By C. A. Chandraprema Courtesy The Island

The global liberal mafia has already begun mobilizing against the Rajapaksas in anticipation of their return to power. Last Friday, Brahma Chellaney of the American funded New Delhi based NGO Centre for Policy Research wrote an article to the international web page Project Syndicate on the possible return of the Rajapaksas to power with the apocalyptic sounding title “The End of Sri Lankan Democracy?” Chellaney is an interesting character. He is the spin doctor credited with having invented the ‘Chinese debt trap’ theory, which was applied to Sri Lanka as well in relation to the Hambantota port. The theory that captured the imagination of the Western dominated international media was that the Sri Lankan government had been forced to lease the Hambantota port to the Chinese because they were unable to service the loan of 1.26 million USD taken to build the Hambantota port.

This is not borne out by the facts at all. The amounts borrowed for the various projects initiated by the Rajapaksas is minuscule in comparison with the commercial borrowings of the yahapalana government in the past five years. For the yahapalana government especially, 1.26 million USD is peanuts – just one afternoon’s borrowings. The total amount that had to be paid by 2036 in relation to the loan taken to build the Hambantota port is USD 1,266 million capital + USD 495 million in interest – a total of USD 1,761 million. By the end of 2016, nearly USD 500 million of this total amount had already been repaid. Thus Sri Lanka had no difficulty at all in repaying this loan. Be that as it may, we are told by the foreign liberal media that Sri Lanka was forced to sell the 1.26 billion USD port because we could not pay back the money taken to build it and nothing that we say will convince them otherwise!

The man responsible for this spin on things is supposed to be Chellaney. Some think he is a RAW operative, but it is highly unlikely that RAW would allow one of its operatives to work for an American funded NGO. It seems only too clear that Chellaney is an American agent operating from New Delhi. With the yahapalana government leasing the Hambantota port to the Chinese, the latter ended up getting a port in Sri Lanka which they would never have got if the Rajapaksa government had been in power. The Rajapaksa government was going to run the port itself. In fact, at the time the government changed, documents had already been signed to lease the container terminal in the port to the two Chinese companies that became the bidders to lease out the entire free port including its 2,000 hectare industrial park. The Chinese company that now manages the port was originally a joint lessee of the container terminal in the port.

The media reported recently that Japan’s NYK, the largest vehicle shipping company in the world had come to an agreement with the Hambantota port to use it as a transhipment hub. This too was a deal that was originally struck between SL and NYK when the Rajapaksas were in power. Had the Rajapaksas remained in power, Sri Lanka would have had a port in Hambantota, and not the Chinese. The fact that China now has a port in Sri Lanka is entirely due to the change of government in 2015, which the Obama administration was largely responsible for engineering. The US Ambassador in Sri Lanka at the time, Michelle Shison was up to her eyeballs in the regime change project in Sri Lanka. She was instrumental in not allowing Ranil Wickremesinghe to contest as the presidential candidate that year and insisting that the UNP agree to a common candidate.

The former US Secretary of State John Kerry had himself revealed that in 2015, the US had spent USD 585 million ‘to promote democracy’ in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nigeria in 2015 alone. So what happened in 2015 was that the USA spent money to bring into power the government, which provided the Chinese with a free port in Sri Lanka! This is one of the biggest foreign policy fiascos in modern world history. It would have come as a delightful surprise to the Chinese when they were offered the Hambantota port on a platter by the Obama administration’s puppet regime. The Chinese had never once asked the Rajapaksas for the port. Initially, the yahapalana government was so anti-Chinese that they stopped all Chinese funded projects as soon as they came into power.

A fig leaf to cover a free port

One of the things that motivated the yahapalana government to finally give up its infantile opposition to China was because the flood of aid and investment that it was expecting from their Western backers never materialised. Another reason why Wickremesinghe gave the Hambantota port to China could be as an act of vengeance as the US had deprived him of the chance to contest the 2015 presidential election. At the provincial council elections held in 2014, it was only too obvious that the trend was going in favour of the UNP. But RW had to forego the candidacy due to American pressure. Chellaney is the American sponsored Indian spin doctor who provided the explanatory fig leaf to conceal the Obama administration’s embarrassment when the Sri Lankan government brought into power by them, handed over a valuable strategic asset in the Indian Ocean to the Chinese. One would be hard put to think of another fiasco of this magnitude in the history of maritime politics.

