Scandinavian aid and World View International Foundation

Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography

Norway which was a poor country at the beginning of the 20th century quickly became very rich after the discovery of North Sea oil. These offshore oil deposits in the cold seas between Norway and Scotland changed the fortunes of Scandinavian countries which earlier depended on fishing for their national income. Another factor was that Norway was a Protestant Christian country which believed, as much as feasible, in social equality and charity. All Norwegian churches collect a tithe which is reserved for charity.

Much of their missionary work was in East Africa, particularly Tanzania, where the local people were not subject to extreme cruelty as in the Belgian Congo or South Africa. Norwegian missionary activity was benign because they had no imperial ambitions. For instance Julius Nyrere, the Tanzanian leader was a Christian, schooled in a Nordic missionary institution. It was much later that Norway was interested in Asia – Sri Lanka in particular. Like other Scandinavian countries which had got rich and also had a history of brutal subjugation by Nazi rulers in the thirties and forties.

Norway set up a foreign funding agency called NORAD. NORAD began to fund small projects in South -Asia- At this juncture most western donor agencies began to select ‘target countries’ where they could invest with the hope of obtaining good results. With JRJ’s policies which were perceived as ‘rolling back socialism’ and being more liberal in associating with foreign donors, Sri Lanka became the number one target country for donors like NORAD, SIDA [Sweden], FINNIDA [Finland], DANIDA [Denmark] and CIDA [Canada].

Our Finance Ministry was in a good position to negotiate with these donor agencies on the basis of viable project proposals. We had excellent bureaucrats like David Loos, Nihal Kappagoda, Wickreme Weerasooria, Sivagnanam and Akiel Mohamed who could interact with these agencies easily and efficiently. Foreign aid flowed freely to Sri Lanka before the communal riots of 1983.

The World View Foundation was born in this milieu. Two young cyclists from Jaffna had reached Oslo. Radio Norway sent one of its talented reporters named Arne Fjortoft to cover this story. Arne and his wife Ragnar were well known TV and radio journalists and they not only featured the story of the cyclists and found jobs for them in Norway but also wanted to help the people of the North by setting up a factory to make and repair fishing boats. This was a Norad funded project which was approved by the Sri Lankan government and was named the CEY-NOR which even today is managed by our Ministry of Fisheries.

But this was a very bad time for building and repairing boats because very soon the Tamil insurgents [many of whom were later to establish the LTTE] acquired some of these boats. The sea was their lifeline for survival as they could retreat to a ‘base area’ in southern India whenever they were on retreat from the SL army. CEY-NOR was sponsored by the GA Jaffna Wimal Amarasekere but by accident or design it became a project of great interest to the terrorists.

Arne handed over CEY-NOR to the GA and came down to Colombo. Here going back to his familiar trade he entered the field of Information and Communication and set up the World View Foundation with partial support from NORAD. His first contact was with our Ministry but Anandatissa was lukewarm about sponsoring a foreign NGO. At that time Hameed, the Foreign minister, had established links with Scandinavian countries and was soliciting funding for projects in his electorate. He had obtained funds from FINNIDA for a water project in Harispattuwa which was so irregular that it led to an inquiry in the Finnish Parliament and the sacking of the Head of FINNIDA after the media highlighted his culpability.

Hameed’s unorthodox behavior of soliciting funds bypassing the Finance Ministry was referred to President JRJ and a circular was issued by the Treasury prohibiting Ministers from soliciting funds for their own projects outside the procedures laid out by the Department of External Resources. Despite the Harispattuwa scandal Hameed persisted in soliciting funds from foreign countries. A donation from a Korean businessman was not accounted for and a police investigation was launched. An indictment was ready in the Attorney General’s office during President CBK’s tenure when Hameed died suddenly of a heart attack.

While Anandatissa hesitated Hameed jumped into the fray. He accepted the post of Chairman of the Board of WIF. Arne had established WIF with a powerful Board of distinguished personalities which included Bondevick who became the Prime Minister of Norway. At a later time Arne himself contested for a seat in the Norwegian Parliament as a party leader and was expected to be the Minister of Development Assistance but his party fared disastrously and he could not make it. I had visited his electorate Stavvanger with him and was surprised when he was defeated.

WIF contributed to our TV training which was badly needed m view of our foray into Television. I visited Nepal, Thailand and Bangladesh where WIF ran important projects. The ‘power ‘, behind the Nepali throne’, Royal Councillor Chiran Thapa was on the WIF Board as was Police General Chavalit of Thailand. In Bangladesh Mohammed Yunus was a leading member of WIF.

I will refer here to two imaginative projects undertaken by WIF. In Nepal where there was incredible poverty in the highlands WIF pioneered the ‘TV letter to the King’. Our young cameramen went to the poorest villages and recorded the complaints of the villagers which we screened for the King as arranged by Chiran Thapa. This disclosure, we were told, had distressed the King who initiated action on land reform in our target village. The Director of the ‘TV letter’ project, a young US returned Nepali Subhadra Belbase, later became well-known in Kathmandu as a social activist.

After WIF Subhadra joined the UN to work among Nepali farmers. The Bangladeshi project attempted to tackle river blindness which was caused by malnutrition. We were told that the simple remedy for this disease which was caused by the lack of a vitamin was readily found in a variety of Banana recommended by WHO and found in plenty in the delta. With the help of the ‘Thana’ or divisional administration WIF undertook a publicity programme followed by the distribution of banana shoots for the poor who could not even afford that. This was a successful project which was later adopted by the Bangladesh government with good results.

