Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
September 23, 2024
Update by Gospa News Editorial Staff
The leader of the opposition alliance National People’s Power, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, won Sri Lanka’s presidential election, the Lankan news portal Newsfirst reported. Dissanayake was supported by 5,740,179 voters after second ballot count. His closest rival, Sajith Premadasa, leader of United People’s Power, scored 4,530,902 votes. The presidential election in Sri Lanka was held on September 21. The president is elected in a direct general vote for the term of five years. The country held previous direct presidential election in 2019. Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the vote but had to resign in July 2022 amid protests. Sri Lanka has 17 million eligible voters. The voter turnout was around 80%.
In the run up to elections the post-Marxist National People’s Party (NPP), ran a high-gloss, election campaign to market its policies as a ‘new dawn’. Remarkably, the NPP and rival political parties alike had ignored wider geopolitical developments that may contribute to such a dawn given the globally networked nature of Sri Lanka’s ‘poly crisis’.
Re-orienting the economy toward the BRICS that is challenging the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the US dollar as global reserve currency would be one such step.
The US dollar has been long used to debt colonize the Global South. However, all major political parties did little to educate voters about Sri Lanka’s wider geopolitical challenges, or the need to pivot away from the West’s tired debt trap, neocolonialism.
BRICS emerging economies constitute a New Beginning in a ‘multipolar currency world.’ The Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa block also represents hope and an alternative development path for many countries caught in International Sovereign Eurobond (ISB), US dollar debt traps and the related International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout business. There are 56 countries in Asia, Africa and South America that are in Covid-19 Lockdown induced debt traps, and Sri Lanka would need to work with them to counter the G-7 Paris Club creditor countries.
Sri Lanka in the Asian 21st Century
At this time the BRICS block have beaten the G-7 economies. Indeed, the ‘American Century’ seems done and dusted in an increasingly ‘Asian 21st Century’ although US Presidential contenders, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both promised to claw it back. While the American Eagle may not be dead, the train heading east, shifting wealth and power across the world and back to Asia after a couple of centuries of Euro-American dominance, appears to have left the station.
Different regional currencies have emerged to form an alternative trade, technology and de facto reserve currency network, some using Central Bank digital currencies (CBDC), and other cross-border payment systems. The BRICS inter-bank system to counter the Western dominated SWIFT international banking and financial messaging system has just been unveiled.
The global trend away from the US dollar fiat currency (Petrodollar), which is no longer backed by Saudi Arabian oil, accelerated after sanctions on Russia, including the freezing of $300 billion Russian assets over the war in Ukraine.
Necessity is the mother of invention: Countries fearful of the Weaponized dollar and US financial hegemony have been de-dollarizing. Increasingly, the Indian Rupee (INR) and Chinese Renminbi (RMB), dominate intra-Asian and Indian Ocean world trade and currency exchange. Many countries are drawing down dollar reserves and investing in gold, while others like India have repatriated their gold reserves.
South Asia countries like Sri Lanka which are in Eurobond US dollar debt traps would benefit from de-dollarizing and recalibrating trade in regional currencies, while engaging markets closer to home.
The US Dollar Debt trap, LAWFARE and the Central Bank (CBSL)
Sri Lankan’s purchasing power plummeted with rapid local currency depreciation against the exorbitantly privileged dollar amid a staged default two years ago in 2022. This was after the shadowy, off-shore Hamilton Reserve Bank of St. Kitts and Nevis filed a court case in New York against South Asia’s wealthiest country, listed as an Upper Middle Income Country (MIC), purportedly for non-payment of a small amount of interest. As the dollars in State accounts dried up, coordinated Rating Agency messaging that the country was bankrupt’ saw the crash of the rupee against the dollar– instantly beggared citizens.
Retrospectively, Sri Lanka’s first ever Sovereign Default appears to be a Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD) operation amid LAWFARE and cyber operations, with coordinated fuel and food supply chain disruptions and NED-funded, faux democracy (Aragalaya) protests– to deliver the geostrategic Indian Ocean island to the lender of last resorts – the IMF.
Since the Default staged two year ago, Sri Lanka has effectively lost economic sovereignty and policy autonomy to the IMF and Paris Club creditors, that are engaged in mission and mandate creep into Domestic Debt Restructuring (DDR) ironically, in the name of ‘Good Governance’ reforms.
IMF mission creep into DDR along with currency exchange rate manipulation had inflated the county’s purported external debt listed at $ 26 billion at the time of default to a purported whopping $100 billion in the span of two years. This is according to the Governor of the Central Bank (CBSL), Nandalal Weerasinghe, who was appointed during the US-backed regime change putsch.
