By Susantha Goonatilake

A few days ago China’s President Xi Jinping visited the UK. And the British media reported that the British leaders had “groveled “, “kowtowed”; “the USA lost its best friend to its rival”; the 19th century “Chinese humiliation by the British was now reversed” and China was “out to restore the prestige it lost 175 years ago” to the British.

The Western media further noted that Britain had really rolled out the red carpet, the Chinese leader was driven in a gilded carriage,given a lavish banquet by the Queen where the Duchess of Cambridge’s dress was red coloured – the Chinese colour of good luck, stayed at Buckingham Palace, addressed the British Parliament, and was constantly attended by the Queen or Prime Minister Cameron. And the Queen spoke of a UK-Chinese “global partnership”. Wow! Lecturing Britain, had calculated her wins and losses. (In parenthesis, one should note that our President Sirisena on his own visit to the UK gushed that the same Queen shook hands with him without gloves-I have seen her twice at close range shaking hands without gloves-and that Cameron had walked up to his car to greet him. This kind of naivety – to put it mildly – on the part of a new President is perhaps excusable).

Now China’s sense of earlier humiliation and today’s confidence are because she, as observers have noted, sees herself as a civilisation state -having a continuous historical narrative from circa the 3rd century BCE. This continuity is provided by her majority Han ethnic group which current research indicates is not genetically pure but mixed. Contributing to this civilisational whole are her three cultural strands Confucianism, Taoism and the foreign import Buddhism. China unlike recent western nation states has, therefore, a long-range view from its long historical memory.

Midway between China and the UK, you find another country, Sri Lanka with a historical memory also beginning around the 3rd century BCE. “India” named after what the West Asians called the land beyond the Indus, has on the other hand as 19th century British sneered, no continuous historical memory mostly fables and myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In fact, India’s early history was only recovered in the 19th and 20th century through British translations of Sinhalese chronicles. The carriers of our own continuous history, namely the Sinhalese, current research indicates, are also but a genetic mixture, the result of various groups coming here and mixing. Although Sinhalese speak a North Indian dialect, they are by no means “Aryan”. And we of course like the Chinese have been humiliated for five centuries since the advent of the barbarous Portuguese.

In recent years, both China and the UK (and India) have loomed large in Sri Lanka. China after the end of the war had helped develop Sri Lanka’s infrastructure but indications are that the terms could have been better. In fact, one commentator noted that our foreign debt in 2010 was only 36% of GDP while this year, it is estimated to rise to 94%. The bottom line is that we fought the war without much indebtedness but afterwards; especially through infrastructure developments due mostly to Chinese loans, our debt increased. We could have perhaps bargained better.

The war itself, as opposed to ethnic tensions, we should recall, was started by India creating and arming a number of Tamil groups in different parts of India- and an act of indirect invasion and cross-border terrorism. As we were winning the war, India and the UK, both behind-the-scenes and overtly, tried to stop us. In the war, there could indeed have been rights violations as of course, as in every war. In India the disputed territory of Kashmir is a huge platform for human rights violations while her suppression of Punjab separatism was by any standard extremely brutal. And as for Britain (and of course the USA) her invasion of Iraq cost about half a million deaths as did her other adventures in the Middle East. Today’s international TV covers extensively these outcomes of imperial overreach. But there are no cries for accountability for these two rogue states.

The cynical reasons are not far to seek. One of the most brutal countries, Saudi Arabia has been proposed to the UNHRC by Britain. Saudi Arabia as well as other Middle East states in the semi desert areas including Jordan was created by Britain and the West in the 20th century. Time magazine once revealed that the former King Hussein of Jordan in his 46-year rule was on the pay of the CIA. And Jordan’s own CIA clone is a brutal organisation and no paragon of human rights. And from this illustrious Jordan Royal house comes also Prince Zeid, head of the UNHRC, strong advocate of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the presumed judge and arbiter on what happened during our war. The grander advocate of human rights, the USA is not a signatory to the ICC. In fact, as Bernie Sanders a leading Democratic candidate to become the US President, points out there are more prisoners in the US than in China with about five times the US population. This example of misreading of the US reality is a counter to the US’s self-delusion of a non-existent “American exceptionalism”.

These different global threads have now come to a juncture in Sri Lanka. While the British were kowtowing to China to get investment, so was backward India appealing for investment when Xi visited India. India did not get big Chinese investment and during Xi’s visit, China in a show of force amassed troops at its disputed Indian boundary, a boundary drawn by the colonial power. In 1962, India had lost its only war with China and comparisons between the two indicate that India is no serious rival. An indirect outcome of India’s defeat in 1962 was that separatism was banned in India, most notably in Tamil Nadu.

But India has Sri Lanka to squeeze. And we gave the excuse when we allowed in Chinese submarines and our ambassador was berated in no uncertain terms. Like Xi in the UK, we also had our Parliamentary moment when Modi addressed our Parliament. He lectured to us on how we should govern ourselves. Forgotten was mass poverty in India. And in the meantime, Modi ran away totally with the soft power Buddhist option distorting in the process, the Buddhist message which India had forgotten. India considers Buddhism as part of Hinduism. And Sri Lanka, the oldest continuous Buddhist heritage in Asia, has ignored the Buddhist soft power possibilities in international relations.

After berating the Chinese for nearly one year, reality has dawned on the current Sri Lanka rulers. Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake, Defence Secretary Karunasena Hettiarachchi and Rauff Hakeem were all pleading to China to come back and invest. And China was playing hard to get.

The Geneva resolution jointly sponsored by us was directly reminiscent of the infant King Dharmapala handing over our kingdom to the Portuguese. But our Parliamentary gentlemen were no infants. During the recent general election, a section had shouted them hoarse supporting a nationalist perspective. And now, throwing all that aside, they were kowtowing to the privileges of being a minister. This was no parallel with the situation when JR with Indian gunboats outside and overflying aircraft had to give in to the 13th amendment. Under pressure, he forced his parliamentarians to vote but said he will campaign for the nation in the proposed referendum.

But, the current lot does not require any pressure; they prostitute themselves willingly, discarding any ideology. The best illustration of this is seen in the book by the pro- JHU, Asoka Abeygunawardana titled “The Revolution of the Era” which describes how key JHU personnel conspired to bring down MR. And these were the very people who voted enthusiastically for the 18th Amendment which gave MR unprecedented powers. And these were the very ideological people who came to power stating that they wanted to carry the torch of the late Ven Soma Thera, were against their own leader SL Gunasekara as he had once been a Christian, had carried on fasts against unethical conversions and had in their own admission supported the awful BBS. And till the last moment, they were all supporters of MR.

MR has pushed himself into near silence as financial and other accusations like the misuse of government resources in elections piling up. Most shamefully, during the three-day parliamentary debate on the Geneva resolution, Rajapaksa remained silent.

Leaders, what leaders?

Courtesy:The Island