> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Madame-Sir - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/madame-sir/ - Published: 2026-09-14T05:10:01.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-14T05:12:19.000Z - Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam - Tags: Obituary, September 2026 Iranganie Manel Abeysekera, the first woman to enter Sri Lanka's career diplomatic service, died in Colombo on September 10, 2026\. She was 93\. She was buried at Borella Kanatte the following day. She joined what was then the Ceylon Overseas Service in 1958, the only woman among eight candidates selected that year. By the time she retired, she had served as Chief of Protocol, as Ambassador to Thailand and to Germany, and had written the Foreign Ministry's first Manual of Protocol Procedure. ## **An unusual entry** She was born on August 14, 1933, the daughter of E.W. Kannangara, a civil servant who served as Clerk of the State Council and later sat in the Senate. She was educated at Methodist College, Colombo, read history at Somerville College, Oxford, and graduated in 1957\. After her recruitment she studied modern languages at New Hall, Cambridge. Somerville later made her an Honorary Fellow. She came home to a country ten years into independence, with a foreign service that was still taking shape. The public service of that period was an almost entirely male institution, and nobody expected the diplomatic service to be different, which did not stop her from applying. Her early postings took her to the High Commission in London as Third Secretary, and afterwards to Rome and Bangkok. From 1970 to 1974 she was Chargé d'Affaires in Thailand, running a mission in her own right at a time when very few women anywhere in South Asia were doing so. A United States Embassy cable from Colombo dated June 18, 1975 identified her as Sri Lanka's first woman career diplomat and described her as articulate and charming. ## **Chief of Protocol** Abeysekera became Chief of Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1974, the first woman to hold the post, and served until 1980. Colombo hosted the Fifth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in August 1976\. Heads of state and government and senior delegations came from across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to a capital that had never handled anything on that scale. It is still the largest international conference Sri Lanka has held since independence. A good deal has been written about what the summit meant politically for Sirimavo Bandaranaike's government and for Sri Lanka's standing in the movement. Very little has been written about what it took to run. Protocol work is usually written off as ceremony. Most of it is the ordinary business of making sovereign equality function in practice. Precedence has to be settled in advance so that nobody argues about it on the day. Courtesies extended to one delegation have to be matched for all the others. A visiting head of state has to be received in a way that costs the host country nothing in standing. At the 1976 summit that meant fixing the arrivals and departures, the motorcades, the seating plans, the bilateral meetings and the official functions, then reconciling all of it against the security arrangements, against what individual delegations expected, and in several cases against the fact that two governments in the room were not on speaking terms. Mistakes of that kind rarely stay administrative for long. Abeysekera ran that operation. Nothing of consequence went wrong, and her name has largely dropped out of the accounts of the summit as a result. Her more lasting contribution came afterwards. In 1980 she wrote the Foreign Ministry's Manual of Protocol Procedure, converting accumulated practice into a written reference that could outlive the officers who had acquired it. Foreign ministries lose knowledge constantly through retirement and transfer, and very little of what a young diplomat learns comes from a document. She set out to change that in at least one area of the work. In 2004, Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar asked her to revise the manual to take account of changes in diplomatic practice since 1980\. She did so and handed him the updated text. Twenty-eight years after the summit, the officer who had managed its protocol was still maintaining the reference her successors would use. ## **Bangkok, 1982** Her best-known crisis came while she was Ambassador to Thailand. In late June 1982, Sepala Ekanayake, a Sri Lankan who had been repeatedly refused an Italian visa and could not rejoin his Italian wife and young son, boarded Alitalia flight AZ 1790 in New Delhi and told the crew he would destroy the aircraft unless his demands were met. The Boeing 747 was diverted to Bangkok. He held the passengers and crew on the tarmac for well over a day, demanding that his wife and child be flown to him, that he be paid 300,000 US dollars, and that he be allowed to leave without consequence. Jurisdiction lay with the Thai authorities, and the aircraft belonged to an Italian carrier. Abeysekera involved herself because the hijacker was Sri Lankan and because the negotiation had reached a point where he would accept assurances from nobody else. She went out to the airport and talked to him until the passengers and crew were released, none of them injured. What happened next is usually left out. On the strength of her assurance, Ekanayake flew to Colombo with the ransom money and his family. He was arrested a few days later after a complaint by the Italian Ambassador. Sri Lanka had no law against aircraft hijacking when the offence took place. J.R. Jayewardene's government faced pressure from Italy to extradite Ekanayake and strong opposition at home to sending him abroad. He was eventually tried in Sri Lanka. She had given her word to end a hostage crisis without bloodshed. What her government did once the aircraft was empty and the hostages were safe was never hers to decide. She later served as Ambassador to Germany, with concurrent accreditation to Austria and Switzerland, and as Director-General of Political Affairs at the Ministry. After retirement, she chaired the Presidential Committee on Women and the Sri Lanka national chapter of the Coalition for Action on South Asian Cooperation. ## **Madame-Sir** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/madame-sir-651eeb-1-1.jpg) ****The cover of** ***Madame-Sir** **, Iranganie Manel Abeysekera’s 2010 memoir of her career and experiences as Sri Lanka’s first woman career diplomat.** In 2010 she published "Madame-Sir": Career and Dilemmas of the First Woman Diplomat in the Sri Lanka Foreign Service. The title comes from the form of address officials fell back on when they could not decide which one applied to her. Sri Lankan public servants accumulate extraordinary experience, and almost none of them write it down. The memoir is one of the few first-hand accounts of the Sri Lankan foreign service and the only one by a woman of that generation. It records the practical difficulties of the work rather than the ceremonial version, including the assumptions and conventions that attached themselves to a woman representing her country abroad but never to her male colleagues. The service she entered in 1958 did not remain a one-woman service. In 1960, Mary Lukshmi Naganathan followed as its second woman career diplomat and the first Tamil woman to reach that level. She was the daughter of Dr. E.M.V. Naganathan, the former member of Parliament for Nallur, and belonged to a family that traced its ancestry to the old Jaffna kingdom. Sarala Fernando, who joined the service in 1975, later became Sri Lanka's first woman Permanent Representative to the United Nations. The Foreign Service of today would be almost unrecognisable to the selection board that interviewed Abeysekera in 1958. Being the first woman to enter the Foreign Service was only the beginning. Abeysekera went on to become the first woman in several roles that had until then been the preserve of men. Jaffna Monitor extends its condolences to her family and to her colleagues in the Sri Lanka Foreign Service.