UNESCO and having a good time in Paris with Lankan friends

Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama auobiography

“Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations for peace should be sought’

UNESCO Motto

At the age of 43 I became a senior official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Is a specialized body of the UN on a par with FAO, WHO and ILO. After the war, by common consent, the UNO was located in New York, while the other four agencies were set up in three major European cities – FAO in Rome, WHO and ILO in Geneva and UNESCO in Paris. Needless to say the relevant host countries were happy to accommodate the UN and provide many local services as part of their responsibility.

A large number of nationals provided basic services while the professional staff represented the UN’s global membership. The first Director-General of UNESCO was the British scientist Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous, who is credited with writing the motto quoted at the head of this chapter. He established the ground rules of the organization which were very British in character. The DG in my time was Mahtar M’Bow from Senegal who, though alleged to favour Africans, made an attempt to have a fair distribution of positions.

The fact that Sri Lanka was not over represented unlike the Indians and Bangladeshis may have been an added factor in my favour when I became a candidate for the post of Director of the IPDC. India had a strong candidate for the post in Unnikrishnan who was the Managing Director of the Press Trust of India. I knew Unni when he was the PTI correspondent in Colombo before he was promoted to be its General Manager.

He had invited me for some PTI seminars held in Bombay after I became the Secretary of the Ministry of State. I was

lodged in a hotel in the heart of the city which had been the haunt of Krishna Menon when he was a member of the Lok Sabha and Minister in the Nehru Cabinet. The hotel was close to the PTI office. That honour did not work for me since I came down with viral hepatitis after my stay in Bombay.

There was also a whole host of African candidates including a well-regarded Professor of Communications from a Nigerian University. As mentioned earlier, on being selected I was asked to assume duties at the earliest possible date. I replied that I will be available from September 1, 1982.

UNESCO Headquarters is located in two buildings which are close to each other in a salubrious quarter of Paris. The main building designed by Le Corbousier with sculptures by Henry Moore outside and paintings by Picasso inside, is in Place de Fontenoy facing the main entrance of the French Ecole Militaire which is the legendary army school in which Napoleon was trained.

Close-by across the road is the newer ‘Batiment’ [building] built in Brutalist style which houses the Culture and Communications division and branch offices of the embassies of the countries represented in UNESCO. In the basement is also the duty free commissary which is well patronized by the staff and is invariably choc-a-block, particularly on Fridays when the ever thirsty officials stock up for their weekend parties.

The DG, M’Bow, the former Minister of Education of Senegal, was located in the Fontenoy building which had a floor for his administrative staff. He also had an apartment on the top floor in which he lived with his wife and where occasionally he invited us for dinner particularly if it was in honour of a visiting dignitary from our part of the world. Once he invited the visiting Balangoda Ananda Maitriya Thero for a ‘dane’ in his residence, where we were the helper. The reputed monk was very old and not in his proper senses. In his ‘anusasana’ he said that the world was held aloft by tortoises. My friend an Indian architect who translated the priest’s words into French told me that he had edited out a lot of the gibberish so that the highly educated audience would not laugh at the old monk.

Another dinner was held for a few of us who were to accompany M’Bow to New Delhi to participate in it seminar on communication and also meet Indian PM Indira Gandhi. Indira was a fluent French speaker who had represented India in the Governing Council of UNESCO when she was a member of Shastri’s cabinet. So no translators were needed and our DG, who was always nervous about his poor English, had a long and pleasant conversation with the Indian PM.

Secretariat

The IPDC office was located in a tower in the new building in Rue Miollis. Top levels of the tower was occupied by the communications division of UNESCO. Gerard Bolla as ADG ruled the roost from the topmost floor. In the floor below were the ‘intellectuals’ led by Antonio Pasquali [Venezuela] and Alan Hancock [UK] who together with us at IPDC, dealt with the conceptual issues of the New Information Order.

Two floors below were taken by the `engine room’ which comprised of media specialists who provided training and advice to national media institutions of the ‘Third World. They were basically technicians who could fix practical problems of the media. They were led by Pierre Naveaux, a hard drinking Belgian who had been the head of a Film Unit there and his assistant Frank Goodship [Canada].