At this time calls are growing for the resignation of the CBSL Governor under whose 2-year watch the US dollar denominated debt trap had trebled– or is claimed to have increased massively. USD-denominated debt increasingly appears to be a numbers game in the absence of debt Data Security of the Sri Lanka Government Cloud Storage System.
The CBSL, famous for Eurobond Scams under successive Ranil Rajapakse Government was made ‘independent’ of the Parliament and citizens of Sri Lanka as part of the IMF’s anti-corruption Governance Reforms through legislation last year, is now effectively owned and operated by the IMF and related advisors and consultants!
A Conspiracy of Silence on BRICS? A Colonial Mindset and Foreign-Funding
There are no purely economic solutions to fundamentally geopolitical problems.
Sri Lanka urgently needs a comprehensive, long-term, exit-strategy from Western –ISB-IMF-CBSL debt neocolonialism, as well as, new thinking to achieve this.
However, a cross-party consensus appears to exist among all leading political parties, as well as, local think tanks, and the corporate media, to overlook the new dawn that the BRICS represents for debt-trapped citizens.
A colonial mindset has long dominated the national education system and political discourse in the island that was a British Dominion with faux independence until 1972, when the country achieved real independence and its first Republican Constitution.
In recent times, neo-imperial UK-US-EU and Japanese, or G7, interests and funding in the form of ‘development aid’ for research in universities, think tanks and related NGOs, has shaped and contained public discourse on genuine policy alternatives. The current election season saw increased foreign funding from the so-called ‘Diaspora’ to all major political parties, particularly, the NPP, as well as, to various think tanks conducting dubious surveys and polls. The latter outfits have made dubious predictions on election outcomes seemingly to game them –fronting social media and Artificial Intelligence (AI) data mining- while spreading disinformation.
The failure of all major opposition parties to address the geopolitical dimensions of the crisis and prioritize economic alternatives to endless talks with IMF, ISBs and a gravy train of legal and financial consultants, including Lazard, Clifford and Chance, raises serious questions about their external funding networks and policy agendas. This is particularly true of the NPP’s Anura Kumara Dissanayake who had portrayed his party as a break from the past and a new beginning for the country! In lieu of educating itself and its supporters on the wider issues, the pretender to the throne, the NPP which presented itself as an alternative to the existing corrupt political culture did not lift the bar on the national economic policy debate or explore GENUINE alternatives.
The Myth of TINA to the IMF
The election manifestos of US-backed and unelected President Wickramasinghe and the post-Marist opposition National Peoples’ Power (PPP) party, alike, were remarkably silent on the need for a new government to prioritize pivoting to the BRICS to bailout ISB debt-trapped citizens.
Since coming to power amid the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Aragalaya protest putsch, President Ranil Wickramasinghe has portrayed his government’s Debt Sustainability Agreement (DSA) with the IMF as a panacea. His Minister of Finance, Shehan Semasinghe, meanwhile, claimed that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to the lender of last resorts. Amending the agreement as called for by some opposition parties would cause heavy losses to the country and amount to ‘suicide’ he noted.
The warning that Sri Lanka must stay the course on the ‘IMF’s ‘bitter medicine’ of borrowing from predatory International Sovereign or Eurobond (ISB) creditors—come 2028, ironically, in order to pay them off– regardless of who wins the election has been echoed by a host of ambassadors from Paris Club creditor countries, including a visiting Japanese Minister.
Clearly, warnings against ditching the IMF and its DSA must be contextualized in the growing challenge that the BRICS represents to Washington’s economic hegemony. In lieu of ISB Odious Debt Cancellation that international and local academics and debt justice activists have sought, IMF ‘solutions’ entail austerity measures and privatization of public assets to shrink the economy. These IMF measures are set to deepen the Eurobond debt trap and impoverish citizens in the not too distant future.
It is now quite evident that International Sovereign Eurobond (ISB) scams at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), under successive Ranil Rajapakse regime were the root cause for Sri Lanka’s odious debt pile up and staged default two years ago– in 2022. At the time, China was blamed for ‘debt-trap lending’ in a concerted global and local corporate media propaganda campaign as America’s economic proxy war on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) escalated.
Dollarizing Mother Nature: Green and Blue Bonds and Scams
With the wisdom of hindsight, Sri Lanka must look beyond the IMF’s pseudo solution of borrowing from predatory creditors in order to pay them off –come 2028: Only this time around the bonds and scams would be flavored, multi-coloured, and sweetened to make them more palatable to the economically gaslighted natives of a tropical Paradise Lost!
Under IMF and ISB ‘advisors’ tutelage, vanilla bonds would be issued to pay off predatory private creditors and loan sharks, the largest being BlackRock that debt trapped Sri Lanka in collusion with corrupt local politicians and their business cronies.
