By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake* InDepthNews2025-02-03

Of ‘GLADIO’ Operations, Raj Nostalgia History and Literary Festivals

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 3 February 2025 (IDN) — Independence has been a long mirage in Ceylon / Sri Lanka, where history seems to repeat itself as tragedy and farce in equal measure. This week, the geostrategic Indian Ocean island is set to mark 77 years of faux Independence from the British Raj. There will be much pomp and pageantry to mask the fact that the country is caught in a neocolonial Eurobond US dollar debt trap and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout business at this time. It’s crucial to understand these ongoing neocolonial issues to grasp the current situation.

The island effectively lost economic sovereignty to the Lender of Last Resorts amid a staged Sovereign Default to Eurobond holders of the colonial Club de Paris and the Club of London bankers and bondholders and hedge fund managers, three years ago, in 2022, on the eve of its purported 75th Independence Day celebration. This loss of economic sovereignty is a pressing issue that should concern us all.

This year, 4 February, Independence Day, will be marked with great pomp. Eighty million rupees have been allocated for the fanfare and ceremony. Preparatory work, including security detail for the political elite and diplomat corps, has been ongoing for months at Independence Square in Cinnamon Gardens.

This year’s hollow celebration of 77 years of Independence would bear an eerie semblance to its first Independence Day when the famous ‘Pageant of Ceylon’ was staged on 4 February 1948. That was when the British Crown Colony of Ceylon morphed into a ‘British Dominion’—sans genuine Independence. After all, London still controlled the strategic Indian Ocean island’s ports, airports, plantations, justice and court system. The Queen of England appointed the island’s ceremonial head of state, the Governor General.

Ceylon’s Independence on 4 February 1948 was enacted for bemused natives, sans much sovereignty or the Right to Self-determination of colonized peoples, and never mind the question of territorial integrity. The deepsea Trincomalee harbour was still home to the Royal Navy’s Eastern Command until 1958, when Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike nationalized it. He was assassinated in September 1959. Nor was the United Nations Charter’s Article 2.7 affirmation on interventions within ‘the domestic jurisdiction of States’ on the Independence agenda in 1948.

The British then moved to the Indian Ocean Chagos Islands, drove out its people in the early sixties to set up the US-UK Diego Garcia military base, which the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 was illegal under International Law.

Back in Colombo, the colourful Independence Pageant of Ceylon that converted the British Crown Colony of Ceylon into a ‘British Dominion’ on 4 February 1948 was a façade. The ceremonial served to mask and camouflage with colourful cultural traditions, spectacular dances, pomp and circumstance the fact that London still held substantial power and effectively controlled the Parliament of Ceylon, where much of the debate was scripted in London, as much as by the colonial comprador elite, literati and glitterati present at the independence show.

Real Independence in 1972

Perhaps the Whig imperial historian Sir John Seeley, who famously remarked that the British Empire happened in a fit of absence of mind” was right after all!The British empire seemed to exist in suspended animation in Ceylon long after its official Independence in 1948, with clandestine GLADIO-style ‘Stay Behind’ secret service operations, to deliver shocks and destabilize the county– like the assassination of Socialist Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1959.

Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has detailed many GLADIO operations in his book NATO’s Secret Armies”, which are in some ways comparable to the current Sword of Damocles suspended over the natives of Paradise Lost in the form of the Eurobond debt trap that has debilitated the country’s economic sovereignty and eroded its territorial integrity at this time, also with cyber operations and the assassination of Dinesh Shaftter, the primary witness in the Court Case against former President Wickramasinghe in the Central Bank Bond scam case.

Arguably, that first Independence Day ceremony on a bright February morning in 1948 in Ceylon masked yet another face and phase of (neo)colonialism on the island. Indeed, it was the world’s first woman head of State, Socialist Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who delivered a modicum of genuine Independence to Ceylon/ Sri Lanka on 22 May 1972, nearly 25 years after the faux Independence ‘Pageant of Ceylon’ that rendered the country a British Dominion” on 4 February 1948.

Sri Lanka became a Republic in 1972 amid much nay-saying by the colonial comprador bourgeois’ brown sahibs and memsahibs, invested in the colonial economy, and remarkably after the abortive 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection. The county adopted its first Republican Constitution, and its name was changed to Sri Lanka from the colonial Ceylon as part of becoming independent. By then, all the ports and airports, plantations and energy companies had been or were being nationalized, a process that was later sabotaged as in other Afro-Asian neo-colonies.

The first Socialist Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike, assassinated in Operation Colombo in 1959, paid the highest price for nationalizing the geostrategic island’s Trincomalee and other ports, particularly Galle and Colombo, all of which remain the focus of big power competition.

Regardless, the week of Sri Lanka’s purported 77th Independence show will progress with little talk about the meaning of independence, sovereignty, the self-determination of peoples of the Global South, or neocolonialism. There will be no mention of the country’s recent patent loss of economic sovereignty to the IMF, and the staged impoverishment of its people due to rapid local currency depreciation against the exorbitantly privileged US dollar, or the just concluded odious debt Eurobond exchange to benefit unnamed Eurobond holders.

Sri Lanka’s purported 77th Independence Day will be another ceremony, a welcome holiday, bread and circuses for an Anglophile elite and the vernacular masses alike. The pomp and pageantry would no doubt gloss over a darker reality, the peoples’ impoverishment and the ‘pumping and dumping’ of the country with various exogenous economic shocks, including mysterious Islamic State (ISIS) claimed terror attacks in 2019 to Make the Economy Scream”, during the long march to real Independence.

With all its pageantry and pomp, Independence Day would be once again more or less irrelevant, much like the recently concluded second edition of the Raj Nostalgia, Ceylon Literary Festival (CLF), held at the Colombo Public Library.

CLF’s organizers and sponsors preferred the colonial appellation ‘Ceylon’ to the more Independent Sri Lanka. There was no talk at the CLF about Eurobond debt neocolonialism, the new Cold War in South Asia or regime change operations amid hybrid war operations in the Asian 21^st Century” that is set to make Euro-America irrelevant.

There was also no mention of ongoing tectonic geopolitical power shifts across the Indian Ocean and to the Global South, or the rise of the BRICS at the CLF. Of course, the CLF’s principal sponsor was the London-headquartered Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, one of the beneficiaries of Sri Lanka’s USD-Euro bondage and related derivatives.

Ceylon/ Sri Lanka’s natives, rulers and historians, left and right including funded think tanks and NGOs, alike seemed to suffer from amnesia– perhaps, a sign of the ‘colonial condition’ analyzed by sociologists and psychologists including Ashis Nandy in his book Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism”. Meanwhile, WOKE history and identity politics mask continuing structures, systems and institutional logics of neo-colonial Eurodollar debt bondage and bonded labour, including new forms of indentured and migrant labour.

TO BE CONTINUED