Angelo Rasanayagam: UN Diplomat in World’s Troubled Places

Angelo Rasanayagam, retired UN diplomat who worked for nearly three decades with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), passed away in Colombo, on Wednesday, December 9. He was 84 years old, and had been living in Colombo for the last four years. While at UNHCR, Angelo covered practically every refugee hot spot in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean countries that erupted between 1971 and 1996, including the Vietnamese Boat People crisis when he was stationed in Hong Kong, and the Afghan imbroglio from Peshawar, Pakistan.

An alumnus of St. Joseph’s College, Colombo, and the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, where he completed English Honours in 1959, Angelo taught at St. Benedict’s College for a few years before leaving for Geneva, Switzerland, in 1964. He pursued graduate studies in Political Science, Economics and International Affairs at the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, completing his Masters, but interrupting his doctoral studies to join the UNHCR. Over 25 years, he was Chief of Mission in Thailand, Laos, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Iran, and Pakistan, and frequently travelled to Latin America and Africa from Geneva as the Regional Officer for those continents.

His most challenging assignments were in Hong Kong (1979), at the peak of Vietnamese boat people exodus, and in Pakistan (1991-93) during the Afghan crisis. It was in Hong Kong that Angelo publicly rebuked a visiting US Congresswoman from California, who later became a US Senator, for talking out of turn to the media. And out of his work in Pakistan and Afghanistan came his magisterial monograph, entitled, Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Between their itinerant diplomatic postings around the world, Angelo and Anandi, his wife of 46 years, established their home in a garden bungalow in Coppet, a little hamlet outside Geneva. He stacked his house with collector’s books and works of art, loved his garden roses, enjoyed his music, exercised his culinary skills, went to the theatre, besides reading and writing all the while. After retirement, he even volunteered into municipal politics for a while in Coppet, under Switzerland’s impeccably orderly local government system. For neighbourhood company, there were always the likes of Kofi Annan, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and other UN or international dignitaries. He was perfectly bilingual in English and French, fluent in German, and he found time to master Greek reasonably well during his stint in Cyprus.

He was the son of the late X.J.S. Rasanayagam, well known teacher and principal in Catholic schools in Negombo and Colombo, and Ranee (Xavier) Rasanayagam. Angelo would later write that his father “filled their house with books”, while his mother “loved and cherished” him. He is survived by his wife Anandi (nee Vanniasingham), and his siblings, Mano Alles, Lakshman, Vasanthi Visvalingam, Soundari Selvarajah, and Amali Philips. He was a kinsman of mine and we became brothers-in-law when his sister, Amali, married me.

Born and raised in a large Catholic family, and a much larger extended family of uncles, aunts, and cousins, his easing into a long career in international diplomacy may have been serendipitous, but everything else about Angelo’s life, personality, character, generosity, conviviality, values, and interests were quite pre-ordained in the settings of his home and in the social universe of his upbringing. He used to reminisce that as a 16-year old, he started proofreading for ‘Tamil Culture’, the first international academic journal devoted to Tamil studies that was launched, in 1952, by Reverend Thani Nayagam, our mutual uncle.

More than anything else, Angelo’s intellectual pursuits shaped his life even as he navigated through a career of attending to displaced people in some of the most troubled parts of the world. And in his diplomatic work he found the niche for what became his virtual life work – the study and understanding of Muslim and Islamic societies. His depth of historical scholarship and well grounded insights informed his journal articles and book reviews on the history and politics of Muslim societies and evolved into a comprehensive work on Afghanistan that was published in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

The book was praised as a “magisterial work” that connected Afghanistan’s “difficult past with a difficult present in order to extract necessary lessons for the future.” It is not often that Sri Lankan scholars and writers in the social sciences produce a work of recognition on a subject that does not involve Sri Lanka. Angelo Rasanayagam’s book on Afghanistan belongs to this rare genre of scholarly writings, and is a fitting legacy to his life work and interests.

Rajan Philips