Sri Lanka’s Covid-19 numbers saw another surge today, as 354 more persons were tested positive for the virus.
Department of Government Information confirmed that all 354 of the newly-identified patients are close contacts of earlier cases linked to the Peliyagoda fish market cluster.
Accordingly, a total of 737 new cases have been reported within the day.
As per statistics, the total number of Covid-19 infections confirmed in the country to date now stands at 59,167.
Recoveries from the virus meanwhile climbed to 50,337 earlier today, as more patients regained health.
However, 8,547 active cases are still under medical care at selected hospitals and treatment centers located across the island.
Sri Lanka has also witnessed 283 deaths related to Covid-19.
Kandy District Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) parliamentarian Wasantha Yapa Bandara is confirmed to have contracted the COVID-19 infection.
Accordingly, he is the sixth Member of the Parliament to have been diagnosed with the virus.
Starting with State Minister Dayasiri Jayasekera, MP Rauff Hakeem, State Minister Piyal Nishantha, Minister Vasudeva Nanayakkara, and Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi had also tested positive for COVID-19.
Meanwhile, State Minister Jayasekera and Minister Nanayakkara were recently sent home after recovering from the virus.
Stemming from the advice given by Arahat
Mahinda to King Devanampiya Tissa (3 C.BCE), that all beings including the
animals in the forest and the birds in the air have a right to live, tradition
dictated that all precious resources, are always protected. The thick forest
covered hills and mountains, referred to, by Ferguson (1815) as black, leach
infested and full of animals”, were dedicated to the Gods or Devas, and as a
royal decree ensured its continuous protection, very few went in to desecrate
it.
The central highlands were mostly uninhabited;
the few villages that existed were limited to the edges of the fertile valleys.
The non-existence of a hillside building tradition confirmed by the fact, that
every commencement of a building operation led to the flattening of the land or
to the cutting of the hillside to prepare the ‘gevatha’ or platform on which
the dwelling is constructed, reinforces the fact that this wasteful method of
flattening the site in the hills, belonged to a plain’s tradition, as such is
far removed from anything even remotely connected to a hillside tradition[i]. The undisturbed
protection and preservation of the highlands from human habitation over a
couple of millennia permitted a special bio-diversity to evolve, making Sri
Lanka a bio-diversity hotspot. The flora and fauna including the elephant lived
undisturbed. This made them all very special.
To the Greeks and Romans the island was known
as the mother of the most stately of elephants”[ii]. the land of the
sapphire and the hyacinth, the ruby and the pearl”[iii]. Ptolemy refers to the
countries products as being, rice, honey, ginger, beryl, hyacinth and has
mines of every sort, of gold and silver and other metals. It breeds at the same
time elephants and tigers”[iv].
In succeeding ages writers and travellers from
all chimes who have visited the shores, join in the chorus of praise of its
natural attractions. The sides of the mountains were strewn with gems and the
air is perfumed with the odour of cinnamon and Ribeiro says, as Ceylon is the
key of India, it appears as if God had taken pleasures in enriching it with the
earth`s choicest treasures”[v].
The historical records pertaining to the Island
of Sri Lanka were written on Ola leaf and were maintained by the monks in the
Monasteries. However, as they only recorded the deeds of the kings who assisted
and fostered Buddhism and helped develop the different monasteries, there is
little detail of the International trade that existed in the Prasamudra or
Great Ocean, in the historic period. Fortunately, much of the details regarding
trade could be gleaned from information gathered and recorded by foreign
travellers and from objects found in the archaeological excavations. The
records left by foreign writers[vi] refer to the role played
by the island of Sihala-dipa or Taprobane in the lucrative trade that passed
through the Prasamudra”[vii].
The renown of Ceylon as it reached Europe in
the seventeenth century, is quaintly summed up by Purchas, in his `Pilgrimage`,
the heauens with their dewes, the ayre with a pleasant holesomenesse and
fragrant freshnesse, the waters in their many riuers and fountains, the earth
diuersified in aspiring hills, lowly vales, equal and indifferent plains,
filled in her inward chambers with metals and jewels, in her outward court and
upper face stored with whole woods of the best cinnamon that the sunne seeth,
besides fruits, oranges, leimons, etc., surmounting those of Spain: fowles and
beasts both tame and wild, among which the elephant, honoured by a naturall
acknowledgement of excellence of all other elephants in the world, these all
have conspired and joined in common league to present unto Zeilon the chiefs of
worldly treasures and pleasures with a long and healthy life in the inhabitants
to enjoy them, no marvel then if sense and senualitie have here stumbled on a
Paradise”[viii].
The elephant has always been regarded as
special and was a protected species, and the Kings held the killing of an
elephant a criminal offence[ix]. The elephant forests were not cleared[x]. Most of the elephants
were usually captured when they ventured into the forests in the lower plains,
and formed the most important component of the Kings’ stables, supervised by
the Gajanayake Nilame who was appointed custodian of the elephants[xi], their training and their
capture came under the supervision of the Kuruwe Lekham[xii]. This special elephant
from the earliest historical period has been depicted and glorified on temple
and palace walls in sculptural or in painted form. The continuous freezes of
sculptured dancing elephants are a pleasure to behold. Carefully and lovingly
tamed elephants were used for ceremonial purposes and personal travel, in the
hauling of timber and other construction material, in the ploughing of the
fields, in the hauling of farm produce, in battle, in the building of the dams
of the wewas, also in the construction of the large stupas.
The Mahavamsa records the use of elephants
wearing leather boots to consolidate the foundation of the Ruvanweli Stupa in
Anuradhapura (3C BC)[xiii]. Indeed they were the
first theoretical machines, the dozes used in construction. Elephants in full
regalia continued to adorn the religious processions and were traditionally
loved by all. In his 150 AD map of Taprobane, Ptolemy identifies the area
between Adams Peak (Sri Pada) that includes the Walawe Ganga basin and the
Rakwana hills to the sea, as being ‘Elephantorum Hic Sunt’, an elephant feeding
ground[xiv]. During the colonial
occupation of the country, elephants are known to have been captured in the Avissawella, Negombo, Mannar,
Kalutara, Matara, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Trincomalee,
Batticaloa, Buttala area etc. During the
earlier Dutch period, an elephant had even found its way into the Colombo Fort.
The fact that elephants were encountered in a number of locations also confirms
that they were in a habit of moving down from the thick forested hills in
search of food and water. However, prior to the arrival of the British there is
very little evidence of the unnecessary or willful decimation of
elephants.
Over
time the elephant evolved a special pair of feet, suitable to the terrain, the
special hills and mountains in which it lived. Tennent refers to this special
agility being due to a faculty that is almost entirely derived from the
unusual position, as compared to other quadrupeds of the knee joint of the hind
leg, arising from the superior length of the thigh bone, and the shortness of the
metatarsus. The heel being almost where it projects in man, instead of lifted
up as a ‘hook’”[xv].
It is this which enables the elephant, in descending declivities, to depress
and adjust the weight of his hinder portions, which would otherwise over balance
and force him headlong”[xvi]. He further states that,
it is by the same arrangement that he is enabled, on uneven ground, to lift
his feet, which are tender and sensitive, with delicacy and plant them with
such decision as to ensure his own safety as well as that of objects which it is
expedient to avoid touching”[xvii].
Tennent’s observation is confirmed by Dr.
Hooker, writing in the Himalayan Journal, concludes that ‘the elephant’s path
is an excellent specimen of engineering for it winds judiciously’[xviii]. During a Portuguese attack on the Balana fort,
it is noted that, Gasper de Valadares tried to get in the Enemy’s rear by the
elephants way (Ali Mankada), two leagues from Balane, when they made the
diversion on that part, they found it well fortified’[xix]. Elephant paths were
being used as access ways by man.
The great central plateau is called the
Horton’s plains (7200 feet above MSL.), in honour of its British discoverer
Lord Horton. The larger part of it is still covered with primaeval forests,
alternating with dry or marshy meadows known as patenas. Leopards, bears and
wild elephants are the sovereigns of this domain. As we came to the top of the
plateau, after climbing to the top of a deep ravine, we came upon the
characteristic Nilloo scrub, the favourite haunt of the wild elephant. The
large heaps of dung, some quite fresh, which we saw in every direction and the
trodden undergrowth, were ample evidence of the frequent visits of herds to
this spot. The elephants steadily eat their way through the Nilloo scrub; one
marching close at the heels of another. Every bush that is not devoured is
trodden flat; and where a herd of twenty or thirty of these colossal beasts
have marched in single file through the woods, an open road of some yards wide
is left ready beaten, as good as heart can desire – in a wilderness. In fact,
these elephant tracks were the only path used during the expeditions of the
next few days, and by following them alone we made several very interesting
excursions”[xx].
Emmerson Tennent states that; prior to 1840
and before the coffee plantations had been extensively opened in the Kandyan
ranges, there was not a mountain or a lofty feature of land of Ceylon which the
elephant had not traversed in their periodical migrations in search of water
and the sagacity which they display in laying out roads is almost incredible.
They generally keep along the backbone of a chain of hills, avoiding steep
gradients and one curious observation was not lost upon the government surveyors,
that in crossing valleys from ridge to ridge, through forests so dense as to
obstruct a distance view, the elephants invariably select the line of march
which communicates most judiciously with the opposite points, by means of the
safest path”[xxi].
The astute early British surveyors followed the ‘Aliman Kadas’ or the elephant
corridors in setting out the road traces and the transportation networks that
connected the coffee and tea estates and the estate towns in the hills.
Tennent further confirms that, in Ceylon the
districts in which the elephants most abound, are all hilly and mountainous. In
the later, especially, there is no range so elevated as to be inaccessible to
them”[xxii]. A statement confirmed
by Major Skinner who mentions that in 1840, he found spore of an elephant on
the very summit of Adam’s peak, at an altitude of 7420 feet and on the pinnacle
which the pilgrims climb with difficulty, by means of steps hewn in the rock.”
and in 1847 records, elephants on the Ramboda pass on the road to Nuwara Eliya”[xxiii]. The agility of the
elephants to negotiate the steepest hill is highlighted in the Ceylon Observer
(1865), which refers to the attempt to capture elephants in Avissawella. The
Corral was constructed close to a wall of rock so precipitous and high that it
was considered superfluous to continue the enclosure in front of them. But over
the rocks the elephants made their escape and the corral was a total failure”[xxiv].
Tennent also refers to an interesting account
of a Kraal recorded by a person he describes as an able and accurate describer,
published in the Colombo Observer, March 1866, in which is stated that an
infuriated tusker, the ‘property of the government’, made a rush to escape the
enclosure and fairly leaped the barrier, of some fifteen feet high, only
carrying away the top cross beam with a great crash”, completely forcing him to
rethink his view and change that ‘the elephant is too weighty and unwieldy to
leap, at least to any considerable height or distance”. Ferguson the editor of
the Observer on the request of Tennent, had the height rechecked and concluded
that the height was nine feet, but remarked that even this was formidable”[xxv]. It was not only the
climbing or leaping ability but also smell that prompted the elephants to make
a periodic appearance in the peninsular of Jaffna when the Palmyra fruit
ripened”[xxvi].
Heydt records the Dutch efforts in the capture
of elephants for export to the sub-continent, he refers to an elephant trap
that was built and maintained as a permanent feature close to the Matara Fort,
in great detail. Not far from Maderen, the company has an elephant trap, which
is surrounded by many thousand stakes, and extends over a great length and
breadth. When now they intend to capture elephants, as many Sinhalese as
possible are brought together, and the more one can have of them, the better it
is. These separate themselves very widely one from another: and by night with
lights, by day with the noise of various instruments they cause terror among
them, seeing that they cannot well bear such, but rather flee from it. In this
manner the Sinhalese thus provided, all march towards the elephant trap, as is
done amongst us when a hunt is made with beaters”[xxvii].
Katugaha in his article on the ‘The last Kraal
in Sri Lanka’ held at Panamure, states that in the construction of the kraals,
in the past the Dutch followed the Portuguese pattern, but was often a rounded
triangle with a somewhat broader funnel. The stockade in this triangle form
continued to be used till about 1800 when the inner enclosure was done away
with leaving only one main enclosure and the funnel at the apex. In the early British
times, prior to 1833, the shape of the stockade underwent radical change and
became a plain rectangle with a narrow entrance and no funnel: from the front
angles two lines of fencing, well concealed, were continued forward and outward
so as to contain and guide the elephants to the stockade’s entrance”[xxviii].
Heydt has a detail description of how the Dutch
elephant trap works, Near the gates, on which entrance they have ready some
tame elephants, which must as if show the way, and must enter first. These then the wild ones follow, until they
are brought into an open space provided with 2 or 3 drop-gates, on which men
sit hidden. As soon as these see that the wild elephants have been brought
through by the tame ones, they cut the Rottangs (rattans) which hold up the
gate, so that they fall and enclose the place. Then they take again the tame
elephants and let them show the way to the wild ones, until they lead each into
a very long and narrow path, so that he cannot turn around unless he is very
small: and so he goes along this passage until he comes to the end of it, and
as soon as he is there, they quickly push in some tree trunks behind him, so
that he cannot now go backwards. Then they try to tie him up, and bring him
slowly forward, between two tame elephants. If now he will not go forward, they
set a third behind him, which must belabour him with his trunk in a most
pitiful manner, so that he begins to weep and to cry out: and afterwards they
bring him into a place destined for this purpose, and look after him well, and
seek daily, now with kindness, now with beatings, to make him tame, seeing that
they have a quite extraordinary intelligence, more than other beasts”[xxix].
Heydt has an equally interesting account of
what happens to the elephant after capture and the need to partially train them
prior to export. He refers to the Place (Matara fort) as being full of trees,
bushes and coconut gardens, which are very abundant, not only inside the fort
but outside as well, creating the impression of a forest totally hiding the
buildings[xxx].
Behind the first half bastion some quite low roofs peep out from among the
bushes, which (roofs) cover the elephant stables: the Company has in this
island no other place which is so convenient for the capture of elephants as is
Maderen (Matara). For that reason a large number are taken here yearly, or at
least every 2 years, whereas on the contrary near Negombo, where as mentioned
above there is also an elephant-trap, several years often go by before this
happens. The elephants which they purpose to train are placed for safety
between trees, which are in this Place (fort) planted 4 by 4 conveniently for
this, where they can be better disciplined than in the stables. Often several
months pass before they are somewhat tamed, and can understand the speech of
their tutor, (and learn even) so much as to lie down: but they are often sold
before they are properly trained. And to transport such safely, they are tied
beside a tame one and thus led”[xxxi]. “In 1697 there were
97 elephants in the stables at Matara“[xxxii].
Heydt then goes on to describe how animals are
measured, examined and priced for the international market and then escorted tied
to tame elephants to the point of shipment. While I was still in Colombo, there
came thus (tied) beside tame elephants yearly 50 – 60 which had been taken
here, to be sent from there to the Coromandel Coast and Bengal: since the Kings
there buy them from the Company to use them for their pomp. They remained
usually for 3 to 4 weeks near Colombo before they went further, and first must
be measured, according to the custom there, both in height and length, which is
done by the Couber wherein linen is sold. At this measuring attention was given
also to the tail, whether it were complete; and had also its tufts complete, on
which are hairs which are about 4 or at the most 6 inches long, hanging down on
both sides of the tufts. They are as thick as a raven-quill, or rather more,
whereas on the contrary the other hairs of the body are thinner. When selling
or purchasing these beasts one also looks very closely at the ears, seeing that
in the case of many these are highly torn. Those now which have good ears and
tails, and no visible defects, are highly valued: on the contrary those which
are loaded with such defects suffer a great diminution of value”[xxxiii].
