Corruption is a luxury cruiser sailing exclusively outside Europe and non-Anglo waters, it seems, somehow finding safe harbour only in our parts of the world.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s no surprise the recent New York Times (NYT) article, \u2018How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough up a Port,\u2019 muddies four distinct issues: Mahinda Rajapaksa\u2019s alleged corruption, Sino-Lanka economic ties, alleged Chinese expansionism, and Magampura Port\u2019s viability.<\/p>\n
The NYT allegations and selective facts are blatant: Their estimates of ship arrivals to Hambantota use 2012 data, rather than the over-10-times higher 2017\/18 figures. Imputations of China funding the Rajapaksa campaign repackage a now-buried tale first published by Lanka\u2019s State-owned Daily News in 2015. A key informant for the piece is a recently-appointed Editor-in-Chief of state-owned Sunday Observer. Another, is the disgraced former Finance Minister of the doomed Yahapalanaya project.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the former Government (now Opposition) denies being funded by China, and the current Government (former Opposition) denies pressure to \u201ccough up\u201d Magampura Port by China. So where does this all this back-and-forth respiratory rasping leave us? Cough-cough!<\/p>\n
We need a historical and geopolitical clearing of the throat here. Let\u2019s contextualise Hambantota\u2019s erased history of suffering, the counter-hegemonic role played by China in the global economy, and Sri Lanka\u2019s need for industrialisation.<\/p>\n
A hasty history of Hambantota \u2013 Port of the Sampan<\/p>\n
Colombo always misapprehends Hambantota. Take Leonard Woolf\u2019s oft-celebrated Village in the Jungle, where a Colombo capitalist Casanova tries to seduce a local married woman, promising to make her husband a gamb\u0101ray\u0101. Yet Woolf dared not explain how this gamb\u0101ray\u0101 post was created.<\/p>\n
Five hundred years of colonial invasion rendered Ruhuna\u2019s Magampura \u2013 Hambantota \u2013 desolate, the region\u2019s flourishing dry-zone civilisation (with vibrant links to Asia and Africa) destroyed, including industries such as ship building.<\/p>\n
English wars post-1780s, their massacres of 1818 and 1848, and attendant regional land-grabs, bequeathed scattered and impoverished peasant settlements there by the late 19th century.<\/p>\n
The English handed stolen Crown Land to colonial and local absentee landowners for paddy cultivation, who hired on-site managing agents (gamb\u0101ray\u0101s) to exploit local peasants and migrant landless labourers. With moneylenders and merchants also preying on these tenants, who even resorted to hunger renting, capital gushed into parasitic Colombo, and further West.<\/p>\n
The 1980 ban on eco-friendly hena cultivation diverted those lands to Western boondoggles, creating even greater impoverishment. Resistance was met with nationwide massacres of at least 60,000 people in the late-1980s, with Hambantota bearing the brunt. This wrought neither cough nor hiccup from the \u2018international community\u2019.<\/p>\n
Origins of the Magampura Port Project<\/p>\n
A UNP Government once declared: \u201c\u2026The construction of a seaport at Hambantota is a project of \u2018high priority\u2019 aimed to strengthen \u2026 maritime industry and help Sri Lanka regain its historical position as a maritime hub in South Asia\u2026 A seaport at Hambantota would improve the economic situation of the southern region, viewed as Sri Lanka\u2019s poorest region and stimulate the industrial development of the region. The proposed port is viewed as a hub on the Europe-Middle East and Far East shipping corridor and a gateway to the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh sub-continent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first practical Hambantota proposal came in a 2002 GoSL report, \u2018Regaining Sri Lanka: Vision and Strategy for Accelerated Development,\u2019 with present PM Ranil Wickremesinghe\u2019s UNP in Government, though SLFP\u2019s Chandrika Kumaratunga remained President.<\/p>\n
With a planned 2005 launch date, a Canadian Government-funded feasibility study was contracted to notorious SNC Lavalin, a Rockefeller-oil-front which spawned the Canadian \u2018aid\u2019 agency CIDA (that also funded feasibility of JR\u2019s post-\u201977 accelerated Mahaweli boondoggle).<\/p>\n
In 2003, a SLPA-linked ministerial taskforce reviewed the Lavalin study, declaring it \u201cnot bankable\u201d, and \u201cnot a full feasibility study\u201d. The taskforce report noted the Grand Master Plan objective to study the entire Hambantota terrain\u2019s geophysical data was not achieved; while identifying factual errors.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka\u2019s Ministry of Ports Development and Development of the south, and the Ports Authority (SLPA), after a 2001 call for tenders, selected and paid Denmark\u2019s consultancy firm Ramboll for a new Hamban-Port feasibility study.<\/p>\n
With Western and Indian loans not forthcoming, China was invited to step in and construct the port following the Danish report\u2019s specifications.<\/p>\n
Oceanic ports do not bloom instantly, but require decades to develop hinterland and trade. Unlike Colombo\u2019s congested port, Hambantota handles goods including large car carriers, requiring more worker hours. It\u2019s good for southern workers \u2013 and would get even better if they make and load bikes, three-wheelers, cars, ships and machinery to be sold here and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Outside our own determination, who could help us enable such a transformation?<\/p>\n
