During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, several YouTube clips from the 1950s featuring youngsters from various parts of the world participating in the Foreign Exchange Programme sponsored by the US government became an internet sensation. Many of these clips went viral and received tens of thousands of hits and hundreds of comments.
For Thailand, the clips on the 1958 programme put the spotlight on a 15-year-old high school student named Saroj Chavanaviraj. Most of the viewers praised him for his witty, smart, yet cheerful and humble responses to questions thrown at him. Saroj was also commended for his evidently good command of the English language despite the fact that he had no prior foreign exposure of any kind before joining the programme.
Fast forward 30 years, and many of us only got to hear the name Saroj Chavanaviraj for the first time in 1988 when he was already a top diplomat in the Foreign Ministry and hailed as something of a national hero for his role as the ministry's resolute spokesperson on the Baan Rom Klao episode -- a short confrontation between Thai and Lao forces.
At the time, Saroj was admired by the flag-waving Thai population, and he was enjoying the equivalent of celebrity status. He could not even walk the streets without being noticed, greeted and thanked by strangers. "It was a time when I came to understand how celebrities must have felt like. Noodle shops would not even allow me to pay for my food," he once told friends.
In the early 1990s, Saroj's name appeared in the news again when, as director-general of the political department at the ministry, he was assigned to be Thailand's pointman during the final leg of the Cambodia peace negotiations. Saroj was working both at the front and behind the scenes to help the Cambodian factions, and all relevant powers, bring peace to the war-torn country. Those efforts helped lead to the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991 and, subsequently, the establishment of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) the following year.
"I remember how dedicated Khun Saroj was to the cause of friendship between the kingdom of Thailand, the Thai people, and Cambodia and the Cambodian people," commented Keo Puth Reasmey, then-private secretary to the late King Norodom Sihanouk and a former ambassador of Cambodia to Washington.
After his successful stint at the political department, Saroj went on to become the permanent secretary of foreign affairs, the ambassador of Thailand to France, and, after his retirement from the civil service, very briefly, the foreign minister of Thailand.
Saroj passed away early Monday morning at the age of 82 as the result of a prolonged illness.
He will be widely remembered as a consummate diplomat, a gifted administrator, a model boss and colleague, but most important of all, as an idealist who chose to look at the world through the eyes of a 15-year-old boy -- and who did his best to try to make the world a better place for everyone.
Darmp Sukontasap is Co-Founder of the Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies (IDIS), Rangsit University.