From Colombo they are led to Mannar or further
to be shipped out across the straits[xxxiv], and one hour from
Colombo they must cross the wide River Madual or Kelani River[xxxv]. Although the elephants are taken into flowing
water twice daily, yet none the less those which are newly caught do not
willingly go into deep water, and in this show themselves very obdurate. Among
others, one tore himself loose from the crimp (as they call the tame ones) and
backed out of the river; and when he found himself free began to run as fast as
he could. Now not very far from the place where this river falls into the sea
there lies as though a hamlet of many houses, in which live fishermen for the
most part: and this is also called Madual (Mutuwal) after the river. The
elephant now ran towards these houses. Those who sat on the tame elephants came
with all speed to catch this one again; and all the remaining ones were
compelled to wait. But after this they fastened him between two tame ones, and
set a third behind him, to beat him with its trunk so that he cried out
pitifully, and if blew on a trumpet. On this occasion, I was told that they can
swim very well, but do not like to go into deep water; also the female
elephants (coming) behind the males too easily drown, and for this reason are
shy of water, especially when they see beforehand that they must swim a long
way. I have also noticed that they like nothing so well as to lie for some
hours each day in flowing water, and indeed so that nothing remains outside but
a little of the body, and the trunk, by which they breathe”[xxxvi].
Onesicritus (323C.BC) refers to the elephant
species on the Island of Taprobane[xxxvii] as being bigger and
more warlike, than those found on the mainland[xxxviii]. Aelian (4C.BC),
records that the elephants on the island were physically stronger and bigger in
appearance than those of the mainland and may be judged more intelligent in
every way and that many were exported to Kalinga[xxxix]. Cosmos Indicopleustes
(6C.AD) refers to the elephants in Kalinga as being the best on the sub
continent. Probably, a reference to the elephants that had been originally,
exported from Taprobane to Kalinga. Until
the 19th C, large numbers of captive animals were moved across
national bounders, primarily as beasts of war and burden. The geographic extent
and scale of this transport will never completely be known, but there are
records of transport of literally thousands of elephants, over thousands of
kilometers, especially during periods of war”[xl]. Most of the 3000 war
elephants of the Delhi Sultanate came from captures from enemies in South
India, as tribute from subordinate rulers, or as imports from various regions,
including East Bengal, Sri Lanka and Pegu in lower Burma”[xli]. The elephant was much
more valuable than the horse, but reserved for royal and army use and not a
common trade object”[xlii]. For example, one
historic trade route existed between Sri Lanka and the sub-continent by about
300 BCE and later in medieval times, another developed between Pegu in southern
Myanmar to Sri Lanka and Bengal, and then to the Sultanate of northern India,
where wild elephants had been largely extirpated by this time”[xliii]. Tennent gives an
account of Arab traders transporting elephants from Ceylon to India in 1600[xliv].
History records that the Greek general Pyrrhus
of Epirus in 280 BCE, transported 20 elephants from the Greek peninsula to
fight the Roman army in the Battle of Heraclea , which he won at enormous cost
of life. The records are silent on how they were transported. However, later
attempts, when Metellus had to transport elephants across the Straits of Messina
for display in Rome, he made use of a raft made up of large jars lashed to a
frame, the framework covered in planks, and covered in earth and brushwood, so
that the raft looked like a farmyard. As the elephant`s eyesight is weak in
bright sunlight, they may have been tricked to enter the disguised barge in the
daytime[xlv]. The Carthaginians were
later to transport elephants from Africa to Sicily by sea. And this could
hardly have been on a raft. Instead, as
Asia used ships to transport elephants from the earliest period, this knowledge
would have reached the Mediterranean and the efficiency of transport may have
changed.
The Devanagala inscription of Parakrama Bahu 1
(12C.AD), records the details of his naval campaign in Burma where he
commissioned a huge fleet of a hundred ships as a step against the Burmese
King`s decree to discontinue the payment of elephants as tribute and the unfair
increase in the prices for individual animals, making it difficult to trade in
tuskers[xlvi]. The expedition was a
success and normalcy prevailed. In the
11C ADE, The King of Lanka sent a trade delegation to Cambodia. Due to the
trade rivalry between Burma and Cambodia, while traversing Burma, the King of
Burma captured the Envoys and confiscated their elephants, money as well as
ships. The King of Lanka immediately stopped the selling of elephants to
foreign countries and immediately increased the price[xlvii].
Most of these references confirm that the
Sinhalese have been involved in the capture and the export and import elephants
from time immemorial. Considering the number of elephants including tuskers that
were imported for breeding and training, from the Pegu region of southern Myanmar
a major source of elephants for Lanka[xlviii], some connections may
have existed between the imported and those in the wild. Unfortunately this
will ensure, that Sri Lanka`s claim to a separate strain will always remain under
a cloud.
Parakrama Bahu 1 in the Nainativu inscription
written in Tamil states that foreign merchants are welcome and assured
protection. It mentions that the island traded in elephants and horses. But in
the event of a foreign ship being wrecked, half the goods would go to the King.
If the ships carried elephants and horses King would only take a quarter of the
goods[xlix].
The Ceylon elephant was highly prized on the
sub continent for its special docile qualities and were captured for export and
for use within the country by the Sinhalese, the Moors, the Portuguese and the
Dutch. Unfortunately, due to the paucity of Portuguese records, as most of them
were burnt by Van Toll after the Dutch takeover of Colombo. The real number of elephants exported by the
Portuguese is not known. Queyroz records the customs duty on the sale of
elephants paid as feudal tribute by the Vania of Putalao (Putalam) and the King
of Candea (Kandy), which amounted in all to 20, good and bad (elephants) at 200
xerafis per head. Not counting the (elephants)
what remained in the hands of the officers of the king on account of their
customary laxicity, amounted to only 4000’ xerafis”[l] or 20 elephants. “Abeysinghe
(1966) records that the Portuguese maintained an annual demand of 37 elephants
for export from two kraals. These were valued at 9,250 rix dollars which was
equal to 15% of the total revenue of the state“[li]. “Durate Barbosa (1514)
refers to the Royal monopoly of elephants – a good elephant fetched 1,500
ducats on the Malabar coast, while Ribeiro states that, as the Ceylon elephant
was superior , traders were prepared to pay twice or even up to four times for
them compared to elephants from other countries“[lii].
The Portuguese casado Tristao Golayo de Castel
Branco owned a special loading area called the Quay of the elephant’s (today’s
Kayts) for the holding and export of elephants”[liii]. They were herded
through elephant pass, today, the name for the narrow piece of land through
which elephants were led, tied to tame ones, on their way into the Jaffna peninsula
and to Kayts for export.
The specialisation of Kayts as a holding and
staging place for shipments of elephants is confirmed by Friar Francisco de Oriente (who) went to
Tanadiua, which is also called the Quay of the elephants, because it is facing
another island from which alone elephants are embarked; and on reaching the
village Vratura, he found Tristao Golaya de Castel Branco, a casado of S.
Thome, who had come to build a boat, and from whom he asked for timber to erect
a cross: and cutting down a thick jungle, the den of deer and other game’, he
secured the timber for his cross”[liv].
The well documented Dutch records point to the
fact that on an average, in excess of 150 elephants were exported annually[lv] even though the King of
Kandy had granted permission for taking 20 – 30 animals only[lvi]. These animals mostly
captured in the Western and South Western region, which covered an area from
Mannar up to Matara, were marched all the way to Mannar or Kayts tied to tame
elephants to be shipped abroad. The many rivers that had to be crossed on the
way to the point of shipment, usually many miles away, was a constant worry, as
there were instances when the animals while in the water tried hard to break
away from their crimps[lvii]. Eventually to be
shipped in large flat bottom wooden barges, ten at a time, to the subcontinent.
Earlier elephants were also shipped out to the Coromondal coast via Kayts.
Considering the 100 year duration of the Dutch stay in the coastal region of
Ceylon, and even allowing for 75% of the Dutch presence in the island as the
most productive, the possible total number of elephants exported is a
staggering 11,250 specimens in their
prime.
To the Dutch, the export of elephants was a
lucrative item of revenue. In the 18th C. it produced an average of
100,000 Guilders per year, sometimes more, sometimes less. The Ceylon elephant
s were greatly desired in India for war and as draught animals. Bengal and Golconda
Muslim merchants came along to purchase
them. The sales took place in the port of Kayts from where loading of the
animals was convenient. They were captured in an elephant kraal or hunt held
periodically in different parts of the country where wild animals abound. Such
kraals were held in the Colombo district, the Matara district and along the
borders of the Vanni. The holding of the krall was an elaborate and specialised
procedure which was carried out by a caste of people [lviii]whose occupation it was.
They were in charge of a Master of the Hunt who was responsible for the whole
organisation. They held land as accomodessans for the work they did”[lix].
The animals captured in the south were marched
northwards to Jaffna by land along the coastal road. They had to pass through
the Kandyan Kingdom on their way and special permission had to be sought for
this transit. Another source for the supply of elephants was the tax due from
the Vanniyar of north Ceylon. In return for the rights they held in the land
and the taxes they collected from cultivators in the Vanni, they owed the lord
of the land certain taxes which for long have been commuted in terms of
elephants. These had to be delivered by them annually in Jaffna[lx]. The merchants came to
Jaffna every year to buy elephants. The market operates through brokers who
were natives of Jaffna[lxi] and had functioned for
many years. Many attempt to make direct sales to the merchants ended in failure.
Under Imhoff the price had been increased but the results were discouraging. A
new and revised price list was soon issued and was operating on Gollenesse’s
time. In fact, the decline of the
elephant trade continued in Loten’s and Schreuder’s time as well ”[lxii]. In the meantime no extraordinary trouble has
been taken this year to establish new hunts, as otherwise we would be
over-burdened with these gluttonous animals with no small harness to the poor
inhabitants from whose gardens they must be provided and, besides, at the
ordinary time scale we will be able to bring to market about 150 animals this
year”[lxiii].
The Dutch Governor Thomas Van Rhee in his 1697 record
to the Company discusses alternate transport methods, ” We have been
casting about in our mind for some other means of transport, but so far we
could think of nothing better than the construction of two large pontoons, a
little larger than the pontoon “De Hoop” which is 64 feet long, 18
feet wide and 3 and1/2 feet deep carrying 40 lasts”. “It is a flat bottomed vessel with a
round prow and keel, and carries a mast with a mizzen and foresail, so that it
may go close by the wind; and because of its floating capacity may easily pass
over the shallows of the Mannar River”[lxiv].
Commencement of the Human Elephant
conflict in the British era
The dislocation and systematic elimination of
the elephants from its traditional habitat, brought about by the British
initiated expanding coffee and later tea plantations created the first real
Human Elephant Conflict on the island and thereafter the magnificent elephant
was declared a pest and hunted for sport. A reward of a few shillings was
placed for the head of an elephant, and from 1845 – 1856, 3500 rewards were
claimed in the Northern Province alone, and during the period 1851 – 1856, a
similar reward of a paltry number of shillings was paid for 2000 elephants
killed in the Southern Province between Galle and Hambantota. This may not
include the 1400 claimed by Major Rogers and 500 each claimed by Captain Galloway
and Major Skinner. Tennent records the official killing from 1845 – 1856 as
being 5500 elephants in the Northern
and Southern Province alone[lxv], of course, this figure
does not include the injured that were afforded a solitary death in the forest.
As the tea estates of the British Plantation
Enterprise continued to expand into the virgin cloud forests of the East, South,
South East and South West escarpments of the central high lands, it destroyed
many thousands of acres of virgin cloud forests. It may be also be concluded
that many thousands of elephants, were forced to sacrifice their habitat, to
the murderous British Plantation Enterprise to be killed as a pest to rid the
elephant from the highlands, to make way for the establishment of the plantation
industry, to move into the plains in the years that followed. Tennent concludes
that at the rate they are being killed the species will soon be extinct in
Asia”[lxvi].
The availability of patches of forests, in
which the small herds, usually family groups of elephants under a matriarch,
could recuperate in, with a number of family groups coming together in search
of water, like that seen at Minneriya today referred to by some as ‘the
gathering’, a coming together of different groups for water, an infusion of
minerals and to ensure regeneration of the species. In 1844 Tennent, made a similar observation of
how, several herds sometimes browse in
close contiguity, and in their expeditions in search of water, may form a body
of possibly one or two hundred members. But on the slightest disturbance each
distinct herd hastens to reform within its own particular circle and to take
action on its own behalf for retreat or defense”[lxvii].
Unfortunately, the accelerated destruction of
the forest covers from 1977 onwards, and its reduction to 18% today (we don’t
regard rubber plantations as valid forest additions for biodiversity support),
has encouraged the steady worsening of the ensuing Human Elephant Conflict. A
sad conflict, that has led to the willful destruction of an average of 150
elephants a year or one elephant killed every two days. Considering a
conservative average of 125 elephants a year, the total number of elephants
killed over the 30 year period is in excess of 3750 elephants. These are mind boggling figures and do not include
those dying from poisoning, the cruel ‘Hakka Patas’ an extremely cruel and
inhuman form of tortured death and from gunshot wounds, unnoticed in the
forest.
A survey conducted by the Department of
Wildlife Conservation in 2011 – 12, concluded that there are approximately 6000
elephants in the wild. Since 2000 with greater human encroachment into the
forests for developmental exploitation, thereby reducing the elephant habitat
and escalating the Human Elephant conflict, and the increased fatality due to
train accidents, the numbers being killed annually, has increased considerably.
Today, the mortality rates are closer to 150 -160 per year.
Certainly, with enhanced encroachment into the
forests if the massacre continues at this accelerated rate, together with the proposed
creation of holding pens for the troublesome animals, a process that will invariably
and eventually capture the roaming males, the so-called troublesome animals,
who provide and are responsible for the gene base. The continuing illegal
capture of juveniles by individuals looking for objects, that they hope will,
enhance their prestige in their limited social circle, will add to the problem
and very soon the elephant will be extinct in the wild in Sri Lanka, and that
for a certainty, within the next ten years[lxviii]. In the past those
who had elephants knew how to care for them, they were mostly working
elephants, well fed and bathed. They were regularly exercised, not kept tied to
a tree in the garden to be exercised once a year at the annual pageants, to be
born an elephant today is certainly an entry into ‘Apaya’[lxix].
In order to enhance and increase the elephant
habitat within Sri Lanka, one possibility may be to use the genetic engraving,
that helps map out the route for the elephant to engage in regular and periodic
incursion up into the escarpments of the southern highland plateau, possibly
the last bastion to fall to the once lucrative plantation enterprise, is
confirmed by elephant sightings at Poonagala, Millennium point, Koslanda,
Randeligala. Kanneliya, Adam’s Peak etc., an area usually entered from the
southern plains and up the steep Koslanda hills, to advantage. With careful
planning, enhancement and reforesting of the highlands being abandoned by the
tea industry[lxx],
to recreate the forest landscape, the area could then be reused, to
successfully win back the lost habitat for the elephant and ensure the islands
water security for the future as well.
Ashley de Vos
Endnotes
[i] De Vos 1988, The Built Environment in 2025,
Inaugural Conference, OPA, Colombo.
[iii] Khordadbah., Book of routes, Tr. M. Meynard
in the Journal Asiatique, 1865. Ceylon. M.S An Officer, Late of the Ceylon
Rifles Vol 1, 1876, London Chapman Hall. Asian Educational Services, 1994,
Delhi. p1.
