By Victor Robert Lee
Voters end an apparent slide towards dictatorship, and confound Beijing’s plans for the region.
Democracy has taken many knocks in recent years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has twisted a supposed Russian democracy into a dictatorship. Beijing is touting its single-party autocracy as superior to democracy. And in Washington, democracy looks like a legislative train wreck. But the island nation of Sri Lanka this past week proved that democracy is alive and well in at least one corner of the world, by throwing out its own Putinesque figure.
On January 8, a diverse coalition of Sri Lankan parties led by Maithripala Sirisena defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa, president since 2005, who was seeking to secure a third six-year term. Rajapaksa, whose administration in 2009 finally crushed a longstanding Tamil separatist movement in the country’s northeast, presented himself as a god-like figure and set about placing numerous relatives in key government posts, making national politics something of a family business. When the chief justice of the Supreme Court made decisions contrary to his family’s liking, Rajapaksa simply sacked her. He had a promising rival, military commander Sarath Fonseka, jailed. He ordered up a massive new port to be built in his small hometown of Hambantota, on the southern coast of the island – and named it after himself. In Hambantota, he constructed a multi-hundred-million-dollar “international” airport that sits mostly empty, hosting just two to four flights per day He named this after himself, too.
Who provided the billions of dollars of loans for these projects, as well as for an ongoing colossal landfill “port city” at Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo? China’s government – through its export-import banking arm, with all construction mandated to Chinese state-controlled companies, with no competitive bidding, and with no public accounting of the economics involved.
The southern coast of Sri Lanka is ten nautical miles from the main sea lane linking East Asia to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. That includes the corridor for China’s oil and gas shipments from the Persian Gulf. Beijing’s interest in Sri Lanka’s strategic location is by no means strictly commercial; twice in 2014, Chinese submarines for the first time ever docked in Sri Lanka, at the newly Chinese-built and -operated south port of Colombo harbor. At the other new port, Hambantota, which is also controlled and operated by a Chinese state-owned company, four of seven large berths are exclusively reserved for Chinese vessels for 35 years, according to Phoenix News in Hong Kong. There are no disclosed restrictions on Chinese naval use of the berths.
Read the full story at The Diplomat