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e-Con e-News 01-07 March 2026

Indian authorities are being accused of ordering the unarmed Iranian warship IRIS Dena to leave Indian waters prematurely, and of tipping off the USA about the location of the ship, putting the sailors, many of them students, in harm’s way. The Dena was then attacked by a US submarine in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone, killing & maiming over a 100 people, while disrupting Sri Lanka’s maritime livelihoods, and international trade.

In the present circumstances, we request all fishermen

not to cross Sri Lanka’s maritime borders and to avoid

entering the maritime territories of other nations”

– Fisheries Minister, ee Sovereignty, Fishermen urged

Fishing boats have been warned not to venture out in international waters. Well, tell that to the Indians! Meanwhile, Indian commentators are asking how such ‘a major military intervention was made possible’ in what India calls its ‘primary maritime backyard’?India had even declared itself the ‘Net Security Provider’ in the Indian Ocean:

‘Yet, the world’s most powerful country, the USA,

came to India’s doorstep & sank a warship

– & India could not prevent it.’

(see ee Random Notes, Failing to Protect)

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     Several Gulf countries, who claim to have opposed the most recent US attack on Iran, are wondering if ‘force majeure clauses’ (unforeseeable circumstances that prevent fulfilment of contracts) can be invoked in current agreements, to ‘alleviate some of the anticipated economic strain from the current war’. Indeed, while economists recently called for disasters linked to ‘climate change’ be taken into account in calculating Sri Lanka’s unpayable debt to Wall Street’s bond holders, surely the USA’s & Europe’s propensity to wars (including waging terrorism on Sri Lanka), far more frequent than weather-related calamities, should also be computed into the calculus.

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‘According to the UN Law of the Sea, principles of peaceful

purposes and due regards must be adhered to when acting

within an Exclusive Economic Zone’

– ee Sovereignty, A death blow to sovereignty: Sajith

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‘There are developments in the Indian Ocean

that are even more serious than what

has been publicly stated…’

– Chief Government Whip Nalinda Jayatissa

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Did the Sri Lankan authorities, either inadvertently or purposely, provide data to the USA on the Iranian ship’s coordinates before it was attacked? ‘IRIS Dena had requested permission to stay within Sri Lankan territorial waters and waited for 14 hours, before this request was turned down by President Anura Kumar Dissanayake’, states the Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL). The extent to which the ruling parties of India and Sri Lanka have been complicit in this mass murder, requires public inquiry, asserts the CPSL.

     Indeed, the Socialist Alliance (which includes the CPSL) has strongly condemned the National People’s Power (NPP) government’s ‘deepening military cooperation with the USA’, pointing to the recent transfers of intrusive ‘US naval & aviation assets’ (‘deep-sea surveillance & high-seas operations… designed for power projection’), along with ‘operational integration into US-led commands’, as representing ‘a dangerous abandonment of the country’s longstanding non-aligned foreign policy. (see ee Random Notes)

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• The long-cherished demand by the countries of Asia & Africa for an Indian Ocean Peace Zone (IOPZ), shelved by the present government, clearly needs to be revived, to prevent the ‘expansion of war’ into the region. However, both the US & Europe (England, France etc) still maintain lethal war machinery in the Indian Ocean, from colonial West Asia to the French in Mayotte to the English & USA in Diego Garcia, all the way to settler colony Australia & killer-colony-in-everything-but-name: Japan? These imperialists are even still claiming faraway ownership of the Indian Ocean Seabed (France wants 20%!). Imperialism’s stenographers in Sri Lanka keep struggling for euphemisms to describe the latest flagrant US war mongering: ‘Middle East War Widens’ etc. But is it a ‘Middle East War’? Or just another one of the endless US wars, as against Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, ad nauseum… And did the colonials really leave our countries, enabling a 1,000 fake PhDs, to declare ‘postcoloniality’ in such a barely decent hurry?

     Without knowing what Independence or freedom actually entails (not just a new name, a new flag, a new song, or new clothes, ties, briefcases), without knowing that capitalism is about machine-making-machine industrialization, there was a rush northward to acquire Master’s [or Slave’s?] degrees in Postcolonialism. But, the beast is still not dead. Like some mythical monster (not from Munster), it arose 100-fold, with 100 heads… Those who did know, what real liberation means, were vilified, isolated, assassinated. Now, those they had most vilified, such as Joseph Stalin & Mao Zedong, who showed us way in the 20^th century, on how to defeat Nazis & imperialists – only stand ever taller day by day!

     War is already here!

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‘Deputy Minister of Public Security Sunil Watagala

stated in Parliament today (06) that the country has

fallen into a wartime-like situation,

despite it being an undesirable development.’

