Editorial

The President flies to an important and long overdue destination next week – Beijing, China. It is not a state visit, but a working visit to participate in China’s flagship ‘Belt and Road’ Forum where he is also to meet with the high and mighty, the movers of China and the shakers of world affairs.

In what appears to be a harbinger of good tidings prior to the visit, the Chinese surprised everyone by announcing this week that they had reached a ‘tentative’ agreement on Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring efforts. This, however, did not go down well with the rest of the Paris Club creditors who question if Sri Lanka is negotiating with China differently. The timing of China’s announcement on the eve of the IMF/World Bank meeting in Morocco could not be a coincidence either.

China – as a major creditor of debt-ridden Sri Lanka – had to be virtually dragged to the table over Sri Lanka’s desperate moves to get out of its bankruptcy. It argued that any bilateral agreement would create a precedent vis-a-vis other debtor nations, especially countries in Africa.

Widely accused by the West of indulging in a systematic policy of extracting concessions after submerging poor countries in a ‘debt trap’ with development loans that could not be repaid, especially after a worldwide pandemic that also started in that country, China, naturally, has strenuously denied that that is the case.

Sri Lanka will surely continue seeking Chinese assistance to escape from the debt trap it has fallen into.

Unsolicited projects in Sri Lanka with grease all over were dangled in front of politicians of yesteryear with their senior officials in cahoots. The country received a port, an airport and many other things without a local plan to sustain them. The port at Hambantota only served China’s long-term strategic interests and the way they secured the deal was a national disaster.

One fact that cannot and must not, however, be forgotten is China’s steadfast support to Sri Lanka to end the scourge of an armed separatist insurgency that dragged on for 30 years due to active support from India and passive support from the West for the terrorists.

It may have been due to China’s own interest to help Sri Lanka against an Indian and West backed insurrection in Sri Lanka, but it is vulgar in the extreme to question such motives of a friend who answered Lanka’s desperate call for arms at the time when others refused.

While China has unreservedly backed Sri Lanka in international forums like the UNHRC, it is not that Sri Lanka has not reciprocated. It has backed China at every turn. It has even gone the extra mile, being a Buddhist-majority country, to refuse a longstanding request by the Dalai Lama of Tibet to pay homage at the Temple of the Tooth due to Chinese opposition to the visit.

China is now a global economic powerhouse and has been a longstanding friend of Lanka. Its octopus-like tentacles are spreading far and wide. It is testing the waters of the Indian Ocean with an expanding blue water navy to ensure any possible future Western sanctions will not throttle its lifeline to the rest of the world. Its latest forays into Sri Lankan ports of call have pitted this country against China’s enemy states as a result.

Sri Lanka is key to keeping the Indian Ocean a relative zone of peace amid the warring parties vying for supremacy, with the latest in this direction being the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) launched during the recent G20 summit in New Delhi in what some analysts see as a move to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Sri Lanka is being buffeted by the ‘big boys’, but it must navigate the ship of state between a rock and a hard place in these stormy seas for what is best for the country under the circumstances.

It must stick to its neutrality as a friend of all and an enemy of none. That must be the golden thread that runs through the fabric of its foreign policy.

Not war, but a two-state solution

The Arab-Israeli volcano in West Asia or the Middle East as it is more commonly referred to, has erupted once again with its furious lava devastating the unfortunate holy land of the area.

The blame game goes on – and the burning question of who started it – will go back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 during the era of Western colonialism that led to the creation of the state of Israel without a solution for the ejected Palestinian people.

The immediate escalation is the surprise land, sea and air coordinated attacks on Israel by Hamas, the non-state actor. The offensive is payback time for state-sponsored terrorism by Israel against the Palestinian people, say Hamas. The scale of the military onslaught by Hamas is what had drawn international attention – not the long-suffering lives of those in occupied Palestine.

For Sri Lanka, taking sides is a difficult proposition. It has abandoned its once unwavering support for the Palestinian cause which even saw the closure of the Israeli embassy in 1970 only to invite them back to help in the defeat of the LTTE.

Furthermore, on the one hand, Sri Lanka has faced the scourge of terrorism by non-state actors and on the other, been itself accused of state terrorism in defeating such non-state actors in terrorist activity.

The ongoing war in Israel and Palestine is slowly expanding to the rest of West Asia and this is not good news for Sri Lanka and its workers in the region. Wars in the region in recent years from Kuwait to Iraq, then the pandemic, resulted in hits on the Sri Lankan economy. There is also the ominous possibility of disruption to oil supplies for the world unless the conflict is contained.

There is no answer to this decades-long conflict other than the two-state solution as the state of Israel is a fait accompli and the ousted Palestinians need a sovereign state for themselves.