Strawberry pink macro-linked governance bonds are being designed with a USAID and EU-funded think tank, Verite Research, to monitor local corruption sans mention of ISB corruption or the fact that the bondholders’ names are kept secret.
Meanwhile, Green and blue debt bondage (or Debt for Nature Swaps also known as ESG or Environment, Social and Governance Bonds), are being designed to save Mother Nature in the faux Anthropocene. This, by financializing and dollarizing forests, fields and marine areas and sea-bed resources which would deprive indigenous fishers and famers of traditional livelihoods and access to forests, lands and marine areas, demarcated for ‘Environmental Conservation’– in violation of core principles of both Debt Justice and Climate Justice.
Sri Lanka’s business community and financial sector in which Eurobonds scams and derivatives are a growth opportunity, has been long colonized by the American Chamber of Commerce and solely lacking in innovation to leverage and industrialize the island’s extensive mineral and marine resources.
In the midst of elections fog, for the first time a green bond was issued in Sri Lanka by the DFCC Bank and the colonial Club de Paris predatory creditors announced an in Principle agreement on debt restructuring. This is in lieu of outright ISB debt cancellation that Academics and Debt justice activists had called for.
In a nut shell, green and blue bonds are designed by financializing, dollarizing and privatizing Mother Nature; tropical forests, marine areas, ocean resources, and the air we breathe with Artificial Intelligence generated science fiction carbon credit calculations. In the name of conservation local famers and fishers would be denied access to their livelihoods– forests, fields and marine areas and resources. The UNDP’s, Sri Lanka Diaspora member, Kanni Wignaraja has been enlisted to market green and blue bondscams in Sri Lanka amid the faux Anthropocene climate catastrophe narrative. All this of course is part of the globalists new Green Deal’ to debt colonize Global South countries, and perhaps simultaneously save the exorbitantly privileged US dollar as the world de-dollarizes, also given America’s massive $ 35 trillion debt and counting.
Green Bondage and the new Green Deal: Militarism the Real Threat
The United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterrez has been talking up climate boiling” and generating fear psychosis, which may help sell green and blue bonds and scams. The faux Anthropocene is of course mainly caused by environmental pollution generated by the US-led NATO war machine, its war games, 800 plus military bases around the world, endless wars, not to mention Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) and HAARP. The latter enable staging climate disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, heat domes, flash floods, earth slips, forest fires etc. with glossy media footage of climate disasters for green and blue washed humanitarian Disaster Capitalism.
However, there are few UN conferences calling for shutdown of environment-polluting military bases and NATO’s endless wars, that now have the world tether on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Has the UN abandoned its primary mandate to keep the global peace in preference to hot air faux Anthropocene CoP Summits?
Are ongoing attempts at US dollar-based financialization of Mother Nature in Tropical Islands in the form of Green and Blue bonds also meant to help prolong the dollar’s life as global reserve currency in an increasingly multipolar currency system—as the world de-dollarizes? Back in Sri Lanka, the IMF-ISB pseudo solution of issuing green-washed bonds to deepen the debt trap and pay off predatory ISB creditors come 2028, is set to inflate the debt numbers. Regardlss, the UNDP’s Kanni Wignaraja has been marketing blue and green bonds and scams in Sri Lanka. This, with the usual IMF’s austerity measures and privatization of national assets to shrink the economy is a recipe for double disaster– a second default in very short order!
Finally, the conspiracy of silence among major political parties and their foreign advisors and policy drafters on the need to re-orient Sri Lanka’s economic policy to leverage new developments in her Asian neighborhood, such as, applying to join BRICS, is concerning. Pivoting to the BRICS and the global south would enable transfer of technology to industrialize and access new markets to leverage Sri Lanka’s largely untapped, and valuable marine and mineral resources. This would help a growth-led escape from Paris Club creditors and the USD-Eurobond debt neocolonialism encrypted in the IMF Extended Fund Facility (EFF) agreement.
There are no IMF solutions to Sri Lanka’s fundamentally geopolitical problems. In fact, the IMF is a big part of the geostrategic island’s poly crisis and Eurobond debt neo-colonialism. It is hence that the tropical island blessed with Mother Nature’s largess must ‘de-dollarize to de-colonize’!
Published at Veterans Today https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/de-dollarize-to-de-colonize-sri-lanka-as-asia-must-pivot-to-the-brics-after-elections-won-by-post-marxists/
During the last couple of days, Sri Lanka elected a left-leaning outsider as its 9th Executive President and then went on to win a test match in Galle.
Sean Van Dort, Chairman of the Sri Lanka Shippers Council 