[iv] Ptolemy. Bk Vll, Ch lV. Sect 1.Ancient India
as Described by Ptolemy, 1927, Ed Chuckerverty. Calcutta.
[v] Ceylon. M.S an Officer, Late of the Ceylon
Rifles Vol 1, 1876, London Chapman Hall. Asian Educational Services, 1994,
Delhi p2, 3.
[xi] Seneviratne. D.V., Elephants in Sinhala
Literature. 1973. Sri Lanka Wildlife Bulletin No. 27-30.
[xii] The Kuruve Lekham controlled the Kuruwe or
elephant men. The training of the war elephants was the duty of the Kuruwe clan
who came under their own Muhandiram. Op. cit.
[xiii] Mahawamsa. Tr. Wilhelm Geiger. 1912. Oxford
University Press. London.
[xiv] A personal communication from, Prof. Merlin
Peris. 2006.
[xv] Tennent E.T.. 1867, The wild Elephant
Longman, London.
[xvi] Tennent E.T.. 1867, The wild Elephant
Longman, London.
[xviii] Hooker Dr. Himalayan Journal., Vol 1. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol
Xlll.
[xix] Fernao De Queyroz. The Temporal and Spiritual
conquest of Ceylon, Tr. S.G.Perera. 1930. Five books in three Vols. Reprint
1992. Vol 11, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi. p578.
[xx] Ernst Haeckel, A visit to Ceylon. Tr. Clara
Bell, 1883. 1975 reprint, Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd. Dehiwela. p204.
[xxi] Tennent E.T.. 1867, The wild Elephant
Longman, London.
[xxvii] Johann Wolffgang Heydt, Allerneuester
Geographisch Und Topographischer Schau-Platz Von Africa Und Ost Indien, 1744.
Wilhersdorff. R. Raven-Hart, Heydt’s Ceylon, 1952, being the relevant sections
of the original pertaining to Ceylon. Ceylon Government Press, Colombo. p48.
[xxviii] Katugaha. H.I.E. The last Kraal in Sri
Lanka. Gajah 29, 2008. p5-10.
[xxix] Johann Wolffgang Heydt, Allerneuester
Geographisch Und Topographischer Schau-Platz Von Africa Und Ost Indien, 1744.
Wilhersdorff. R. Raven-Hart, Heydt’s Ceylon, 1952, being the relevant sections
of the original pertaining to Ceylon. Ceylon Government Press, Colombo. p48,
49.
[xxxi] Johann Wolffgang Heydt, Allerneuester
Geographisch Und Topographischer Schau-Platz Von Africa Und Ost Indien, 1744.
Wilhersdorff. R. Raven-Hart, Heydt’s Ceylon, 1952, being the relevant sections
of the original pertaining to Ceylon. Ceylon Government Press, Colombo. p51.
[xxxii] Jayawardena. J. The Elephant in Sri Lanka.
1994. The Wildlife Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka. Colombo.
[xxxiii] Johann Wolffgang Heydt, Allerneuester
Geographisch Und Topographischer Schau-Platz Von Africa Und Ost Indien, 1744.
Wilhersdorff. R. Raven-Hart, Heydt’s Ceylon, 1952, being the relevant sections
of the original pertaining to Ceylon. Ceylon Government Press, Colombo. p52.
[xxxv] Possibly the Kelani River north of Madual or
Mutuwal, the mouth of which extended to Wattala, which was also one time a
port. The hour distance referred to by Heydt (1744), could be a traditional
hour which was usually 24 or 28 minutes according to the copper Paethatiya, the
Kelani River was indeed close and just north of Colombo.
[xxxvi] Johann Wolffgang Heydt, Allerneuester
Geographisch Und Topographischer Schau-Platz Von Africa Und Ost Indien, 1744.
Wilhersdorff. R. Raven-Hart, Heydt’s Ceylon, 1952, being the relevant sections
of the original pertaining to Ceylon. Ceylon Government Press, Colombo. p52.
[xxxvii] Weerakkody D.P.M. 1997, Taprobane, Brepols.
The Greek name for the island.
[xxxviii] Pliny.P. The Natural History of Pliny. 1855.
Tr. John Bostock and H.T.Riley. 6 Vols. London.
[xxxix] Sicholfield A.F. 1959, Aelian on the
characteristics of Animals, London.
[xl] Sukumar. R. The Asian Elephant, Ecology and
Management. 1989. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. UK.
[xlvii] Goonatilleke. H. Sri Lanka Cambodia
Relations with special reference to the period 11- 20 C. JRAAS New Series, Vol.XLVll. Special Number.
[xlviii] Digby. S., War Horse and Elephants in the
Delhi Sultanate. 1971. Oriental Monographs. Oxford. UK.
[xlix] Indrapala. K. The Nainativu Tamil
Inscription of Parakrama Bahu 1. 1963. University of Ceylon Review. Vol XX1
No1. P70.
[l] Fernao De Queyroz. The Temporal and Spiritual
conquest of Ceylon, Tr. S.G.Perera. 1930. Five books in three Vols. Reprint
1992. Vol 11, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi. p729.
[li] Abeysinghe. T. Portuguese Rule in Ceylon 1966. Lake House
Bookshop. Colombo. Jayawardena. J. The Elephant in Sri Lanka. 1994. The
Wildlife Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka. Colombo.
[liii] Fernao De Queyroz. The Temporal and Spiritual
conquest of Ceylon, Tr. S.G.Perera. 1930. Five books in three Vols. Reprint
1992. Vol 11, Asian Educational Services, New Delhi. p 628.
[lvii] The escorting elephants, the tame elephants
to which the semi tames ones were tied to were referred to as Crimps.
[lviii] They were the Kuruwe people from Kegalla. The
training of the elephants caught from the wild for both traditional purposes
and war and even the mahouts were trained by the Kuruwe people. J.Jayawardena,
Biodiversity and Elephant Conservation Trust.
[lix] The Memoirs of Ryckloff Van Goes (1663 –
1675), Colombo 1962. P27.
[lx] S. Arasaratnam. The Vanniyar of North Ceylon
: A Study of feudal power and Central Authority, Ceylon Journal of Historical
and Social Studies. Vol X. No1. P103-5.
[lxi] S. Arasaratnam. The Vanniyar of North Ceylon
: A Study of feudal power and Central Authority, Ceylon Journal of Historical
and Social Studies. Vol X. No1. P103-5.
[lxii] The Memoirs of Ryckloff Van Goes (1663 –
1675), Colombo 1962. P27.
[lxiv] Thomas Van Rhee, 1697 p.14. also see Roland
Silva. Architecture. Discusses forty
last or the capacity of a flat-bottomed boat of 64 feet long or 18 feet wide
and 3 and 1/2 feet deep is equated to 78 tons of goods or the weight of ten
elephants.
[lxv] Tennent E.T.. 1867, The wild Elephant
Longman, London.
It is possible that an individual might hide behind the
legal immunity of parliamentary privilege and, disregarding moral
principles, engage in direct or implicit defamation of another or others.
Such defamation may happen either through the defamer’s own
intention or by instigation of others.
If this occurs, it seems contrary to the intention behind
parliamentary privilege and, as such, would amount to abuse of it.
In fairness, it therefore seems necessary that framers of
parliamentary rules re-examine the question of parliamentary privilege to
determine whether it is possible to introduce safeguards against abuse.
In this regard, blind adherence to practices in some other
countries does not seem prudent or necessary.
Prof. Rose Anne Kenny, principal investigator at TILDA.
Please take vitamin D to help protect against Covid-19 while the vaccine is being rolled out — this is the urgent message from a group of Irish medical experts.
The experts from Ireland’s leading universities have appealed to the Government to issue updated guidelines for all Irish adults on vitamin D supplements which, they say, can significantly reduce the risk of infection, serious illness and death from Covid-19
However, to date there has been no policy action despite the mounting evidence showing the benefits of supplementation, they say.
The group have pointed to studies describing significant reductions in death amongst older nursing home patients and substantial reductions in ICU admission rates amongst hospitalised Covid-19 patients following supplementation with vitamin D.
They also highlight emerging evidence from Andalucia in Spain, where a public health initiative to supplement all vulnerable groups including those in care homes with vitamin D coincided with a fall in daily Covid-19 death rates from 60 per day in mid-November to just three per day by the first week in January.
Unfortunately, vitamin D is lacking in the Irish population across all age groups and so experts including Prof Declan Byrne, clinical director at St James’ Hospital and Prof Rose Anne Kenny, principal investigator of TILDA, are urging the Department of Health to increase its current vitamin D guidelines to the general adult population for a daily intake of 20-25 micrograms to build protection against the virus.
Among the other eminent academics involved in this work is Dr Dan McCartney, programme director of Human Nutrition and Dietetics at TU Dublin and Trinity College.
Dr Dan McCartney, programme director of Dietetics and human nutrition at TUD.
‘The current pandemic has claimed over 2,700 lives in this country and continues to pressurise our acute care system,” he says.
Along with mask-wearing, hand-washing, social-distancing and cough etiquette, taking vitamin D supplements now will give the Irish population a degree of protection while the vaccine is being rolled out.
The accumulation of evidence linking low vitamin D levels and Covid-19 is now considerable
Finland has recorded low Covid-19 infection and death rates in a country which has been compulsory enriching its milk and spreadable fats with vitamin D since 2003.
Research from Germany has shown a fifteen-fold increased need for invasive mechanical ventilation and a six-fold increased risk of death in Covid-19 patients with low vitamin D levels, while data from Cordoba in Spain and from France and the UK have highlighted a 25-30 fold reduced risk of ICU admission and a substantial reduction in risk of death in Covid-19 patients supplemented with vitamin D.ADVERTISEMENT
In the study from Cordoba in Spain, out of 76 patients who were admitted to hospital with Covid-19, 50 received activated vitamin D. The other 26 didn’t get any vitamin D and all of the patients were tracked over their admission.
Of the 50 patients who received vitamin D, only one went to ICU and recovered quickly and all 50 of these patients were discharged without complications.
Of the 26 patients who didn’t get vitamin D, 13 of them had to go to ICU and two of them died. Statistically, this equates to a 25-30 fold greater likelihood of being admitted to ICU amongst the people who didn’t get this high dose vitamin D supplementation during their admission.
The study from France provided older Covid-19 patients from nursing homes with high dose vitamin D supplements during their admission and monitored them for five to six weeks post-discharge from hospital.
They found that 83 per cent of those who got vitamin D before leaving hospital were still alive five weeks later whereas in the group who didn’t get vitamin D in hospital, only 44 per cent survived.
Mortality
The larger UK study was published in December and showed a seven-fold reduction in mortality amongst hospitalised Covid-19 patients who were given high dose vitamin D supplements during their admission.”
Dr McCartney advises that Irish adults take 20-25 micrograms (800-1000 iu) of vitamin D per day for the duration of the crisis, although older people and those who are obese or who have darker skin may need to take a higher dose in consultation with their GP.
Supplementation is the answer here. It is not possible to get adequate amounts of vitamin D from food or sunshine at this time of year to achieve the blood levels necessary for enhanced immunity.
There is a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in this country across all age groups meaning that all adults are at risk.
Prof. Rose Anne Kenny, principal investigator at TILDA.
The ideal supplement for adults in Ireland is 20-25 micrograms per day (800-1000 iu/day) taken with food, and that should be sufficient to get most people above the critical 50 nanomoles per litre blood vitamin D threshold where immunity against Covid-19 is enhanced.”
| January 19, 2021 at 9:11 AM CST – Updated January 19 at 5:13 PM
ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Vitamin D is an important nutrient that helps your body absorb calcium. But studies show about 40 percent of Americans don’t get enough of the vitamin. And, new research is suggesting low vitamin D levels may affect a person’s chance of getting COVID-19 and recovering from it.
It’s known as the sunshine vitamin. Vitamin D helps keep your bones and immune system strong. Now, researchers are finding this vitamin may also be linked to COVID-19. There appeared to be worse outcomes in COVID patients who have low vitamin D levels,” said Dr. Ivan Castro, MD, who practices Internal Medicine at Private Health MD.
In a recent study, more than 80 percent of 200 hospitalized COVID patients had a vitamin D deficiency, and prescription vitamin D helped COVID patients recover better. Of 50 patients who received it, none died and only one ended up in the ICU. In a group of 26 patients who didn’t receive vitamin D, two died and 13 were admitted to the ICU.
Vitamin D is linked to the immune system,” said Castro, MD. You can make sure you’re getting enough of the vitamin. Food like salmon, sardines, cod liver oil, egg yolks, mushrooms, milk, and oatmeal are high in vitamin D. Though the sun may be the best source. Your body makes vitamin D when it’s exposed to direct sunlight.
The recommended daily value of vitamin D for most adults is between 600 and 800 international units, depending on your age.
Contributor(s) to this news report include: Julie Marks, Producer; Bob Walko, Videographer and Editor.
Talking about the aim of the exploration, Union Minister of State for Tourism and Culture, Prahlad Singh Patel, said, The world should get to know about the Ram Setu through evidence based on scientific research.”
Also, Ram Setu’s age will be ascertained through the study of fossils and sedimentation to see if it correlates with the Ramayana period, sources in the Ministry of Culture told The Indian Express. (Photo: NASA)
The government has approved an underwater research project to ascertain the origins of the Ram Setu — a 48-km-long chain of shoals between India and Sri Lanka.
Talking about the aim of the exploration, Union Minister of State for Tourism and Culture, Prahlad Singh Patel, said, The world should get to know about the Ram Setu through evidence based on scientific research.”
Ram Setu, also known as Adam’s Bridge or Nala Setu, holds religious significance because of the Ramayana.
The central advisory board on archaeology, which functions under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), has approved the proposal for this underwater exploration project. The study — to be conducted by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) Goa — will focus on the process behind Ram Setu’s formation and also whether there are any submerged habitations around the structure.
Patel said, ASI has been asked for permission by the NIO on two counts — excavation to ascertain the age of the structure, and to explore the surrounding area. The permission has been granted.”
Also, Ram Setu’s age will be ascertained through the study of fossils and sedimentation to see if it correlates with the Ramayana period, sources in the Ministry of Culture told The Indian Express. Keeping in view the upcoming Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, sources say research is likely to begin this year itself.
In it’s proposal note, NIO said: The historicity and the date of ‘Ramayana’ remain a debatable subject among historians, archaeologists and scientists. It is proposed to carry out scientific and underwater archaeological studies to understand the nature and formation of the Ram Setu and its surrounding area.”
The agency’s research vessel named Sindhu Sadhana will be deployed to collect samples of sediment from 35-40 metres below the water level. Sindhu Sadhana is an indigenous exploration vessel which can stay underwater for up to 45 days.
Ram Setu has been at the centre of debate since 2005 when the UPA government proposed the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, to build a shipping canal to link the Arabian Sea with the Bay of Bengal. For this, a channel passing through the limestone shoals of Ram Setu was to be dredged in the Sethusamudram sea, between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. However, the project was opposed by environmental groups as well as by the BJP as they said that the project would damage the Ram Setu.
At the time, AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa had demanded from the-then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Rama Setu be declared a national monument, even as then DMK chief M Karunanadhi had come down heavily on communal forces” for using the myth” of Ram Sethu to stall the Sethusamudram project.
Widespread COVID-19 cases have been reported from each district in the country yesterday and that more than 100 cases have been reported from Colombo, Gampaha and Kandy districts.