(see ee Sovereignty)

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     India had invited Iran’s navy to attend an International Fleet Review (IFR 2026) & MILAN 2026 exercises in Visakhapatnam, Kerala, hosted by the Indian Navy from February 17-25, which Sri Lanka & 73 other countries participated. US ships which were part of the exercises had left early; then a US submarine lay in wait for the Iranian ship. Local Kerala residents are recalling how the Iranian sailors had lived in camaraderie with their Indian, US & Sri Lankan counterparts. Vessels participating in such exercises are ‘required to follow strict protocol, which includes not carrying ammunition’. The Iranians had requested permission for their ships to stay within Sri Lankan territorial waters, after the US began their invasion of Iran – but was permission ‘purposely delayed’? (see Random Notes)

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‘Authorities determined that the ship would not be kept

at Colombo Port because the harbor is the country’s main

commercial maritime hub, & the presence of a belligerent

state’s naval vessel could affect

shipping activity & insurance costs.’

(see ee Sovereignty)

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• ee wonders what belligerence means when the USA has a deadly addiction, to being at war somewhere in the world at any time – and is still allowed to park its countless lurking warships around our countries’ commercial ports. There are also reports that the USA had threatened airstrikes on Colombo Port if the government allowed the Iranian ships into a completely legal safe harbor.

‘Although the vessel was near the Port of Colombo,

Colombo is our principal commercial port. Retaining

such a vessel within our main commercial port carries

the risk of adversely affecting our maritime industry.’

– President, ee Sovereignty, Ship to be moved to Trinco

The Sri Lankan government says they have moved a 2^nd Iranian ship to Trincomalee Port (long ogled by both the USA & India, not to forget England), so as not to give shipping insurers & trading companies further excuse to raise costs. It also turns out the Strait of Hormuz have been closed not by Iran (who clarified they would only deter tankers linked to the USA, Israel, England & others attacking Iran) but by the London-based ‘International Group’, which controls the 12 International Group of Protection & Indemnity Clubs, 7 of which, ‘between March 1 and March 2… issued 72-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and all Iranian territorial waters’! (see ee Quotes, Insurers Make a Killing)

     Meanwhile, Anglo-US state new service Reuters reports that, Jayne Howell, the US embassy’s charge d’affaires in Colombo is demanding that Sri Lanka’s government hold the Iranian sailors & survivors as prisoners & prevent their repatriation to Iran. The USA also wants Sri Lankan authorities to ‘minimise Iranian attempts to use the detainees for propaganda’. However, what is not propaganda? – as their media have daily & happily advertised their propensity for mass murder, from Gaza to everywhere, as it seeks to assert its ‘full spectrum dominance’? While many commentators claim this quickly spreading and escalating huge war is due to the Israeli government having proof of the US President & other powerful leaders’ abuse of children, aka the Epstein Files, Sri Lankans as much as any in this world, know why and how we have been invaded for over 500 years…

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     The US Secretary (Minister) of War, Pete Hegseth, claims the Iranian sailors suffered ‘a quiet death’. He says the USA will not follow ‘stupid rules of engagement’ in the course of this war, which has already seen the mass murder of 180 school girls, which brought no apologies, only a claim the school was misidentified (by AI!!) as a legitimate military target. Hegseth’s ‘stupid rules’ could be referring not to ‘international law’ (which the USA no longer even pretends to acknowledge!) but to the USA’s own military codes that forbid the killing of survivors. The US Secretary of War, who clearly evinces schoolboy-like ‘masculinity challenges’, has already recently been accused of killing survivors of US airstrikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean. US military laws even cite the precedent of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle which on 27 June 1918 was torpedoed by a German U-Boat: Considered one of the deadliest Canadian naval disasters, 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers & seamen were killed in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats. A German court in 1921 even sentenced the officers to years in prison for following ‘illegal’ orders. Germans would claim that England was holding a gun to its head at that time post-WW1. A declared crime, or war crime, however, also requires an accountable state or states (humans with weapons & handcuffs) to prosecute it.

