November 19, 2013,
President Mahinda Rajapaksa with Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma at the final press briefing in Colombo yesterday.
(Pic by Nishan S. Priyantha)
By Lynn Ockersz
The ascension of Sri Lanka to the chairmanship of the Commonwealth of Nations, while being a foreign policy triumph of sorts for this country, presents Sri Lanka with a challenge which it cannot permit to go unmet. That is, Sri Lanka could seize this opportunity to establish that it is able and willing to be a practitioner of democratic norms and values or prove its critics right that it is incapable of doing so and that it is, indeed, degenerating into authoritarianism.