A total number of 724 COVID-19 patients have been detected in the country yesterday and the majority of 197 cases were reported from the Colombo District, while 110 cases from Kandy and 106 from the Gampaha Districts.
In addition to these, 28 cases from Kalutara, 38 from Galle, 40 from Kurunegala, 27 from Matale, 24 from Kegalle, 31 from Ratnapura, 22 from Matara, 21 from Puttalam, 13 from Ampara, 12 from Hambantota, 15 from Mannar, 9 from Vavuniya, 7 from Nuwara Eliya, 7 from Polonnaruwa, 2 from Monaragala, 3 from Trincomalee, 4 each from Badulla and Jaffna and one each from Anuradhapura, Kilinochchi, Mullaithivu and Batticaloa districts.
Meanwhile, the total number of cases in the second wave of COVID-19 stands at 52,439 as of this morning. Among them 38,729 cases have been reported from the Western Province alone.
A total of 841 COVID-19 patients were detected within today bringing the total number of cases in the country to 58,430, the Government Information Department said.
Accordingly, the total number of active cases thereby increased to 8,466. Meanwhile, the total Covid-19 recoveries stand at 49,684.
Three more persons who were infected with Covid-19 have fallen victim to the virus, the Director-General of Health Services confirmed a short while ago.
Following the new development, the total number of novel coronavirus-related deaths reported in Sri Lanka has climbed to 283.
One of the victims is a 77-year-old woman who was residing in Colombo 14 area. She was transferred from Colombo National Hospital to Mulleriyawa Base Hospital after testing positive for the virus. She passed away yesterday (January 23), while suffering from Covid-19 pneumonia, high blood pressure, liver infection and kidney disease, the Department of Government Information said.
The second victim was identified as an 84-year-old woman from Maradana area. She died on Thursday (January 21) while receiving treatment at the Colombo National Hospital. The cause of death was cited as severe blood poisoning, Covid-19 pneumonia and heart disease.
In the meantime, a 65-year-old woman who was living in Pujapitiya area fell victim to the virus today (January 24). Upon testing positive for the virus, she was transferred to the Theldeniya Base Hospital from Kandy National Hospital. The cause of death was recorded as Covid-19 pneumonia and blood poisoning.
Covid-19 infections registered in Sri Lanka crossed the grim milestone of 58,000 as 492 more persons were tested positive today (January 24).
In addition, 349 from the Peliyagoda cluster were also confirmed as active coronavirus cases earlier this evening. Thereby, 841 infections in total have been identified so far within the day.
As per statistics, the total number of Covid-19 infections confirmed in the country to date now stands at 58,428.
Recoveries from the virus meanwhile climbed to 49,684 earlier today, with 423 more patients returning to health
Members of ‘Muslim Dikkasada Pilibanda Viyath Hamuwa’ stated today (24) that they were wronged by the Kathi Courts.
Meanwhile, Minister of Public Security Sarath Weerasekera stated that the issue regarding the Kathi courts will definitely be resolved in the new constitution.
Sri Lanka is never short of controversy. Colombo East Container Terminal is at the centre of a major national crisis which would decide the future of the current government and would decide the country’s future. The issue has traversed this far partly as a result of clueless politicians, corrupt public officials, wheeler-dealer advisors and not soliciting the advice from correct quarters. First and foremost, any government elected to power by the People are duty-bound to protect the sovereignty of the nation and not its neighbor. Secondly, any decision taken has to be in the best interest of the nation and not because of geo-political pressures. Politicians’ role is to find ways to come out of political issues and the diplomats, advisors and think tanks are there to find alternate ways to mitigate issues.
Let us take each argument
In May 2019 a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between the Yahapalana Government, India & Japan. There was no mention of Adani in this MoC
Therefore, referring to the May 2019 MoC to justify giving Adani ECT is an argument that cannot be accepted. When to this 49% Japan is not even involved presently.
India must be given ECT because we handle 66% of India’s Transhipment
The MoC was signed between India-Sri Lanka-Japan and not between any transshipment providers.
Shipping lines are private companies who berth in Sri Lanka for their advantage not to please or displease India or even Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka handles a large volume of transshipment because it is advantageous to the shipping lines. It is shipping lines who decide where they dock and why and not governments in power. Therefore, the claim that India will remove transshipment if Adani is not given ECT is false unless the Indian Government will subsidize the shipping line for the loss of money to bypass Colombo Port & dock elsewhere.
Price & Time are key factors that India or Singapore cannot challenge Sri Lanka with. This key factor must be understood by all.
The commercial and strategic value of Colombo Port has yet to be understood properly by politicians and key advisors. The combination of PRICE, TIME, DEPTH and SERVICEwill provide a competitive edge over all the upcoming Ports in the region. DEPTH is the factor Sri Lanka needs to complete to win that competitive edge.
These are areas Sri Lanka can attract shipping lines and Colombo Port has every ability to do so especially with the Port City Financial Hub also coming up. The Hub Port status enjoyed by Colombo Port with ECT in full capacity under its own management would mean high dollar income to the ECT/Colombo Port. This is what the 23 Trade Unions are trying to convey to the decision makers and it would be good for the Cabinet Sub-Committee to listen to their arguments before presenting a paper without their inputs landing Sri Lanka in a bigger calamity politically & commercially.
Geopolitics
Decades ago India & US were not on friendly terms. Today, India is a strategic partner of the US. Decades ago India was angry at Sri Lanka’s pro-US stand. This was round about the same time India helped train and fund Tamil militancy and Sri Lanka weathered 30 years of terrorism. The IPKF was forced upon us. It was during a change in government that luckily made India agree to withdraw the IPKF when asked to do so. Indo-Lanka Accord signed in 1987 promised to disarm LTTE and end the conflict within hours. All main clauses of the Accord were breached by India but India continues to make demands. Even after the breach of agreement India has still to return the oil tanks in Trinco. These scenarios are valid reasons for the Sri Lankan public to be cautious of dealing with India. Denying India what India demands before signing on any dotted line is far better than a diplomatic and government-government warfare in the future. We shirk to even imagine such a future scenario.
This is so because India’s strategic partnership with US encompasses directly challenging China in the open seas and US and Indian military are regularly conducting naval exercises with Japan & Australia. Ports will hold a key role in this partnership. We saw the large influx of war ships arriving at regular intervals in Trincomalee and the signing of ACSA with US and SOFA is in the pipeline as well. Donor agencies insist on PPP with external parties to meet their agenda and advantage. Sri Lanka should know to negotiate deals to its advantage not to please the other party.
The ports & airports are the entry exit points to a country & the keys to these points must be held by the State. International trade is dictated by buyers and service depends on the demand. Thus, a commercial port has to develop as per the requirements of the shipping lines and with Sri Lanka situated in the central trade lane, Sri Lanka naturally offers an automatic best place location for any shipping line (main lines/feeder lines). Thus, it is other add-on factors that Sri Lanka needs to provide. It is unfortunate that all of Sri Lanka’s development proposals end up getting strangulated due to petty politics and political prostituting. We have wasted many years in not bringing up Colombo Port as well as other Ports around Sri Lanka to the level it should have been brought with strategic thinking and strategic planning & global marketing.
It was as a result of lethargy, corruption and another instance of prostituting that Queens Terminal went to P&O/JKH in 1999 for 30 years and the lease concluding in 2029 with the Terminal returning to SLPA once again. Ironically the same players that cut this deal are in office currently. With SAGT terminal exactly next to ECT, this would mean the SLPA would have a BOX TERMINAL. There are only 4 such terminals in the world. This would be another strategic asset to Sri Lanka bringing dollar revenue and would be able SLPA/ECT to even compete with CICT giving better offers to shipping lines. The importance of ECT is its berthing capabilities and its services and operations can be developed as an ongoing exercise as Port engineers and Trade Unions are assuring to make the ECT a profitable entity under 100% Sri Lanka’s ownership and control by 2025.
Why India wants to suddenly develop ECT? Why Adani?
The proposal to develop Colombo Port came during the 1stterm Presidency of Mahinda Rajapakse. India did not show any interest in developing ECT. India’s sudden interest came with the regime change it engineered with US that saw a plethora of Indo-US influence in Sri Lanka. As pointed out by the Trade Unions, the GoSL must be alert to the corrupt nature of Adani who is under investigation for money laundering and corruption even in India. As close associate of Indian PM, the Unions ask a very valid question – what if the Modi Government collapses and the new Indian government is anti-Adani, what is the outcome of influence Sri Lanka will have to weather. GoSL must also note that when India has thousands of people dying of hunger on a daily basis, when areas of India are still living in the cave days, why would India wish to nominate a very close associate to take over 49% of a strategic port, unless it was for India’s strategic purpose rather than to help Sri Lanka develop its port. We must not be naïve to the fact that India is also developing ports to attract shipping lines. Why would India wish to develop Sri Lanka’s Port which would automatically be a first choice for any shipping line over India’s new ports, given the saving in cost and time?
Why would India and Adani give $700m for our Port without having undisclosed strategic plan which Sri Lanka is unlikely to benefit from!
Is Adani and India giving $700m just to make Sri Lanka happy unless their investment is something different to what we think. How long will Adani demand to stay in Sri Lanka to recover this ‘investment’. What if India is killing 2 birds with one stone by demanding the ECT as a political threat but with intent to ensure ECT development never gets off the ground and giving India the time it needs to build its ports and even entice shipping lines to transfer transshipment at a lesser cost than what Sri Lanka offers. Marketing a port has all sorts of possibilities. We only need to improve the DEPTH of the ECT as all other factors are to our competitive advantage. When Sri Lanka’s decision makers are only interested to put India First, what is our future?
National security of Sri Lanka has to matter far more than making investors happy. With the Port City emerging as a future revenue centre, Sri Lanka has to make sure its next door key commercial port is also kept secure. Giving 49% stake to a corrupt Indian is going to get Sri Lanka nowhere. It also makes any to ask, if 49% is not a sale or a lease, but Adani is giving $700m – what is this deal called!
It is also important to look at how India is separately exerting influence over Sri Lanka – Palaly airport, KKS & Oluvil harbors, IOC, Trinco Oil Tanks and exclusive economic zone which is off limits to Sri Lankans even military, rising influence over Estate Tamils by India, interfering even in the Jaffna university – these cannot and should not be taken lightly. Where India has to take decisions, India doesn’t mince words or is even bothered about angering anyone – the denial of credentials to the guru of Sri Lanka’s India First policy is one good example where Indian bureaucracy dictates to its politicians and is not bothered about making Sri Lanka unhappy.
Sri Lanka is not on a wicket to be dictating to anyone, however, Sri Lanka must maintain a dignity that must return to the foreign policy of Mrs. Bandaranaike who stood her ground on all matters and was respected for doing so by leaders of both Eastern and Western blocs. To this day, she is held in the highest esteem by all including India whom she had to guts to say no to!
The factors presented to the public as reason to give Adani ECT is unacceptable and the issues likely to emerge from this handover is going to be far more complicated and difficult for Sri Lanka to handle. We can part ways before signing on any dotted lines. But if India is given control over 49% of a key port which would entail loss of jobs to Port Workers, management in Indian hands and trouble inside the Port, that would prevent shipping lines from calling at Colombo Port, gaining this $700m giving 49% becomes meaningless. We are going to be saddled with Adani until he is satisfied that he has earned his profits and we don’t know how long he will want to remain and how much trouble he would cause as he is presently doing with Indian farmers!
In continuing last week’s article on how lies manufactured and
manipulated by charismatic leaders and mediocre theorists can distort the
perceptions of the masses and lead societies to violence I must make a
brief diversion, before I come to the local context – my main purpose —
to focus on how Donald Trump is leaving White House as the most dangerous
President that ever walked out of it. He is leaving America under the darkest
cloud that threatens to come down not in dismal rain but in ghastly
blood. He left the White House saying: Goodbye, we love you, we’ll be back in
some form,” before boarding Air Force One for the last time.
That is an ominous message. And he has the potential to do it considering the
following he has. America exploded because of one big lie manufactured
and manipulated by Trump. Millions of his followers believed in his big
lie that he won the election. And he left the White House
as a bitter man vowing to come back to vindicate himself and
possibly to get even with those who stole” his victory.
This makes life risky to his rivals. To begin with, I fear
for the lives of both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
America has a bitter history of assassinating controversial and reformist
leaders who dominate tumultuous times. It has a history of assassinating four
Presidents: 1. Abraham Lincoln (1865) shot by a confederate, white supremacist,
immediately after the Civil War which led to the emancipation of Afro-American
slaves ; 2. James Garfield (1881) shot by a disgruntled public servant; 3.
William McKinley 1901 was shot by an anarchist who had lost his job; and 4. J.
F. Kennedy shot in 1963 with conspiracy theories pointing a finger at egregious
Edgar Hoover, the head of FBI. In between Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronal
Reagan narrowly escaped assassination attempts.
The last phase of Trump’s regime was a volatile time where the
American nation was split right down the middle. It was the time closest to
that of the Civil War where racist supremacist were riding high. Then
violence originated from the overall conditions of the Civil War. The unique
aspect of our time is that violence has come straight down from the President
who tried every trick in the book and failed to retain his seat in the
White House. He challenged the election result in 62 courts which
rejected his lie that the election was stolen from him through fraudulent
means. His own Party was divided on it. The people rejected it. He fought two
Senate seats in Georgia on his lie and lost both. Finally, when he ran
out of all avenues, the last means available to him was to stop the
Congress assembled to count the electoral votes and endorse Joe Biden as the
winner of the election. In a desperate bid he sent his mob down Pennsylvania
Avenue to the Congress to grab power with physical force – a blood-thirsty mob
which was out to Hang Pence!” who was presiding at the count, and also Nancy
Polosi, the Speaker of the House, if they could get her.
Inciting an insurrection to stop the democratic process in order
to grab power violently was a crime committed by Trump in full public view.
This desperate act, which was doomed to fail, question his mental state. Can a
rational man who can think logically reject the reality staring in his face and
continue obsessively and fanatically to believe in his own lies —
lies which he could not substantiate and were leading him, every step of the
way, to his nemesis? Could he stop the will of the American people
expressed overwhelmingly in favour of his rival, Joe Biden, in the presidential
election by sending his rag-tag mob down the mall to stop the legitimate act of
the first branch of government assembled to endorse his defeat? Only a
half-demented, self-pitying, intransigent maniac, paralysed by the fear of facing
the world waiting to get him once he leaves the protective office, could
believe in phantasmagorial lies like the one he believed in. He and his
followers sincerely believe that tens of thousands of dead men’s votes
were cast for Biden along with tens of thousands of votes that were
shifted by machines fixed to make Biden win. Our modern societies are plagued
by lies manufactured and promoted by self-seeking political leaders whose lies
have led to early deaths and unnecessary destruction. The lies that political
leaders have marketed for short-term gains have in the long-term been dangerous
to their lives and that of their followers. These lies invariably tend to
ricochet and knock them out. As I pointed out earlier it happened to Hitler, it
happened to the Tamil leaders and it happened to Donald Trump.
The leaders who thrive on palpable lies deserve their inevitable
humiliating end. But it is the consequences to the people and the community
that are tragic, leaving them as helpless victims of unmanageable and
overwhelming disasters. The poisonous lies injected by the leaders into
society create toxic politics that drive people to irredeemable extremism.