There were also numerous broadcasters who were led by a Philipino ‘Choy’ Arnaldo. Choy had been with Radio Veritas, the Catholic Broadcasting station located in Manila.

Later Lakshman Rao [India] joined Hancock on a short term assignment. They were a motley crew who were somewhat nervous about the interest in a new Information Order by member states and the establishment of IPDC. Earlier they had an easy time girdling the globe advising radio stations and film units. My challenge was to coopt their services and their budgets to achieve the objectives determined by the Governing Council of IPDC which were to create a transformation in global media capability and its practice.

In the IPDC secretariat I was assisted by Claude Ondobo from the Camaroons who had his work cut out because of the demands of the emerging African countries for both technical assistance

and training. The majority of African members in our governing council came from authoritarian states which were getting a ‘bad press’ in western media and wanted IPDC to do something about it.

Since our focus was on developing countries I encouraged Claude to increase African participation in IPDC activities and also sought funding for those projects by creating ‘funds in trust’ with money from

Scandinavian countries.

Our ADG Bolla also made sure that the IPDC had good secretarial assistance. The leader of our support staff was the experienced Madame Hoareau, an English woman married to a Frenchman, and who had earlier been Bolla’s private secretary. It was a kind gesture on his part to help me who was new to the UN bureaucratic practices which entailed a lot of form filling. I also had the feeling that this placement helped the ADG to keep tabs on the activities of the IPDC.

The UNESCO establishment from M’Bow downwards was apprehensive that due to political interests, IPDC could function outside their chain of command. I am sure that Hoareau would have given good reports about us because Bolls soon began to treat us as his favourites. The second secretary of our office was Nadia, a friendly and capable lady of emigre Russian stock, who by a happy coincidence was earlier married to a Frenchman named Jacques Renault whose family had tea plantations in Talawakelle.

Jacques was close to Sri Lankans in Paris and would unfailingly attend our embassy parties. Nadia had visited Talawakelle as a young bride and had good memories of Sri Lanka though by this time she was divorced and Jacques had married a well-known artist who too was a regular participant at our embassy soirees. Once, when on holiday back home, I visited Jacque’s tea property. The present Tea Research Institute is located on lands acquired from his company before they were restricted to fifty acres by land reform.

There is a beautiful old church on this property, but it is badly neglected now. In addition to the regular staff we also had a young French `stagiare’ who helped Claude with his African projects. This over allocation of resources to IPDC was queried by UNESCO’s staff management committee of which Ananda Guruge was a member. Bolls and I appeared before them and after listening to us the committee decided to approve the current allocation of staff. That was the only time I had to cross swords with the management reviewers of UNESCO.

Paris — `The City of Light’

Right from my school days Paris was the city of my dreams. That fascination may have begun with the stories which Mr. Kannangara, our middle school teacher had spun for us – tales of the Count of Monte Cristo. Once a week he transported us to pre-revolutionary France when narrating the adventures of Jean Valjean and his adversaries. At about the same time we saw films about the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ who spirited noblemen away from Paris and the guillotine.

In our University days we were inspired by the French Trotskyites and as supporters of the LSSP read every instruction sent to our leaders by the ‘revolutionaries’ of the Fourth International based in Paris. The struggles between the different lines’ espoused by Trotskyite intellectuals within the Fourth International as played out in LSSP tactics on the ground in Sri Lanka, which varied from time to time, were diligently explained to us by Doric de Souza in his weekly clandestine lectures to us in Peradeniya. As the poet Wordsworth said of the French Revolutionary era, which may well be used to describe us in our youth; “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; but to be young was very heaven”.

Though I settled down in Paris in 1982 I had visited ‘The City of Light’ every year since 1977. From my first visit in the 1960s I had attended several meetings in Paris and also spent time with friends there. For instance I was in Paris in 1981 when the French Socialist Party won the Presidency with Francois Mitterand as its candidate. We joined in the partying on the Left Bank which went on till morning and saw red roses, the attractive symbol devised by the ‘avant garde’ marketeers of Mitterand, that were strewn everywhere.

