightful and inspiring collection together and in making it available to a broad readership.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Paul Meyer
Paul Meyer is a former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament. He is currently Adjunct Professor of International Studies, Simon Fraser University and Chair of the Canadian Pugwash Group.