Assessing allies: China and the USA<\/p>\n
Imperialist interference in Sri Lanka escalated after our 1948 transit from crown colony to crown dominion. In 1952 the US blocked aid after our Rubber-Rice Pact with China, which US adviser to \u2018our\u2019 Central Bank, Theodore Morgan, called a \u201cMilitary-Political-Economic offensive against the Free World!\u201d<\/p>\n
Western-backed Big Pharma\u2019s sabotage of Senaka Bibile\u2019s progressive national pharmaceutical policy is well known. Less known is the US Embassy in Colombo\u2019s threat of sanctions after the GoSL moved to ban genetically modified food in 2001.<\/p>\n
A Carnegie Mellon University study analysing data from 117 elections worldwide, found US interference in at least four Sri Lankan elections (1956, twice in 1960 and 1965). In 1970 and 1977, US funds bankrolled the UNP. WikiLeaks revealed US Embassy \u201cconcern\u201d about JVP \u201cmisappropriation\u201d of financing for General Sarath Fonseka\u2019s presidential bid. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry recently admitted to US spending $585 million to \u201cpromote democracy\u201d in several countries including ours.<\/p>\n
As for China, the 1952 Rubber-Rice Pact was signed by a US-allied, avowedly anti-communist UNP Government. It was Sri Lanka that approached China for loans as Western and Indian credit \u2013 hungry for short-term projects with quick returns \u2013 was not forthcoming. More recently, China agreed to help the hapless Yahapalana Government despite their election on a campaign of racist insults.Sri Lanka cannot afford to alienate sources of credit alternative to the predatory IMF and World Bank, whose structural adjustments exacerbate \u201cthe development of underdevelopment\u201d. China\u2019s economic rise offers a post-Western-hegemony new multipolar world, which serves Lanka\u2019s interests if harnessed strategically.<\/p>\n
\u201cDebt-trap diplomacy\u201d and \u201cString of Pearls\u201d<\/p>\n
The loudest coughing cacophony on \u201cChina\u2019s debt-trap diplomacy\u201d comes from the Indian Center of Policy Research, funded by the Indian Government and such US funders as the Bill Gates, Hewletts, Omidyar, Ford, and Asia Foundations (all sellers of overpriced industrial goods and services).<\/p>\n
The \u201cString of Pearls\u201d allegation that China is using civilian facilities to build a chain of Indian Ocean naval and military bases originates in a 2004 report to the US Department of Defence by Booz, Allen, Hamilton, a US military think-tank contractor \u2013 employer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, who accessed top-secret reports due to its lucrative Pentagon links.<\/p>\n
Even a 2013 Economist article says, \u201cChina\u2019s growing empire of ports abroad is mainly about trade, not aggression\u201d, echoing Beijing\u2019s insistence it does not seek hegemony. Nevertheless, the NYT repeats this \u201cSoP\u201d argument, while ignoring the scatterplot of US military bases around the world including our region.<\/p>\n
This NYT article comes out when the Central Bank Bond fraud has undermined their allies\u2019 claims to \u201cgood governance\u201d (Yahapalanaya). US attempts at provoking a military confrontation in the South China Sea, since Obama\u2019s \u201cPivot to Asia,\u201d have been replaced by internationally condemned trade wars, with Trump firing the first salvos.<\/p>\n
After April\u2019s Modi and Xi summit, relations between India and China have improved. Beijing-based Global Times opines, the USA<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026 hopes India can play an essential role in balancing the rise of China. Does India really want to play the role that the US expects? \u2026this strategy has a strong military stance against China. At the very least, it is redividing Asia-Pacific with Cold War thinking \u2026 It is better for India to look to China for ways of self-development. What India can learn from China is that its ability to stand on its own feet will determine its place in Asia and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
The message from Beijing, of self-reliant cooperation for mutual advancement, is surely more persuasive than Washington\u2019s confrontationist superpower agenda beyond its expiry date. Self-reliance should also be our stance!<\/p>\n
Regaining Sri Lanka<\/p>\n
Hambantota offers an alternative to the dictatorship of Colombo\u2019s mercantile elite, who believe village idiots don\u2019t need modernised facilities that provide better jobs, and should stick to seasonal, low-productivity cultivation.<\/p>\n
As an entrepot based on a productive hinterland, Hambantota could become a manufacturing base for modern industrialisation of a historically-marginalised region. It could provide a template for the development of Sri Lanka\u2019s peripheries, allowing them to shake off the parasitic port of Colombo.<\/p>\n
Yet export industrialisation is a short-term solution. A home market for locally produced goods is vital for sustainable development. Will our usurious banks and their import-happy merchants invest in it?<\/p>\n
Leaving the NYT aside, can our media inspire a national conversation to develop the country in this way?<\/p>\n
The real corruption is in the multinational corporate system of lobbying, kickbacks, insider-trading, pricing, tax avoidance, and capturing the country\u2019s wealth wasted in imported conspicuous consumption by a Colombo cabal that has served the West faithfully for centuries.<\/p>\n
Courtesy: Daily FT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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