For instance, there are 3006 counties in America and in every
one of them there is at least one or two white supremacists, seething
with racism and armed with a gun, ready to target both the President and
Vice-President, if and when an opportunity arises. Apart from that there are
sufficient number of red-necked, white supremacists in the armed forces
who can do to both President and to Vice-President what the Sikh
bodyguard did to Mrs. Indira Gandhi. In the current context, what has happened
has happened because one leader believes, in his deranged way, that he alone
knows the truth when the whole world proclaims it’s a lie. Consequently,
not only America the whole world is facing the horrors of Trump’s mendacious
cult.
He, of course, will go out of the White House perpetuating
his lie which will fuel the fires of hate that are waiting to explode in the
coming days, may be years. Who knows? For what it is worth, it must
be recorded that a leading Indian astrologer has predicted that Kamala
Harris will be the next president. This too sounds ominous. It can only mean
that Biden will not last his full term. Whether it will be through
natural causes or man-made causes is not clear. The Security forces will
have a nightmarish time protecting both as the mood of divided America has
turned nasty with fanatics hanging around, waiting to target their perceived
enemy.
The battle that was fought and won was battle for the
truth. Trump was manipulating and manufacturing an alternative narrative based
on brazen lies. In his inaugural speech Biden took on this issue head-on
and said: And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are
manipulated, and even manufactured. ……The recent weeks and months have
taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies, lies told for
power and for profit,”
Biden’s speech has a great relevance to the world, particularly
to Sri Lanka, because foreign policies aimed at bringing lasting peace on earth
and reconciliation among divided communities cannot succeed on manufactured
lies. This is a large theme that can be explored later. For the moment, it
is his statement that we must reject the culture in which facts
themselves are manipulated, and even manufactured” that will be explored
in the Sri Lankan context. The hostile foreign policies of the West
and India in particular are based essentially on the narrative packaged and
marketed by the Tamil separatist lobby which has a sizeable toe-hold in most
foreign offices of the West and India. There is at least one Tamil
lobbyist who had infiltrated as volunteers the political offices of left-wing
MPs from UK to New Zealand. Their clout exceeds that of the embassies and high
commissions of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To this day no
strategy has been worked out to combat the Goebbelsian Tamil narrative that has
dominated and determined the anti-Sri Lankan foreign policy of foreign nations.
The latest example confirms how the craftily manufactured
Tamil narrative determines the foreign policy of India. After his recent
trip of Sri Lanka, Dr. S. Jaishankar, the Indian Foreign Minister, said,
parroting the mantra of the Tamils : It is in Sri Lanka’s own interests that
the expectations of the Tamil people for equality, justice, peace and dignity
within a united Sri Lanka are fulfilled.” This is a politically loaded sentence
which in many ways sums up the global perspective on which Sri Lanka is judged
and sentenced to the gallows by the international community, The words
equality”, justice”, peace” and dignity” have a politically explosive
connotations indicating that the Tamils have been denied these essentials in a
systemic way to deny them their fundamental rights to live as human beings.
Accepting in toto the usual litany of complaint of the Tamil lobby, the
India state is plainly accusing the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) of denying the
Tamils, in particular, their equality”, justice”, peace” and
dignity”. The Tamil propagandists have succeeded in painting the GOSL as
a racist state that had denied the Tamils these fundamental rights.
Herein lies the crux of the North-South conflict. The
international dynamics also flow from this premise. This is a lie of
Trumpian proportions. The entire case of Tamil Eelamists, separatists,
federalists, devolutionists, etc., is based on this monstrous lie. There is
no empirical, historical, reliable evidence available to substantiate
this case.
There are two main ways by which the veracity of this accusation
can be tested. The first is by considering how the Tamils have fared in the
last 73 years under the rule of the Sinhala state”, as they are wont to call
it to make it sound like racist state. The second is by considering how
the Tamils have been treated under Tamil regimes starting from 13th century
when they settled down for the first time as permanent colonists in Jaffna to
the end of Prabhakaran’s one-man regime on May 14, 2009. An objective
assessment of the status of the Tamils under these two regimes can settle the
argument as to whether the Tamils have been denied these essentials under
the Sinhala state” or the Tamil states. Since the Tamils went down the
path of separatism and violence on this theme of the denial of equality”,
justice”, peace” and dignity” – it is even there in the Indian Foreign
Minister’s document – it is of extreme importance to evaluate their accusations
as expressed by them in every forum, local and international.
This, of course, is a huge theme which needs volumes to explore.
But for our immediate purposes I will have to reduce the comparisons to the
bare minimum. At the end of which I will ask the hired moralists who
pontificate on human rights – mainly Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, Jehan Perera,
Prof. Savithri Gunasekera, her side-kick Prof. A. Aluvihare, Ms. Radhika
Coomaraswamy, Prof. Jayadeva Uyangoda, and, of course, our man who never
fails to advertise himself as a political scientist, Dayan Jayatilleke, and
also the assorted anti-Sinhala-Buddhist editorial writers and columnists — to
tell us which state had denied the Tamils equality”, justice”, peace” and
dignity”.
So let’s begin with the Tamils regimes going back in history to
the Arya Chakravartis. I repeat I am dealing with only abbreviated historical
episodes selected to highlight the condition of the Tamils under the two
separate regimes. The most dramatic episode that sets the templates for the
future begins with Sankili who marched down to Mannar on the Christmas eve of
1544 and massacred 600 Tamils who refused to swear allegiance to him. Men,
pregnant women, children were slaughtered because they owed allegiance the King
of Portugal. The political ambition of becoming the sole representative of
Jaffna – a common obsessions with the Jaffna Tamils — was first
established by him. When Sapumal Kumaraya ruled Jaffna the Tamils were governed
under the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology of tolerance and equals. He did not
persecute the Tamils demanding total allegiance to Kottte. He even built the
sacred Nallur Temple, according to some reports. But it is the
authoritarian, intolerant and cruel Sankili fascism which eventually became the
dominant political culture of Jaffna. Sapumal Kumaraya’s tolerant culture
did not find the necessary fertile ground to grow as a political force in
Jaffna. When the Vellalas took over the running of Jaffna as subalterns
to the colonial masters they wielded power ruthlessly to oppress,
suppress and persecute the Jaffna Tamil low castes. One of the most
memorable Tamil contributions to the Oxford dictionary is the Tamil word
pariah”. It reveals the degrading contempt with which the Tamils treated their
own Tamil fellowmen. The Tamils did not confer equality”, justice”, peace”
or dignity” to pariahs. They were the outcasts.
Tamils degrading Tamils and reducing them to subhuman outcasts
was a systemic culture enforced with the authority of Hindu religious
laws. Their religious dogmas and customs had no compunction in denying
equality”, justice” peace” and dignity” to the Tamils. Rajavarothiam
Samapanthan goes around capitals of the world complaining about the
denial of dignity to the Tamils by the Sinhala state”. Well, what has he
done to save the oppressed Tamils from the depths of their despair? Why
did he not come out openly to defend the dignity and equality of the low-castes
who were denied the right to worship their common God/s at Maviddipuram
Temple? When the low-caste Tamils demanded equality to worship in a
common prayer house their heads were cracked with bottles filled with
sand. So when did the Vellala who are now demanding equality”, justice”
peace” and dignity” give equality”, justice” peace” and dignity” to their
own low-castes?
Low-caste Tamils were kicked around by the Vellala elite as if
they were an unworthy breed of subhuman pariahs who did not deserve equality”,
justice” peace” and dignity”. The Vellala elite who ruled Jaffna as
subalterns of the colonial masters from the 17th century oppressed, suppressed,
persecuted, and denied the Tamil people the fundamental human rights to
drink water from their wells, or even to walk in sunlight fearing that it
would pollute the high caste eye sight. They were not allowed to sit in
buses. They had to sit on the floor of the bus. There were separate pews in the
back for the low-castes. They were not allowed to worship Lord Siva inside the
same Hindu temples. Their schools were burnt. Those who violated the
Vellala supremacist rules were hammered by Vella thugs. Mourners burying their
loves one with traditional drums were waylaid and beaten to near death.
The came independence. For the first time the subhuman treatment
of the Jaffna Tamil low-caste was made illegal by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike
when he passed the Prevention of Social Disabilities Act of 1958. For the
first time the powers of the Vellala supremacists to oppress their own people
were clipped. The liberated Tamils were beginning to taste dignity, equality,
peace and justice.
But then came the first Tamil state born out of the war declared
by the Vellala elite at Vadukoddai on May 14, 1976. The Tamils had a
quasi-state, complete with a judiciary, army, navy and an air force. Tamils
were proud of their state. But what dignity did Sampanthan and
Sumanthiran have under the Tamil state? They complain to the world that they do
not have dignity under the Sinhala state”. What is the dignity,
security, peace and justice they enjoyed under the Tamil state? What chances
did Sampanthan have of being appointed as the Leader of the
Opposition in Prabhakaran’s state?
The NGO leaders complained that the Tamils could not
find justice in the Sinhala state”. So when did Paikiasothy
Saravanamuttu go to the courts in his Tamil state looking for justice? He was
even scared to open a branch of his office in his Tamil state. Whenever
he wanted to justice he went to the courts of the Sinhala state”.
And he boasted triumphantly of his victories against the Sinhala rulers.
Didn’t Tamil lawyers like Sumanthiram, Vigneswaram and Ponnambalam practice and
thrive in Sinhala courts? What kind of justice would they have got from the
Tamil state in Vanni if they took up the case of a Tamil child abducted by the
Tamil state and thrown into Prabhakaran’s futile war? They operated in the
Sinhala state” which they claim never gave justice to them, but never
went to operate in the Tamil state that was supposed to give
them equality. Why?
The evidence of Tamils being denied equality”, justice”,
peace” and dignity” by the Tamil regimes is overwhelming. But let us
now look at how the Tamils were treated by the Sinhala state”. The
Tamils never had it so good as under the Sinhala state”. They had free
education from kindergarten to the university – a boon not available to
the Tamils in S. India, the only homeland of Tamils. They have to pay for
tertiary education. They have free health services which their compatriots do
not have in USA – the land of the free. They don’t’ have to wait
till three Sinhalese get jobs for one of them to get a job
like in Malaysia. There are 193 flags flying at the UN and the only flag that
recognises the Tamils is the flag of the Sinhala state”. Never have the Tamils
achieved such high status in their history as under the Sinhala state”. Not
even the Indian flag, their homeland, has given them a place. Tamils have
been conferred with great dignity with their leaders being given a place
of honour in national stamps. Tamil language is dignified in all Sri
Lankan currencies. Under the Sinhala state” Tamils have shone as never before.
It has been the golden period of Tamils. In his biography of his father-in-law,
S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, Prof. A. J. Wilson categorised the Dudley Senanayake-
Chelvanayakam coalition as the golden years of Tamil-Sinhala cooperation”. It
is a historical fact that the Tamil never had ” equality”, justice”,
peace” and dignity” as under the Sinhala state. The NGOs and the Indian government
have enough research workers to justify their claim that the Tamils were denied
.”equality”, justice”, peace” and dignity” by the Sinhala state”. In fact,
it is election time now in Tamil Nadu. Modi’s government is facing
serious charges of Hindification” of Tamil Nadu. Ms. S. Vijayadharani, a
Congress member of Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly, blasted the Modi government
the other day on Newshour 10 programme for its
one language, one religion, one history, one culture policies
imposed on Tamil Nadu by the centre.
There is no space in this article to elaborate the main
theme any further. The argument is clear. The Tamils never had equality,
peace, justice and dignity” in any period of their history except under the 73
years of what they called ”the Sinhala state”. So, the Indian government
must seriously consider rephrasing their diplomatic language to
make their political pressures credible. Their diplomatic ability to push
their interests through lies is not going to convince the Sri Lankan public
that they are genuine in helping Sri Lanka to achieve either its
own interests or reconciliation. If the Sinhala state” has treated the
Tamils far better than any of the Tamils regimes throughout their history –
leaving aside the common failings that plague the history of all nations – why
should the Indian government intervene in the domestic affairs on false
accusations of a community that has treated its own people worse than dogs?
India is not going to solve its problem or that of its
neighbours if it pursues its interventions on the lies of one community. The
Sri Lankan government too must aggressively challenge the fake accusations with
the truth. It has to be done on solid research which has been hijacked by
the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist NGOs and media hacks recycling Tamil propaganda. A
well-qualified research team can easily blast to smithereens the kind of
propaganda on which the Indian policy is based on. Foreign interventions based
on Tamil fiction can be easily demolished. It is up to the Foreign
Ministry to initiate action to save the nation from foreign
interventions.
We
have all read or heard Aesop’s fable ‘The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey’: A man
and his young son set out taking their donkey to market to sell it there.
Listening to different censorious comments of a number of people they
encountered on the road, they first rode the animal, then they carried it.
First the man rode the horse, then the boy, then both of them together, and
finally, they started carrying the donkey tied to a pole by its legs; while
passing a bridge over a river, the donkey struggled to kick himself free, which
resulted in the animal falling into the water and getting drowned. You can’t
miss the lesson taught by the story. If you try to please all, you will please
none; and what’s more, trying to please everyone could have disastrous
consequences. Your conduct should be determined by a realistic assessment of
your own circumstances to suit your own best interest and that of those who
depend on you. Don’t be distracted by a desire to win praise from all the
people that come into temporary contact with you. By the way, Greek fabulist
Aesop (620-564 BCE) in Greece was a contemporary of Gautama Buddha (623-543
BCE) in India.
The
moral of the well known fable is worth the attention of our present rulers, who
seem to believe that they have to please the minority of diehard
federalists/separatists and the handful of Muslim religious extremists
parasitising on the local body politic at the expense of the wellbeing of the
peaceloving fairminded majority of the Sri Lankan people. Both these groups are
trying to strategically position themselves, to their undue advantage, between
the government and the especially aggressive faction of the geopolitical
gamemaster fraternity in the region. It would be a grave error if the ruling
politicians took for granted the loyalty of the silently suffering peaceful
ordinary Sri Lankans (95% of the population), including the nationalists who elected
them to power, fighting on the ‘One Country, One Law’ platform. There seems to
be a growing general perception as though the government is too narrowly
focusing on the few local extremists and the brazen international bullies of
different types from outside weaponizing them for their own advantage.
The
cow slaughter ban introduced in September 2020 was intended to please and
perhaps also silence the Buddhist monks who had been sincerely agitating for it
for a long time. But will these monks stop, when the much more crucial
issues that they have been raising for decades such as the destruction of
Buddhist archaeological heritage sites in the north and east provinces,
forcible proselytization of Buddhists and Hindus by foreign funded Christian
and Islamist extremists, allegations of sterilization of Sinhalese mothers
without consent by a Muslim doctor with suspected Islamist connections,
persecution of traditional Muslim men and women by Jihadists, and many other
infinitely more significant problems are apparently being relegated to the
backburner? What’s the status of the cow slaughter ban now? Is it being
implemented? How can the same government reconcile the imposition of the
particular ban with the opening of the largest meat processing factory in South
Asia in the Katunayake Investment Promotion Zone hardly three months later?
Won’t the economically more important industrial project have been marketed to
the people with less embarrassment had there been no cow slaughter ban? Or
perhaps the ban was a strategic measure to create a local market for the
general meat products of that factory, however tiny the beef consumer base in
Sri Lanka may be? What could then be said about the moral basis of the
particular ban?