On another occasion, as I have related earlier, I joined the multitude of young men who accompanied the cortege of Jean Paul Sartre for burial at the cemetery in Montparnasse. I had witnessed the massive May Day rallies organized by the CGT or the Communist Party’s Trade Union as it wended its way from the heart of Paris – the Bastille. Equally impressive were the military parades marking the Fourth of July. I naturally looked forward to an interesting stay not only in my new job but also in the wonderfully artistic city which had been mercifully spared the bombings which had obliterated cities like Berlin, Dresden and parts of London.

My first task was to find lodgings till I could get more spacious accommodation when my family arrived. I was lucky in that my many friends helped me to settle in comfortably. Three of my best friends in Paris – Manu Ginige, Premachandra and Navaz – were all living in apartments in a building in Rue de Lilas in Paris 19, close to the Buttes Chaumont. This had been once the Bohemian quarter of Paris and was now a Communist stronghold.

Premachandra was a Communist who had as a young man first migrated to Moscow from Colombo. After some time there he had crossed over to Paris and married Irene, a girl of Greek nationality .He had raised a family of two girls and a boy and was working as a ‘cordon bleu’ chef in Radio France. He was missing Sri Lanka badly and had managed to persuade his friends, Ginige and Navaz, to occupy flats in his building. There was another vacant flat in the building and I rented it.

Our presence was duly noted by other flat mates, many of them Communists, who jocularly called our building ‘Maison Sri Lankaise’ or Sri Lanka House. Prema and his wife loved to cook and most evenings were spent in his or Manu’s flat eating, drinking and discussing politics. Any Sri Lankan politician coming to Paris – but particularly Dharmasiri Senanayake their long standing friend – was entertained by the Premachandras.

All the visitors were asked to bring along were Sri Lankan newspapers and ‘pol’ arrack which he shared with us. Since Prema was a practicing chef who used to cook for the bigwigs of Radio France, he would try out his classical French menus on us. Needless to say we were happy to oblige him and compliment him on his mastery of French cuisine. On some Sundays we would go with him to the local arrondissement market to see him buying fish and poultry after examining and prodding the product.

The local charcouterie staff reserved special cuts of meat for him and the butcher was happy to be complimented by a cordon bleu chef. After about six months in Rue de Lilas all of us began to put on weight because of Premachandra’s sauces and sugary confections. Prema who was smoker into the bargain, got a heart attack to which he succumbed several years later. His only exercise was a Sunday stroll in the nearby park selling the Communist Party newspaper, ‘Le Humanite’.

Another visitor to Prema’s apartment was Esmond Wickremesinghe. He too was fond of good food though he had been warned about his health. Later we arranged an apartment for him with cooking facilities, close to UNESCO headquarters. A staffer from the embassy Abeyratne would cook his cholesterol and sugar free meals as ordered by the doctor. Whenever I hosted a party in my apartment I would invite Ananda Guruge and his wife Sujatha as well as Daniel Lefevre of UTA who also loved good food, to join our gang.

Since Manu and Navaz were embassy staffers at that time I would invariably join them in their soirees. Duty free liquor flowed freely at these parties and friends of Sri Lanka from all professions would congregate to support the embassy. Among the regulars were Bernard de Gaulle, a nephew of the famous leader, Jacques Renault and his wife who were artists, Daniel Lefevre and local heads of travel Companies like Neckermann, Club Mediteranee, UTA and Accor.

Some of the big wigs of French companies operating in Colombo were also present sometimes with their Sri Lankan representatives who were visiting Paris. A smattering of Asian ambassadors and local businessmen were also invited. Though usually it was bitterly cold outside the parties suitably fuelled by hot drinks and chillied curries went on late into the night. Sri Lankan parties were popular since unlike the Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis we served vintage scotch and champagne at our parties.

After Ananda Guruge became the Ambassador he stopped serving liquor and attendance dropped dramatically, especially from among the foreign guests. In Paris there were Embassy parties almost every evening as most countries were represented in France. Each Embassy wanted to outdo the other in attracting the Parisian elite. Good champagne and top of the order whiskeys were a great incentive for inveterate party goers who went from one embassy to another and were not averse to bad mouthing the poorer embassies.