Columns

As though Sri Lanka’s Government did not have multiple problems in its hands that appear to be getting more complex by the day, there enters a ship into our territorial waters. That is not surprising, for Colombo Port accommodates many from different parts of the world, even a suddenly surfacing Chinese submarine as happened in 2014 when the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was visiting Sri Lanka.

But this is a funny vessel. It appears to be leaking some noxious substance. Then it decides to self immolate within spitting distance, as it were, of the Colombo Port City (CPC), the newly legalised piece of land reclaimed from the sea by some Chinese company that now holds 43 percent of it for 99 years as part of a deal that has sent shock waves in more knowledgeable sections of the Sri Lankan community and elsewhere despite the intervention of the Supreme Court to make it more acceptable.

That was expected to satisfy the dubious and the sceptics. But there are those who continue to insist the country has been hawked to the Chinese and all this political talk of preserving Sri Lankan sovereignty is a lot of rubbish uttered by some who cannot even spell sovereignty let alone understand its implications.

If we are ready to sell our souls to the Chinese leaders who have claimed to be our “all-weather friends” as both sides claim with such self-serving conviction, why is it that Beijing sells its Sinopharm vaccine to us at $15 a dose and to Bangladesh at $10?

Despite professorial attempts to cast doubts over the truth of this with the help of Chinese diplomatic missions, there emerged a message from the Bangladesh Prime Minister’s assistant who confirmed the price our neighbour has agreed to pay.

It would seem our friend, come rain or sunshine, is dragging us further into what some describe as a “debt trap”, thank you very much. The China initiated Belt and Road is fine. But it is the poor Sri Lankans who have to tighten the belt if they can find one.

So this ‘ghost’ ship somewhat ostentatiously named “X-Press Pearl” that emerged from over the horizon after two other countries apparently refused to touch it even with a barge pole heads toward the 270 hectares that the Chinese dug out of the sea.

The timing is interesting when you think of it. The Pearl, if I might call it that, decides to cast itself and sink to the bottom of the sea and die the day before China was to recollect one of the blackest days in its post-revolutionary history. I write this on June 4, when 30 years ago the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders ordered the troops to end the mainly student protest at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The troops did it all right, turning Tiananmen into a new killing field, even moving in a column of tanks in a show of military muscle to crush a protest by unarmed protestors.

Three months later, I went to Hong Kong to work for the Hong Kong Standard. The unprecedented reaction of the people there and the anti-Beijing protests by millions of its inhabitants were still reverberating — during my 10 years there and for several years later. That is until the heavy hand of China’s one-party state under Xi Jinping put an end to Hong Kong’s public show of anger and dissent.

But that’s another story, yet it needs telling perhaps at another time, for several reasons that would be pertinent for Sri Lanka in the months and years to come.

In the meantime, there are stories aplenty in the country that was once home and still is in many ways. In the days gone by when people had more faith in astrologers and “saathara karayas” as they were called, politicians and their hangers-on whose livelihood depended on hanging-on as long as possible, would have rushed to these forecasters with horoscope in one hand and a sheaf of betel in the other.

Here in the UK, those with a passing knowledge of Buddhism or have heard of “karma” — often misused in conversation or in writing — are wont to say that what is happening in Sri Lanka (in fact in the world today) is as a result of the “karmic law”.

Back in that country like no other, those of older generations or village inhabitants would call it the “karumey”. But our karumey is the political class and those aspiring to political leadership or prominence.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)