A
thirty year old young Buddhist monk, by the name of Bowatte Indaratana, set
himself on fire at a place adjacent to the Dalada Maligawa on May 24, 2013
demanding that killing of cattle be stopped, and later died in hospital. His
commitment to his cause was not in question. The Ven. Mahanayakes didn’t say
anything in public in praise of the monk as far as I can remember, nor did the
government of the day under Mahinda Rajapaksa say or do anything of permanent
significance in response to the monk’s self-immolation. Years later, a maverick
monk claiming to be an Arhant had a birthday bash where a variety of dishes
were served including beef and pork! The activist monks mentioned above have
been raising much more crucial issues that are threatening the very survival of
the Sinhalese and the Buddha Sasana. It is these problems that politicians must
help resolve if they genuinely want to please the monks and the general public
including the majority community.
It
is a fact that public opinion about banning cow slaughter is not unanimous
(primarily because it is divisive, economically unaffordable, and impractical).
We have to tolerate ideas and practices that some of us disapprove of, but some
don’t, provided that these ideas and practices don’t interfere with
democratic governance and our age-old people friendly way of life. Personally,
I have no objection to the ban on cattle slaughter, I’d rather rather support
it without remaining neutral. I am a vegetarian, and have been that for most of
my life. Common sense would suggest that a strictly regulated meat industry may
be allowed. But community-alienating separatism and murderously violent
religious extremism which are bound to destroy our country in every way should
be not be tolerated, though both are attractive to the geopolitical players,
who are only concerned about their own respective national interests. (The
present government, under the presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has started
dealing with them amidst the many unnecessary obstacles placed on its path,
such as the corruptibility, indifference, and inaction of a few rotten eggs
among the vast of majority of responsible, patriotic civil authorities, and the
pressure exerted on them by conscienceless communal politicians; the situation
has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic.)
A
twofold cause that the handful of young vocal monks out of the 36,000 strong
Maha Sangha have been championing, for the most part non-politically except
where they can’t help it, amidst many physical and mental hardships, is the
containment of unethical proselytizing efforts of numerous foreign-funded
fundamentalist Christian and Islamic sects making inroads into the traditional
Buddhist and Hindu religious spaces, and the protection of the ancient Sinhala
Buddhist heritage sites – most of them gone to ruin many centuries ago, but the
invaluable common archaeological inheritance of all Sri Lankans, particularly
in the north and the east provinces – from treasure hunters (who usually happen
to be some criminals among the Sinhalese Buddhists including even politicians),
and non-Buddhist vandals and landgrabbers, the last motivated by aggressive
politico-religious ends. Monk activists have gathered much valuable information
to back up their various complaints against both violent and non-violent
extremists.
But
leaders of successive governments, with a single brave exception (GR),
have largely ignored them, and refused to get involved out of the unfounded
fear of alienating minorities. These leaders do not seem to understand that,
through their feigned political correctness policy, they encourage
opportunistic minority politicians to willingly embrace extremists for
political advantage, instead of engaging their genuine, up and coming,
broadminded young rivals to tackle the extremist menace. (In the same breath,
it must be said in fairness to MR that though he has also resorted to the
policy of political correctness in dealing with minority politicians, he never
did so to cheat them or to deceive the people. Often, on such occasions, his
goodwill was not adequately reciprocated, especially, by conservative Muslim
politicians who are still flourishing; but they will have to call it a day when
the fresh awakening Muslim youth overtake them in a few years, maybe. Once when
confronted by the fact (it was by a journalist I think) that the majority of
Muslim voters did not vote for him even though he behaved in that friendly way
towards them, MR admitted that he knew that to be the reality, but that he was
still hopeful of winning them over. Opportunistic minority politicians (they
have so far managed to sidetrack the modern thinking progressive young
contenders) and the extremists invariably politicize both the problems we have
touched on here – namely, cremation and syrup issues – and other problems that
they create. Thus, the misapplied political correctness policy of successive
governments has led to increased politicization of issues which should be
resolved without recourse to politics.
The
cremation vs burial problem and the issue of various traditional remedies of
dubious or untested efficacy/safety proposed to fight the spread of Covid-19
have been politicized, not by the government or its supporters for it should be
obvious to anyone that such a thing will not help them or the general public in
any way. These things have been given a political colour by the opposition, the
extremists, and their supporters in the mainstream as well as the social media;
it is they who have politicized it and who are trying to make the most out of
those non-issues by falsely imputing their politicization to the government, in
pursuance of their different objectives, at the expense of the truth.
Unfortunately,
some overenthusiastic government politicians have mishandled the ad hoc
adoption of ‘syrups’ and other herbal remedies and magical cures such as
charmed pots of water thrown or emptied into streams, as a default coronavirus
containment measure, by inadvertently inviting a media frenzy over the process,
depicting it as a display of traditional local superstitions that are allegedly
being offered as a substitute for a more modern scientific approach to fighting
the Covid-19 pandemic. The politicizing of the ‘syrup’ issue was done by the
media and political critics of the government. Of course, few or none of these
traditional methods may be explainable or in terms of modern science. Some of
them may show positive results or may just enhance immunity against diseases,
and do nothing more; some may have only placebo effects. One carping scribe
called Sri Lanka a syruplic instead of a republic.
A
reasonably large section of our highly literate population (15+ adult literacy
rate: 93.2/2017) do not like to see their rulers indulging in what looks like
risible superstitious rituals even in a desperate situation like the one we are
undergoing at the moment. It was at the instance of the WHO that available
indigenous medical practices specific to each society across the world were
also proposed in the continuing absence of a strictly scientifically tested
drug or vaccine for the novel coronavirus disease (Desperate times call for
desperate measures). While following the WHO’s suggestion in this regard, the
government initiated a scientific attitude to it. The Rajarata University at
Mihintale was entrusted with carrying out a study of the local remedies with
particular attention to medical ethics based on Western medicine that generally
obtains in the world and the country’s laws governing medical and
healthcare.
Internationally
recognized young medical researcher, physician, and pharmacology
professor Channa Jayasumana (40), MBBS, PhD, FRCP Edin., is State
Minister of Production, Supply and Regulation of Pharmaceuticals. As a
scientist, he knows how best to deal with the WHO-proposed use of traditional
cures, remedies and preventive measures as an easily available additional
method to combat the unknown virus. What is known as ‘Dhammika paeniya’ (one of
many such syrups or alleged indigenous medicinal infusions or decoctions) has
been recommended only as a placebo in the form of a supplementary food drink,
but not prescribed as medicine, while it is still being laboratory-tested at
Rajarata University. However, in their inexcusable naivety and voracious
appetite for publicity, some of his clueless, credulous colleagues in the
government made a mess of things by guzzling down the stuff in public, in an
apparent unnecessary promotional effort, with obvious relish as the vehicle or
medium of the alleged drug is ‘pure’ bees’ honey (almost impossible to find in
the market nowadays).
Eventually,
though, for some reason, the authorities could do precious little to control
the ‘rate vedas’ (crooks) who went berserk exploiting the opportunity to brew
and market hundreds of impromptu medicinal concoctions in order to hoodwink the
masses and fleece them of what little they have by way of money. Meanwhile, the
detractors who customarily deal in a different kind of concoctions, went to
town on their familiar disinformation campaign against Sri Lanka, trying to let
it appear to the world that the country is today being run by people who
believe more in supernatural cures than in scientific medicine. Such falsehoods
are grist to the established anti-government propaganda mill, in advance of the
anticipated diplomatic showdown in Geneva in March.
Cremation
of Muslim dead due to Covid-19 is a much more controversial issue, though
equally bereft of a supporting base in facts, with possible, nay, probable,
unjustified, international consequences. The over 90% non-Muslims of the
country and perhaps some Muslims as well who accept cremation (of Corona-dead)
as a necessity in the present national and global emergency, during which,
science, not religion, must be given preference, make no hue and cry about it.
Right from the beginning, the healthcare authorities let science determine what
should be done. The decision of the Director General of Health Services (DGHS)
to order mandatory burning of Covid-19 dead bodies was to ensure the total
destruction of the deadly virus with still unknown pathological implications
leaving no room for it to contaminate the soil or the naturally shallow
aquifers of the country. Local experts have found that cremation is the best
Covid-19 infected corpse disposal method for Sri Lanka. There is no need to
listen to politically motivated contrary suggestions offered by international
specialists who have little scientific awareness of the ground realities in Sri
Lanka. Cremation was decreed by the DGHS, the competent authority, acting on
proper scientific advice. The government has nothing to do with it. It is wrong
to charge that the decision was influenced by politics to hurt a particular
religious group.
Certain
Muslim commentators who claim to be scientists and even koranic scholars,who
advocate burial of Corona-dead Muslims and the so-called ‘moderate Muslim’
politicians like Ali Sabry who passionately urge it in spite of the
mandatory cremation directive issued by the DGHS, I am afraid, are not revealing
the truth that they know and that I know, at first hand: the truth that
there is nothing in the Quran (which I have read) to say that burial is an
inviolable religious obligation for Muslims. I worked for nearly eighteen years
before the turn of the century under the Ministry of Education and Youth
Affairs of a Gulf country (1982-1999), adjacent to where the religion of Islam
was born. I came across oral and material evidence to suggest that other forms
of disposal of dead bodies than burying were used in that country in the then
recent past. One method had been to place the duly wrapped corpse in a rock
crevice and seal it with pieces of rock beaten into place to protect it from
wild animals. I didn’t see this being done during my time there; but I saw scattered
bones of a dead person thus deposited in a rocky grave some years before (My
Arab friends told me that probably hyenas had somehow disturbed that grave).
This was conceivable considering the fact that few places are available in the
usually rockhard stony terrain of that region where deep enough graves can be
manually dug for burying bodies. Today the situation may be different with the
availability of machines to do the job. Arab Muslims were a trading seafaring
nation. Dead sailors must have been consigned to watery graves. They were a
warring people as well, and probably proper burials for the wardead could not
be afforded all the time. So, there apparently is no reason why an exception to
the burial mode that is traditionally practiced by Sri Lankan Muslims cannot be
made in this deadly emergency.
High-ended retailer Saks Fifth Avenue added private security, fencing and barbed wire ahead of a Black Lives Matter protest in New York, June 7. 2020. (Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar last month took a hard look at rent and rent-seeking at the Henry George School of Social Science.
Michael Hudson: Well, I’m honored to be here on the same show with Pepe and discuss our mutual concern. And I think you have to frame the whole issue that China is thriving, and the West has reached the end of the whole 75-year expansion it had since 1945.
So, there was an illusion that America is de-industrializing because of competition from China. And the reality is there is no way that America can re-industrialize and regain its export markets with the way that it’s organized today, financialized and privatized and if China didn’t exist. You’d still have the Rust Belt rusting out. You’d still have American industry not being able to compete abroad simply because the cost structure is so high in the United States.
Michael Hudson. (Wikimedia Commons)
The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds. In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.
America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production. New York City, where I live, used to be an industrial city and, the industrial buildings, the mercantile buildings have all been gentrified into high-priced real estate and the result is that Americans have to pay so much money on education, rent, medical care that if they got all of their physical needs, their food, their clothing, all the goods and services for nothing, they still couldn’t compete with foreign labor because of all of the costs that they have to pay that are essentially called rent-seeking.
Housing in the United States now absorbs about 40 percent of the average worker’s paycheck. There’s 15 percent taken off the top of paychecks for pensions, Social Security and for Medicare. Further medical insurance adds more to the paycheck, income taxes and sales taxes add about another 10 percent. Then you have student loans and bank debt. So basically, the American worker can only spend about one third of his or her income on buying the goods and services they produce. All the rest goes into the FIRE sector — the finance, insurance and real estate sector — and other monopolies.
And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?
America used to have industrial capitalism in the 19th century. That’s how it got richer originally but now it’s moved away from industrial capitalism towards finance capitalism. And what that means is that essentially the mixed economy that made America rich — where the government would invest in education and infrastructure and transportation and provide these at low costs so that the employers didn’t have to pay labor to afford high costs — all of this has been transformed over the last hundred years.
And we’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism. Before, the idea of capitalism in the 19th century from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill to Marx was very clear and Marx stated it quite clearly; capitalism was revolutionary. It was to get rid of the landlord class. It was to get rid of the rentier class. It was to get rid of the banking class essentially, and just bear all the costs that were unnecessary for production, because how did England and America and Germany gain their markets?
We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”
They gained their markets basically by the government picking up a lot of the costs of the economy. The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.
And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.
It had its government fund basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States. They don’t have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension later on. And most of all the Chinese economy doesn’t really have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important public utility of all. Banking is what China has kept in the hands of government and Chinese banks don’t lend for the same reasons that American banks lend.
Shanghai’s Pudong district from The Bund. (CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
(When I said that China can pay lower wages than the U.S., what I meant was that China provides as public services many things that American workers have to pay out of their own pockets – such as health care, free education, subsidized education, and above all, much lower debt service.
When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning — more than workers in other countries — goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So, what seems to be low wages” in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.)
Eighty percent of American bank loans are mortgage loans to real estate and the effect of loosening loan standards and increasing the market for real estate is to push up the cost of living, push up the cost of housing. So, Americans have to pay more and more money for their housing whether they’re renters or they’re buyers, in which case the rent is for paying mortgage interest.
So, all of this cost structure has been built into the economy. China’s been able pretty much, to avoid all of this, because its objective in banking is not to make a profit and interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. It creates money to fund actual means of production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation facilities, to build infrastructure. Banks in America don’t lend for that kind of thing.
So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.”
They only lend against collateral that’s already in place because they won’t make a loan if it’s not backed by collateral. Well, China creates money through its public banks to create capital, to create the means of production. So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.
The United States has decided not to gain wealth by actually investing in means of production and producing goods and services, but in financial ways. China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it. And whether you call this, industrial capitalism or a state capitalism or a state socialism or Marxism, it basically follows the same logic of real economics, the real economy, not the financial overhead. So, you have China operating as a real economy, increasing its production, becoming the workshop of the world as England used to be called and America trying to draw in foreign resources, live off of foreign resources, live by trying to make money by investing in the Chinese stock market or now, moving investment banks into China and making loans to China not actual industrial capitalism ways.
China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it.”
So, you could say that America has gone beyond industrial capitalism, and they call it the post-industrial society, but you could call it the neo-feudal society. You could call it the neo-rentier society, or you could call it debt peonage but it’s not industrial capitalism.
And in that sense, there’s no rivalry between China and America. These are different systems going their own way and I better let Pepe pick it up from there.
Pepe Escobar: Okay. Thank you, Michael, this is brilliant. And you did it in less than 15 minutes. You told the whole story in 15 minutes. Well, my journalistic instinct is immediately to start questions to Michael. So, this is exactly what I’m gonna do now. I think it is much better to basically illustrate some points of what Michael just said, comparing the American system, which is finance capitalism essentially, with industrial capitalism that is in effect in China. Let me try to start with a very concrete and straight to the point question, Michael.
Okay. let’s says that more or less, if we want to summarize it, basically they try to tax the nonproductive rentier class. So, this would be the Chinese way to distribute wealth, right? Sifting through the Chinese economic literature, there is a very interesting concept, which is relatively new (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) in China, which they call stable investment. So stable investment, according to the Chinese would be to issue special bonds as extra capital in fact, to be invested in infrastructure building all across China, and they choose these projects in what they call weak areas and weak links. So probably in some of the inner provinces, or probably in some parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for instance. So, this is a way to invest in the real economy and in real government investment projects.
Right? So, my question in fact, is does this system create extra local debt, coming directly from this financing from Beijing? Is this a good recipe for sustainable development, the Chinese way and the recipe that they could expand to other parts of the Global South?