     So a crime has been committed – is the crime committed by those victims who allow it to happen? If a thief robs you, it is you who should be charged for allowing it to happen to you? – according to the French Marquis de Sade School of Law. Calls to morality & reason are what slaves, chained & unchained do – masters have no use for such whining, according to the German Frederick Nietzsche School of Masters. Here then is the thesis – who will provide the anti-thesis? (Ask, Hegel?). So where & how will the negation arise to synthesize? Ask Marx? Where is the negating ‘negro’ who says No to the Master, says good night to day light? The sun never sets on their empire & its crimes, said the English, but yet it rises. Some infantiles on the other side, or war porn addicts, are egging & taunting Russia & China to intervene so as to spark ‘world war’ – though it is already a war on the world, and Sri Lanka has had war waged on it for over 500 years at least… The USA keeps hinting that they will even resort to nuclear weapons if their war doesn’t go as planned, also increasingly whining & claiming that China & Russia are helping defeat their war machine in West Asia! The US embassy in Colombo, trying to appear cool under the collar and unperturbed, had to clarify that their ‘suggestions’ for ‘Alternate Travel Routes to Citizens Due to Limited Middle East Operations’, was ‘Not a Travel Advisory’. Meanwhile:

The USA is Moving 1000s of People out of Middle Eastern

Countries: ‘It is ⁠being done quietly, but seamlessly’ (Trump says

in a social media post without providing ⁠further details)

(see ee Sovereignty)

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Many commentators have already reported that the USA’s military has been given unrestricted access to all Sri Lankan ports, including Hambantota port, & airports, through an Acquisition & Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), first secretly signed (7 pages) in 2007 for 10 years, and then secretly re-signed in 2017, with 10-times more concessions (83 pages), after the USA engineered & funded that awkward coalition of the Yahapalanaya, mashing together a rump SLFP, UNP & JVP in 2015. 

     Unable to force the then-President Maithripala Sirisena (who they had financed into power) to sign the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), which would allow US boots on Sri Lankan soil, nor finalize the MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) to enable deeper economic penetration, and also unable to prevent the election of Gotabhaya Rajapakse as President, they soon engineered a faux putsch, enabling his removal (but not his hanging), which ended up sending the country into ‘the scaly arms of the IMF for a 17^th time’. 

‘Our trade-, tourism- and remittance-dependent economy

heavily relies on the external environment. We can only hope

that the tariff wars and the conflicts in West Asia will end soon.’

– Nimal Sanderatne, ee Economists

Who made our economy export-dependent? Who keeps it so? Mind you, economic ‘regime change’ is indeed a need, when we consider that the colonial import-export plantation fraud that has ruled the country for almost 200 years, is still in charge, making us totally dependent on the whims & fancies of imperialist governments & their satrapies, selling workers & primary commodities abroad. ACSA is due to be extended again in 2027. An IMF-dug ‘debt cliff’ & abyss yawns in 2028.The USA is plotting, to ensure another ACSA extension: watch the political, military & economic moves they have been making.

     ‘Was the signing [the recent Montana National Guard] agreement a political condition for the reduction in tariffs?’, asked the CPSL last year. Was this MoU, ‘a precursor to signing a SOFA with the USA? Will Sri Lanka’s military, naval & air force infrastructure facilities, as well as Sri Lanka’s ports & airports, be placed at the disposal of the US war machine? Is Sri Lanka to be a pawn in US military aggression in Asia?’

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This ee Focus reproduces SBD de Silva’s discursion into the ancient Sinhala relationship with money, which may be a surprise to some. And so ee continues Chapter 8 of de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, with an excerpt entitled, Trade & Monetary Exchange in a Precapitalist Economy – the Case of the Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka. Indigenous Sinhala labour stopped working in the plantations due to the attempt to impose American-style slavery. Yet the attitude of the Kandyan Sinhala to ‘being drawn into the plantation system, since it was in their areas that the coffee and tea plantations were mainly set up… is conventionally explained by their unfamiliarity with trade & the use of money’. de Silva’s a fascinating look, with detailed references, into the ‘lively’ internal and external trade (and smuggling) in the midst of invasion, and the role of the Muslim traders, despite the attempts to prevent people’s access to salt and ammunition, as well as the flourishing trade in cinnamon. There are those who wish to tiptoe over the bloody marshes of past invasions, wearing the spotless shoes of  personal virtue, while ignoring the heroic role of the upcountry Sinhala, while attempting to play the exploited tea plantation workers, imposed from India, against them. These chapters offer a much-needed antidote to such faux histories.

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An avid ee Reader, sometimes contributor, and generous disseminator of our newsletter has sent us a comment by a critic of ee for using ‘classic propaganda’ techniques – as determined by the USA’s AI program ChatGPT. All we can say is that just look at how the forever English mainstream (main sewers!) newsrooms cover all their current & recent ‘proven’ wars, & (those not covered up such, as their genocides & colonial history). Then try this: put CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc., before some of the above highlighted phrases, or on their AI, and see how well the old boot fits!!

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Contents:

USA Threatens Airstrikes on Colombo Port