True to form in this latest article on Sri Lanka Chellaney states apocalyptically that “… the Rajapaksa family’s potential return to power is welcome news for Chinese President Xi Jinping. But it is bad news for practically everyone else.” He paints the possibility of the Rajapaksas returning to power in the darkest colours possible. He says, “One of Asia’s oldest democracies may be in jeopardy. Sri Lanka’s presidential election next month, is expected to bring to power another member of the Rajapaksa family, whose affinity for authoritarianism, violence, and corruption is well known While Sri Lanka’s democracy survived the last test – an attempted constitutional coup by outgoing President Maithripala Sirisena a year ago – it may not survive a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency”.

The entire article that he has written is nothing but a repetition of all the accusations hurled at the Rajapaksas over the past several years.

“Mahinda’s decade-long tenure, which ended in 2015, was characterised by brazen nepotism, with the four Rajapaksa brothers controlling many government ministries and about 80% of total public spending.”

“By steadily expanding presidential powers, Mahinda created a quasi-dictatorship known for human-rights abuses and accused of war crimes.”

“Mahinda’s pro-China foreign policy allowed for the swift expansion of Chinese influence in Sri Lanka – and rapid growth in Sri Lankan debt to China. It was the debt incurred during the last Rajapaksa presidency that forced Sirisena in 2017 to sign away to China the Indian Ocean’s most strategic port, Hambantota, along with 6,070 hectares (15,000 acres) of nearby land, on a 99-year lease.”

“There is little reason to doubt that Gotabaya would revive his brother’s corrosive legacy. Simply by becoming president, he could gain immunity from two lawsuits pending in US federal court over war crimes allegedly committed while he was Sri Lanka’s defence chief.”

“During the war’s final years, thousands of people – from aid workers and Tamil civilians to the Rajapaksa family’s political opponents – disappeared or were tortured. And the final military offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels was, according to the United Nations, a “grave assault on the entire regime of international law,” with as many as 40,000 civilians killed.”

“According to the wartime military commander, Sarath Fonseka, Gotabaya ordered the summary execution of rebel leaders as they surrendered.”

International political Mafiosi

The spin that Brahma Chellaney has put on the presidential elections in Sri Lanka is the clarion call of the international liberal mafia. Even though there has been regime change in the USA and Britain as well, the effects of regime change in the USA and Britain have not been felt in Sri Lanka largely due to the liberal deep state in the USA and Britain and also to the fact that the government we still have in Sri Lanka is a creation of the ousted liberal regimes in the USA and Britain. The defeated global liberal Mafiosi are fighting back everywhere and Chellaney is the adavance party working on Sri Lanka. He is trying to organize opposition to a possible return of the Rajapaksas to power by saying things like the following:

“The Rajapaksas have already used the Islamist bombings (on Easter Sunday that killed 253 people) to fan the flame of Sinhalese nationalism. And Gotabaya has promised his supporters that, if elected, he will strengthen the intelligence services and reintroduce surveillance of citizens, in order to crush Islamist extremism. The prospect of an alleged war criminal still wedded to extrajudicial methods becoming president rightly terrifies minority groups, the media, and civil-liberties advocates.”

“Gotabaya’s camp has also confirmed that, as president, he plans to “restore relations” with China. Given Sri Lanka’s strategic location near the world’s busiest sea-lanes, the implications of this pledge extend well beyond the island. Indeed, Sri Lanka could play a pivotal role in the struggle for maritime primacy between China and Indo-Pacific democratic powers (India, the United States, Japan, and Australia). China’s “string of pearls” strategy has been encircling India by securing strategic military and commercial facilities along major Indian Ocean shipping lanes.

“… the Rajapaksa family’s potential return to power in Sri Lanka is welcome news for China, which hopes to turn the country into a military outpost … A Gotabaya presidency would… help China gain strategic supremacy in the Indo-Pacific.”

Chellaney has sought to organize India, the USA and Japan against the Rajapaksas by saying that a Rajapaksa restoration would turn Sri Lanka into a Chinese military outpost and that China would gain ‘supremacy’ in the Indo-Pacific. This kind of idea had much resonance in 2014-2015, but it is very unlikely that India especially, would fall for such propaganda this time around. Before 2015, there was no Chinese-run port in Hambantota. After the regime change in 2015 now there is one. India knows better than anybody else that if this government continues for another five years, there is no telling what else they will see coming to Sri Lanka as the yahapalana government sells parts of the country off to the highest bidder.

India knows through experience that what they need on their southern border is an independent country with a strong government that can run the economy properly and does not have a policy of selling off strategic assets to foreign parties. The government in Sri Lanka also should have a leadership strong enough to be able to give India the guarantees that it needs that Sri Lankan territory will not be used to the detriment of India. If the Rajapaksas do not win this election, India is going to be in deeper ordure than it is in already.