Michael: Well, this is a big problem that they’re discussing right now. The localities, especially rural China, (and China is still largely rural) only cover about half of their working budget from taxation. So, they have a problem. How are they going to get the balance of the money? Well, there is no official revenue sharing between the federal government and its state banks and the localities.
So, the localities can’t simply go to central government and say, give us more money. The government lets the localities be very independent. And it is sort of the let a hundred flowers bloom” concept. And so, they’ve let each locality just go the long way, but the localities have run a big deficit.
What do they do? Well in the United States they would issue bonds on which New York is about to default. But in China, the easiest way for the localities to make money, is unfortunately they will do something like Chicago did. They will sell their tax rights for the next 75 years for current money now.
So, a real estate developer will come in and say; look we will give you the next 75 years of tax on this land, because we want to build projects on this (a set of buildings). So, what this means is that now the cities have given away all their source of rent.
Chicago’s Water Tower and Water Tower Place. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Let me show you the problem by what Indiana and Chicago did. Chicago also was very much like China’s countryside cities. So, it sold parking meters and its sidewalks to a whole series of Wall Street investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund for seventy-five years. And that meant that for 75 years, this Wall Street consortium got to control the parking meters.
So, they put up the parking meters all over Chicago, raised the price of parking, raised the cost of driving to Chicago. And if Chicago would have a parade and interrupt parking, then Chicago has to pay the Abu Dhabi fund and Wall Street company what it would have made anyway. And this became such an awful disaster that finally Wall Street had to reverse the deal and undo it because it was giving privatization a bad name here. The same thing happened in Indiana.
High School marching band in Chicago’s 2008 Bud Billiken Parade. (Curtis Morrow, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Indiana was running a deficit and it decided to sell its roads to a Wall Street investment firm to make a toll road. The toll on the Indiana turnpike was so high that drivers began to take over the side roads. That’s the problem if you sell future tax revenues in advance.
Now what China and the localities there are discussing is that we’ve already given the real estate tax at very low estimates to the commercial developers, so what do we do? Well, I’ve given them my advice. I’m a professor of economics at the Peking University, School of Marxist studies and I’ve had discussions with the Central Committee. I also have an official position at Wuhan University. There, we’re discussing how China can put an added tax for all of the valuable land, that’s gone up. How can it be done to let the cities collect this tax? Our claim is that the cities, in selling these tax rights for 75 years, have sold what in Britain would be called ground rent (i.e. what’s paid to the landed aristocracy).
Over and above that there’s the market rent. So, China should pass a market-rent tax over and above the ground rent tax to reflect the current value. And there they’re thinking of, well, do we say that this is a capital gain on the land? Well, it’s not really a capital gain until you sell the land, but it’s value. It’s the valuation of the capital. And they’re looking at whether they should just say this is the market rent tax over and above the flat tax that has been paid in advance, or it’s a land tax on the capital gain for land.
Now, all of this requires that there be a land map of the whole country. And they are just beginning to create such a land map as a basis for how you calculate how much the rent there is.
What I found in China is something very strange. A few years ago, in Beijing, they had the first, International Marxist conference where I was the main speaker and I was talking about Marx’s discussion of the history of rent theory in Volume II and Volume III of Capital where Marx discusses all of the classical economics that led up to his view; Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Marx’s theory of surplus value was really the first history of economic thought that was written, although it wasn’t published until after he died. Well, you could see that there was a little bit of discomfort with some of the Marxists at the conference. And so, they invited for the next time my colleague David Harvey to come and talk about Marxism in the West.
Well, David gave both the leading and the closing speech of the conference and said, you’ve got to go beyond volume I of Capital. Volume I was what Marx wrote as his addition to classical economics, saying that there was exploitation in industrial employment of labor as well as rent seeking and then he said, now that I’ve done my introduction here, let me talk about how capitalism works in Volumes II and III. Volumes II and III are all about rent and finance and David Harvey has published a book on Volume III of Capital and his message to Peking University and the second Marxist conference was – you’ve got to read Volume II, and III.
Well, you can see that, there’s a discussion now over what is Marxism and a friend and colleague at PKU said Marxism is a Chinese word; It’s the Chinese word for politics. That made everything clear to me. Now I get it! I’ve been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences in China to create a syllabus of the history of rent theory and value theory. And essentially in order to have an idea of how you calculate rent, how do you make a national income analysis where you show rent, you have to have a theory of value and price and rent is the excess of price over the actual cost value. Well, for that you need a concept of cost of production and that’s what classical economics is all about. Post-classical economics denied all of this. The whole idea of classical economics is that not all income is earned.
Landlords don’t earn their income for making rent in their sleep as John Stuart Mill said. Banks don’t earn their income by just sitting there and letting debts accrue and interest compounding and doubling. The classical economists separated actual unearned income from the production and consumption economy.
Well, around the late 19th century in America, you had economists fighting against not only Marx, but also even against Henry George, who at that time, was urging a land tax in New York. And so, at Columbia University, John Bates Clark developed a whole theory that everybody earns whatever they can get. That there was no such thing as unearned income and that has become the basis for American national income statistics and thought ever since. So, if you look at today’s GDP figures for the United States, they have a figure for 8 percent of the GDP for the homeowners’ rent. But homeowners wouldn’t pay themselves if they had to rent the apartment to themselves, then you’ll have interest at about 12 percent of GDP.
And I thought, well how can interest be so steady? What happens to all of the late fees; that 29 percent that credit card companies charge? I called up the national income people in Washington, when I was there. And they said well, late fees and penalties are considered financial services.
And so, this is what you call a service economy. Well, there’s no service in charging a late fee, but they add all of the late fees. When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP. When housing becomes more expensive and prices American labor out of the market, that’s called an increase in GDP.
This is not how a country that wants to develop is going to create a national income account. So, there’s a long discussion in China about, just to answer your question, how do you create an account to distinguish between what’s the necessary cost to production and what’s an unnecessary production cost and how do we avoid doing what the United States did. So again, no rivalry. The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no earned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent. Well, that’s what’s really at issue and why the whole world is splitting apart as you and I are discussing in what we’re writing.
When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP.”
Pepe: Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. So just to sum it all up, can we say that Beijing’s strategy is to save especially provincial areas from leasing their land, their infrastructure for 60 years or 75 years? As you just mentioned, can we say that the fulcrum of their national strategy is what you define as the market rent tax? Is this the No. 1 mechanism that they are developing?
Michael: Ideally, they want to keep rents as low as possible because rent is a cost of living and a cost of doing business. They don’t have banks that are lending to inflate the real estate market.
However, in almost every Western country — the U.S., Germany England — the value of stocks and bonds and the value of real estate is just about exactly the same. But for China, the value of real estate is way, way larger than the value of stocks.
And the reason is not because the Chinese Central bank, the Bank of China lends for real estate; it’s because they lend to intermediaries and the intermediaries have financed a lot of housing purchases in China. And, this is really the problem for if they levy a land tax, then you’re going to make a lot of these financial intermediaries go bust.
That’s what I’m advocating, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These financial intermediaries shouldn’t exist, and this same issue came up in 2009 in the United States. You had the leading American bank being the most crooked and internally corrupt bank in the country, Citibank making junk mortgage, and it was broke.
Sheila Bair in 2016. (Matt Spangler for Washington College, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Its entire net worth was wiped out as a result of its fraudulent junk mortgages. Well, Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wanted to close it down and take it over. Essentially that would have made it into a public bank and that would be a wonderful thing. She said, look Citibank shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. And she wrote all this up in an autobiography. And, she was overruled by President Obama and Tim Geithner saying, but wait a minute, those are our campaign contributors. So, they were loyal to the campaign contributors, but not the voters; and they didn’t close Citibank down.
And the result is that the Federal Reserve ended up creating about $7 trillion of quantitative easing to bail out the banks. The homeowners weren’t bailed out. Ten million American families lost their homes as a result of junk mortgages in excess of what the property was actually worth.
All of this was left on the books, foreclosed and sold to a private capital companies like Blackstone. And the result is that home ownership in America declined from 68 percent of the population down to about 61 percent. Well, right where the Obama administration left off, you’re about to have the Biden administration begin in January with an estimated 5 million Americans losing their homes. They’re going to be evicted because they’ve been unemployed during the pandemic. They’ve been working in restaurants or gyms or other industries that have been shut down because of the pandemic. They’re going to be evicted and many homeowners and, low-income homeowners have been unable to pay their mortgages.
There’s going to be a wave of foreclosures. The question is, who’s going to bear the cost? Should it be 15 million American families who lose their homes just so the banks won’t lose money? Or should we let the banks that have made all of the growth since 2008? Ninety five percent of American GDP of the population has seen its wealth go down. All the wealth has been accumulating for the 5 percent in statistics. Now the question is should this 5 percent that’s got all the wealth lose or should the 95 percent lose?
Worker installs security panels over windows after police evict woman from her foreclosed home in South Minneapolis, 2009. (Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The Biden administration says the 95 percent should lose basically. And you’re going to see a wave of closures so that the question in China should be that, these intermediate banks (they’re not really banks they are sort of like payday loan lenders), should they come in and, bear the loss or should Chinese localities and the people bear the loss? Somebody has to lose when you’re charging, you’re collecting the land’s rent that was paid to the creditors, and either the creditors have to lose or, the tax collector loses and that’s the conflict that exists in every society of the world today. And, in the West, the idea is the tax collectors should lose and whatever the tax collector relinquishes should be free for the banks to collect. In China obviously, they don’t want that to happen and they don’t want to see a financial class developing along US lines.
Pepe: Michael, there’s a quick question in all this, which is the official position by Beijing in terms of helping the localities. Their official position is that there won’t be any bailouts of local debt. How do they plan to do that?
Michael: What they’re discussing, how are you not going to do it? They think they sort of let localities go their own way. And they think, well you know which ones are going to succeed, and which ones aren’t, they didn’t want to have a one-size-fits all central planning. They wanted to have flexibility. Well, now they have flexibility. And when you have many different let a hundred flowers bloom,” not all the flowers are going to bloom at the same rate.
And the question is, if they don’t bail out the cities, how are the cities going to operate? Certainly, China has never let markets steer the economy, the government steers the markets. That’s what socialism is as opposed to finance capitalism. So, the question is, you can let localities go broke and yet you’re not going to destroy any of the physical assets of the localities, and all of this is going to be in place. The question is how are you going to arrange the flow of income to all of these roads and buildings and land that’s in place? How do you create a system? Essentially, they’re saying well, if we’re industrial engineers, how do we just plan things? Forget credit, forget property claims, forget the rentier claims. How are we just going to design an economy that operates most efficiently? And that’s what they’re working on now to resolve this situation because it’s gotten fairly critical.
Pepe: Yes, especially in the countryside. Well, I think, a very good metaphor in terms of comparing both systems are investment in infrastructure. You travel to China a lot so, you’ve seen. You’ll travel through high-speed rail. You’ll see those fantastic airports, in Pudong or the new airport in Beijing. And then you’ll take the Acela to go from Washington to New York City, which is something that I used to do years ago. And the comparison is striking. Isn’t it?
Or if you go to France, for instance, when France started development of the TGV, which in terms of a national infrastructure network, is one of the best networks on the planet. And the French started doing this 30 years ago, even more. Is there……, it’s not in terms of way out, but if we analyze the minutia, it’s obvious that following the American finance utilization system, we could never have something remotely similar happening in United States in terms of building infrastructure.
So, do you see any realistic bypass mechanism in terms of improving American infrastructure, especially in the big cities?
TGV 2N2 Lyria train at Paris’ Gare de Lyon station. (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: No, and there are two reasons for that. No. 1, let’s take a look at the long-term railroads. The railroads go through the center of town or even in the countryside, all along the railroads, the railroads brought business and all the businesses had been located as close to the railroad tracks as they could. Factories with sightings off the railroad, hotels and especially right through the middle of town where you have the railway gates going up and down. In order to make a high-speed rail as in China, you need a dedicated roadway without trucks and cars, imagine a car going through a railway gate at 350 miles an hour.
So, when I would go from Beijing to Tianjin, here’s the high-speed rail, there’s one highway on one side, one highway on the other side. There’ll be underpasses. But there it goes straight now. How can you suppose you would have a straight Acela line from Washington up to Boston when all along the line, there’s all this real estate right along the line that has been built up? There’s no way you can get a dedicated roadway without having to tear down all of this real estate that’s on either side and the cost of making the current owners whole would be prohibitive. And anywhere you would go, that’s not in the center of the city, you would also have to have the problem that there’s already private property there.
And there’s no legal, constitutional way for such a physical investment to be made. China was able to make this investment because it was still largely rural. It wasn’t as built up along the railways. It didn’t have any particular area that was built up right where the railroad already was.
President Donald Trump visiting China in 2017. (PAS China via Wikimedia Commons)
So certainly, any high-speed rail could not go where the current railways would be, and they’d have to go on somebody’s land. And, there’s also, what do you do if you want to get to New York and Long Island from New Jersey?
Sixty years ago, when I went into Wall Street, the cost of getting and transporting goods from California to Newark, New Jersey, was as large as from Newark right across the Hudson River to New York, not only because of the mafia and control of the local labor unions, but because of the tunnels. Right now, the tunnels from New Jersey to New York are broke, they are leaking, the subways in New York City, which continually break down because there was a hurricane a few years ago and the switches were made in the 1940s. The switches are 80 years old. They had water damage and the trains have to go at a crawl. But the city and state, because it is not collecting the real estate tax and other taxes and because ridership fell on the subways to about 20 percent, the city’s broke. They’re talking about 70 percent of city services being cut back. They’re talking about cutting back the subways to 40 percent capacity, meaning everybody will have to get in — when there’s still a virus and not many people are wearing masks, and there was no means of enforcing masks here.
Blue Xs mark social distancing on the platform of a New York City subway station, May 2020. (Marc A. Hermann, MTA, Wikimedia Commons)
So, there’s no way that you can rebuild the infrastructure because, for one thing the banking system here has subsidized for a hundred years junk economics saying you have to balance the budget. If the government creates credit it’s inflationary as if when banks create credit, it’s not inflationary. Well, the monetary effect is the same, no matter who creates the money. And so, Biden has already said that President Trump ran a big deficit, we’re going to run a bunch of surpluses or a budget balance. And he was advocating that all along. Essentially Biden is saying we have to increase unemployment by 20 percent, lower wages by 20 percent, shrink the economy by about 10 percent in order to, in order for the banks not to lose money.
You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism.”
And, we’re going to privatize but we are going to do it by selling the hospitals, the schools, the parks, the transportation to finance, to Wall Street finance capital groups. And so, you can imagine what’s going to happen if the Wall Street groups buy the infrastructure. They’ll do what happened to Chicago when it sold all the parking meters, they’ll say, OK, instead of 25 cents an hour, it’s now charged $3 an hour. Instead of a $2 for the subway, let’s make it $8.
You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism. Well, it’s not socialism. It’s industrial capitalism. It’s industrialization, that’s basic economics. The idea of what, and how an economy works is so twisted academically that it’s the antithesis of what Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill and Marx all talked about. For them a free- market economy was an economy free of rentiers. Free of rent, it didn’t have any rent seeking. But now for the Americans, a free-market economy is free for the rentiers, free for the landlord, free for the banks to make a killing. And that is basically the class war back in business with a vengeance. That blocks and is preventing any kind infrastructure recovery. I don’t see how it can possibly take place.