WIF was the first international organization to popularize the Yunus concept of setting up groups of credit worthy village women entrepreneurs which was later picked up and recommended by the World Bank. Perhaps the promotion of Yunus in the Norwegian media helped in his selection for the Nobel Prize which is a Scandinavian initiative. There were many such projects including the introduction of media studies to the University of Chiang Mai in Thailand, which earned a niche in practical development strategies for WIF unlike the discussion oriented AMIC. Unlike AMIC many UN development agencies worked closely with WIF. However they ran into problems after expanding faster than they could cope with.

UNESCO

The global debate on the New Information Order took a greater urgency due to the rapid escalation of the Cold War. With the ascent to power of Ronald Reagan as President of the US, the laid back approach of Jimmy Carter was replaced by a greater competitive spirit. While special attention was paid to the arms race because only the US economy was strong enough to produce `both guns and butter’, the USSR economy had to choose one or the other. Reagan’s challenge by unleashing his ‘Star Wars’ weapons programme, undercut the Soviet boast that they were on a par with the West.

At the same time resurgent China, having overcome the disastrous Cultural Revolution, was also gaining ground and the rapprochement of Nixon and Mao was perceived as a potential threat to Soviet hegemony. With the Vietnam War concluded, the US could now focus on its economic strength. All these cross currents were at play in the international arena. The UN system in particular was under scrutiny by the US which kept on proclaiming that it was the UN’s major financial contributor.

Reagan took a personal interest in the Information debate. He rightly perceived that it was a veiled attack on American dominance all the way from his favourite Hollywood film industry to the new communications frontier technology which was a byproduct of their space research programmes. They were now spoiling for a fight. The President revamped the USIS or Information Service [which was rebranded as USIA – the Information Agency] and placed it under a crony who had been a band leader in Hollywood.

As Secretary of the Ministry of Information I was invited to tour the USA and view its communications facilities. This tour which was sponsored by the US Education Foundation took me from the East coast to Hollywood in the West coast and onto Hawaii and back to Colombo through Japan. It was an amazingly well-organized tour which had been arranged with the cooperation of our embassy in Washington. The Ambassador at that time was Professor W.S. Karunaratne whom I knew from my Peradeniya days. He had arranged a dinner at his residence with eminent Washingtonians who knew me.

Among them were Howard Simon of the Washington Post who had played a major role in exposing President Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Howard was a keen ornithologist who had visited Sri Lanka the previous year to study birds in our hill country. One day he burst into my office to complain that he could not get a hotel room near Kandy. I immediately telephoned Hunnas Falls Hotel which was supervised by the Hotels Corporation in my Ministry, and arranged for a deluxe apartment. His bird watching was a success and he wrote from Washington to thank me.

He gladly accepted our Ambassador’s invitation for dinner. We also had Dillon Ripley from the Smithsonian Institute. My Ministry had supported the survey of wild life in our country, particularly the elephant population, and their chief local contact was Lyn de Alwis, the head of the Zoological Gardens and a legend in our times. Lyn was a difficult person and I had to intervene several times on his behalf because I knew of his dedication.

The Pinnawela. Elephant Orphanage and later the Singapore Zoo were his creations. Another dinner invitee was Alan Whicker who brought his TV unit to Sri Lanka for a coverage for his popular TV series. Indra de Silva who was my friend from USIS Colombo had taken early retirement and had been granted US citizenship. He was living in Washington and had contacted several American diplomats who had served in Sri Lanka. They too were present, making the evening a very pleasant and productive one for our Embassy.

In this tour the first stop was Washington where I visited the Congress on the Hill and spoke to some Congressmen who were interested in the communications debate. Then I spent time in the Aeronautical and Space Exhibition Centre which was a novel attraction in Washington with its displays of original spacecraft and details of the moon landing. I was permitted to touch the moonrock that had been brought back to earth by the Astronauts. The Curator of the Exhibition was a close friend of Arthur Clarke whose name opened many doors for me in the space research world.

Then I flew to Los Angeles and was lodged in the famous Wiltshire Hilton which was patronized by Hollywood film stars. From there I took a cab to Burbank which was being transformed from a Hollywood movie lot to shooting floors for several upcoming Television series. TV was fast taking over from the classic film studios of the past like Paramount, MGM and Twentieth Century Fox. Movie production was being passed over to the ‘Independents’ or movie makers who made their own films and came to the ‘movie giants’ only for distributing their films.

Since I was from Asia I was taken to a film distribution Office in Wiltshire Boulevard. I was surprised to find that their whole Asian film distribution system was computerized and required only a few secretaries and accountants to manage the operation. This contrasted with our Film Corporation which was full of political appointees who were running the distribution operation with a mountain of files.

Leaving Los Angeles I flew to Honolulu to renew my contacts in the University where my friend Professor Juergensmayer was the Head of the Department of Religious Studies. I also met Mary Bitterman who served as the head of Voice of America under President Carter and Wimal Dissanayake attached to the East-West Centre. It was also an oppornunity to meet ‘Babu’ Wickremeratne and his family again and join in a cook out on Waikiki Beach.

My impressions of the US approach to the New Order debate and reading of the literature about it was useful for the Asian in UNESCO. It was clear that because of his Hollywood ground and links with the communications equipment manufacturers, Reagan would take a personal interest in this debate unlike in the past when State Department officials called the shots. He was also committed to the notion of a ‘free press’ partly because it was related to the First Amendment of the US Constiution and partly because it was a vital ingredient in his commitment to confront Communism. But he was open to the argument that the US would be a beneficiary in the investment communications technology and therefore should engage positively with the ongoing debate.