Pepe: Well, based on what you just described, there is a process of turning the United States into a giant Brazil. In fact, this is what the Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a Pinochetista, as you know Michael, has been doing with the Brazilian economy for the past two years, privatizing everything and selling everything to big Brazilian interests and with lots of Wall Street interests involved as well. So, this is a recipe that goes all across the Global South as well. And it’s fully copied all across the Global South with no way out now.
Michael: Yes, and this is promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And when I was brought down to Brazil to meet with the council of economic advisers under Lula, [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil], they said, well the whole problem is that Lula’s been obliged to let the banks do the planning.
So, basically free markets and libertarianism is adopting central planning, but with central planning by the banks. America is a much more centrally planned economy than China. China is letting a hundred flowers bloom; America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be. Now the irony is that China’s sending its students to America to study economics. And, most of the Chinese I had talked to say, well we went to America to take economics courses because that gives us a prestige here in China.
I’m working now, with Chinese groups trying to develop a reality economics” to be taught in China as different from American economics.
America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be.”
Pepe: Exactly, because of what they study at Beijing University, Renmin or Tsinghua
is not exactly what they would study in big American universities. Probably what they study in the U.S. is what not to do in China. When they go back to China, what they won’t be doing. It’s an object lesson for what to avoid.
Michael, I’d like to go back to what the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] had been discussing in the 2000s when Lula was still president of Brazil and many of his ideas deeply impressed, especially Hu Jintao at the time, which is bypassing the U.S. dollar. Well, at the moment obviously we’re still at 87 percent of international transactions still in U.S. dollars. So, we are very far away from it, but if you have a truly sovereign economy, which is the case of China, which we can say is the case of Russia to a certain extent and obviously in a completely different framework, Iran. Iran is a completely sovereign, independent economy from the West. The only way to try to develop different mechanisms to not fall into the rentier mind space would be to bypass the U.S. dollar.
Occupy Wall Street picket of HSBC, midtown Manhattan; Feb. 14, 2013. (Michael Fleshman Via Flickr)
Michael: Yes, for many reasons. For one thing the United States can simply print the dollars and lend to other countries and then say, now you have to pay us interest. Well, Russia doesn’t need American dollars. It can print its own rubles to provide labor. There’s no need for a foreign currency at all for domestic spending, the only reason you would have to borrow a foreign currency is to balance your exchange rate, or to finance a trade deficit. But China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And in fact, if China were to work to accept more dollars, Americans would love to buy into the Chinese market and make a profit there, but that would push up China’s exchange rate and that would make it more difficult for her to make its exports because the exchange rate would come up not because it’s exporting more but because it’s letting American dollars come in and push it up.
Well, fortunately, President Trump as if he works for the Chinese National Committee, said, look, we don’t want to really hurt China by pushing up its currency and we want to keep it competitive. So, I’m going to prevent American companies from lending money to China, I’m going to isolate it and so he’s helping them protect their economy. And in Russia he said, look Russia really needs to feed itself. And, there’s a real danger that when the Democrats come in, there are a lot of anti-Russians in the Biden administration. They may go to war. They may do to Russia what they tried to do to China in the ‘50s. Stop exporting food and grain. And only Canada was able to break the embargo. So, we’re going to impose sanctions on Russia. So immediately, what happened is Russia very quickly became the largest grain exporter in the world. And instead of importing cheese from the Baltics, it created its own cheese industry. So, Trump said look, I know that Russians followed the American idea of not having protective tariffs, they need protective tariffs. They’re not doing it. We’re going to help them out by just not importing from them and really helping them.
Pepe: Yeah. Michael, what do you think Black Rock wants from the Chinese? You know that they are making a few inroads at the highest levels? Of course, I’m sure you’re aware of that. And also, JP Morgan, Citybank, etc. What do they really want?
Michael: They’d like to be able to create dollars to begin to buy and make loans to real estate; let companies grow, let the real estate market grow and make capital gains.
The way people get wealthy today isn’t by making an income, it’s been by making a capital gain. Total returns are current income plus the capital gains. As for capital gains each year; the land value gains alone are larger than the whole GDP growth from year to year. So that’s where the money is, that’s where the wealth is. So, they are after speculative capital gains, they would like to push money into the Chinese stock market and real estate market. See the prices go up and then inflate the prices by buying in and then sell out at the high price. Pull the money out, get a capital gain and let the economy crash, I mean that’s the business plan.
Pepe: Exactly. But Beijing will never allow that.
Michael: Well, here’s the problem right now, they know that Biden is pushing militarily aggressive people in his cabinet. There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy. They’re very worried about the military and they say, how do we deter the Biden administration from actually trying a military adventure in the South China Sea or elsewhere? They said well, fortunately America is multi-layered. They don’t think of America as a group. They realize there’s a layer and they say, who’s going to represent our interests?
There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy.”
Well, Blackstone and Wall Street are going to represent their interests. Then I think one of the, Chinese officials last week gave a big speech on this very thing, saying look, our best hope in stopping America’s military adventurism in China is to have Wall Street acting as our support because after all, Wall Street is the main campaign contributor and the president works for the campaign contributors.
The politician works for the campaign contributors. They’re in it for the money! So fortunately, we have Wall Street on our side, we’ve got control of the political system and they’re not there to go to war so that helps explain why a month ago they let wholly-owned U.S. banks and bankers in. On the one hand, they don’t like the idea of somebody outside the government creating credit for reasons that the economy doesn’t need. If they needed it, the Bank of China would do it. They have no need for foreign currency to come in to make loans in domestic currency, out of China.
The only reason that they could do it is No. 1, it helps meet the World Trade Organization’s principles and, No. 2, especially during this formative few months of the Biden administration, it helps to have Wall Street saying; we can make a fortune in China, go easy on them and that essentially counters the military hawks in Washington.
Pepe: So, do you foresee a scenario when Black Rock starts wreaking havoc in the Shanghai stock exchange for instance?
Wall Street, Nov. 21, 2009. (Dave Center, Flickr)
Michael: It would love to do that. It would love to move things up and down. The money’s made by companies with the stock market going up and down; the zigzag. So of course, it wants to do a predatory zigzag. The question is whether China will impose a tax to stop this, all sorts of financial transactions. That’s what’s under discussion now. They know exactly what Black Rock wants to do because they have some very savvy billionaire Chinese advisers that are quite good. I can tell you stories, but I better not.
Pepe: Okay. If it’s not okay to tell it all, tell us part of the story then.
Michael: The American banks have been cultivating leading Chinese people by providing them enough money to make money here, that they think that, okay they will now try to make money in the same way in China and we can join in. It’s a conflict of systems again, between the finance capital system and industrial socialism. You don’t get any of this discussion in the U.S. press, which is why I read what you write because in the U.S. press, the neocons talk about the fake idea of Greek history and fake idea of the Thucydides’ problem of a country jealous of another country’s development.
There’s no jealousy between America and China. They’re different, they have their own way. We are going to destroy them. And if you look at the analogy that the Americans draw —and this is how the Pentagon thinks — with the war between Athens and Sparta. It’s hard to tell, which is which. Here you have Athens, a democracy backing other democracies and having the military support of the democracies and the military in these democracies all had to pay Athens protection money for the military support and that’s the money that Athens got to ostensibly support its navy and protection that built up all of the Athenian public buildings and everything else. So, that’s a democracy exploiting its allies, to enrich itself via the military. Then you have Sparta, which was funding all of the oligarchies, and it was helping the oligarchies overthrow democracies. Well, that was America too. So, America is both sides of the Thucydides war if the democracy is exploiting the fellow democracies and is the supporter of oligarchies in Brazil, Latin America, Africa and everyone else.
So, you could say the Thucydides problem was between two sides, two aspects of America and has nothing to do with China at all except, for the fact that the whole war was a war between economic systems. They’re acting as if somehow if only China did not export to us, we could be re-industrialized and somehow export to Europe and the Third World.
And as you and I have described, it’s over. We painted ourselves into such a debt corner that without writing down the debts, we’re in the same position that the Eurozone is in. There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth. And, since 1980 as you know, real wages in America have been stable. All the growth has been in property owners and predators and the FIRE sector, the rest of the economy is in stagnation. And now the coronavirus has simply acted as a catalyst to make it very clear that the game is over; it’s time to move away from the homeowner economy to rentier economy, time for Blackstone to be the landlord. America wants to recreate the British landlord class and essentially what we’re seeing now is like the Norman invasion of England taking over the land and the infrastructure. That’s what Blackstone would love to do in China.
There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth.”
Pepe: Wow. I’m afraid that they may have a lot of leeway by some members of the Beijing leadership now, because as you know very well, it’s not a consensus in the political arena.
Michael: We’re talking about Volume II and III of Capital.
Pepe: Exactly. But you know, you were talking about debt. Coming back to that, in fact I just checked this morning, apparently global debt as it stands today is $277 trillion, which is something like 365 percent of global GDP. What does that mean in practice?
Michael: Yeah, well fortunately this is discussed in the 19th century and there was a word for that — fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this. You could say the question now, and The Financial Times just had an article a few days ago that China’s claims on Third World countries on the Belt and Road Initiative is fictitious capital, because how can it collect?
Well, China’s already thought of that. It doesn’t want money. It wants the raw materials. It wants to be paid in real things. But a debt that can’t be paid, can only be paid either by foreclosing on the debtors or by writing down the debts and obviously a debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.
Fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this.”
And so, you have not only Marx using the word fictitious capital. At the other end of the spectrum, you had Henry George talking about fictive capital. In other words, these are property claims that have no real capital behind them. There’s no capital that makes profit. That’s just a property claim for payment or a rentier claim for payment.
So, the question is, can you make money somehow without having any production at all, without having wages, without having profits, without any capital? Can you just have asset grabbing and buying-and-selling assets? And as long as you have the Federal Reserve in America, come in, Trump’s $10 trillion Covid program gave $2 trillion to the population at large with these $1,200 checks, that my wife and I got, and $8 trillion all just to buy stocks and bonds. None of this was to build infrastructure. None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory. None of this 8 trillion was to employee a single worker. It was all just to support the prices of stocks and bonds, and to keep the illusion that the economy had not stopped growing. Well, it’s growing for the 5 percent. So, it’s all become fictitious. And if you look at the GDP as I said, it’s fictitious.
Pepe: And the most extraordinary thing is none of that is discussed in American media. There’s not a single word about what you would have been describing.
Michael: It’s not even discussed in academia. Our graduates at the university of Missouri at Kansas City, we’re all trained in Modern Monetary Theory. And as hired professors they have to be able to publish in the refereed journals and the refereed journals are all essentially controlled by the Chicago School. So, you have a censorship of the kind of ideas that we’re talking about. You can’t get it into the economic journals, so you can’t get it into the economics curriculum. So, where on earth are you going to get it? If you didn’t have the internet you wouldn’t be discussing at all. Most of my books sell mainly in China, more than in all the other countries put together so I can discuss these things there. I stopped publishing in orthodox journals so many years ago because it’s talking to the deaf.
None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory, employee, a single worker.”
Pepe: Absolutely. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Russia, Michael? There is a raging, debate in Russia for many years now between let’s say the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists. It involves of course, economic policy under Putin, industrial capitalism Russian style. The Eurasianists basically say that the central problem with Russia is how the Russian central bank is basically affiliated with all the mechanisms that you know so well, that it is an Atlanticist Trojan Horse inside the Russian economy. How do you see it?
Michael: Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 . First of all, the IMF announced in advance that there was a big meeting in Houston with the IMF and the World Bank. And the IMF published all of its report saying, first you don’t want inflation in Russia so let’s wipe out all of the Russian savings with hyperinflation, which they did. They then said, well now to cure the hyperinflation the Russian central bank needs a stable currency and you need a backup for the currency. You will need to back it with U.S. dollars.
Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.”
So, from the early 1990s, as you know, labor was going unpaid. The Russian central bank could have created the rubles to pay the domestic labor and to keep the factories in place. But, the IMF advisers from Harvard said, no you’ll have to borrow U.S. dollars. I met with people from the Hermitage Fund and the Renaissance Fund and others. We had meetings and I met with the investors. Russia was paying 100 percent interest for years to leading American financial institutions for money that it didn’t need and could have created itself. Russia was so dispirited with Stalinism that, essentially, it thought the opposite of Stalinism must be what they have in America.
They thought that America was going to tell it how America got rich, but America didn’t want to tell Russia how it got rich, but instead wanted to make money off Russia. They didn’t get it. They trusted the Americans. They really didn’t understand that, industrial capitalism that Marx described had metamorphosized into finance capitalism and was completely different.
And that’s because Russia didn’t charge rent, it didn’t charge interest. I gave three speeches before the Duma, urging it to impose a land tax. Some of the people I noticed, Ed Dodson was there with us and we were all trying to convince Russia, don’t let this land be privatized. If you let it be privatized, then you’re going to have such high rents and housing costs in Russia that you’re not going to be able to essentially compete for an industrial growth. Well, the politician who brought us there, Viatcheslav Zolensky was sort of maneuvered out of the election by the American advisers.
The Americans put billions of dollars in to essentially finance American propagandists to destroy Russia, mainly from the Harvard Institute of International Development. And essentially, they were a bunch of gangsters and the prosecutors in Boston were about to prosecute them.
The attorney general of Boston was going to bring a big case for Harvard against the looting of Russia and the corruption of Russia. And I was asked to organize and to bring a number of Russian politicians and industrialists over to say how this destroyed everything. Well, Harvard settled out of court and essentially that made the perpetrators the leading university people up there. (I’m associated with Harvard Anthropology Department, not the Economics Department.)
So, we never had a chance to bring my witnesses, and have our report on what happened, but I published for the Russian Academy of Sciences a long study of how all of this destruction of Russia was laid out in advance at the Houston meetings by the IMF. America went to the leading bureaucrats and said; look, we can make you rich why don’t you register the factories in your own name, and if you’re registered in your own name, you know, then you’ll own it. And then you can cash out. You can essentially sell, but obviously you can’t sell to the Russians because the IMF has just wiped out all of their savings.
You can only cash out by selling to the West. And so, the Russian stock market became the leading stock market in the world from 1994 with the Norilsk Nickel and the seven bankers in the bank loans for shares deal through 1997. And, I had worked for a firm Scutter Stevens and, the head adviser, a former student of mine didn’t want to invest in Russia because she said, this is just a rip off, it’s going to crash. She was fired for not investing. They said look, we know that’s going to crash. That’s the whole idea it’s going to crash. We can make a mint off it before the crash. And then when it crashes, we can make another mint by selling short and then all over again . Well, the problem is that the system that was put in with the privatization that’s occurred, how do you have Russia’s wealth used to develop its own industry and its own economy like China was doing. Well, China has rules for all of this, but Russia doesn’t have rules, it’s really all centralized, it’s President Putin that keeps it this way.
President Vladimir Putin meeting with German business executives, Nov. 1, 2018. (The Kremlin)
Well, this was the great fear of the West. When you had Mikhail Gorbachev beginning to plan to do pretty much what is done today, to restrain private capital, the IMF said hold off. We’re not going to make any loans to stabilize the Russian currency until you remove Mr. Primakov.
The U.S. said we won’t deal with Russia until you remove him. So, he was pushed out and he was probably the smartest guy at the time there. So, they thought [President Vladimir] Putin was going to be sort of the patsy. And he almost single-handedly, holding the oligarchs in and saying, look, you can keep your money as long as you do exactly what the government would do. You can keep the gains as long as you’re serving the public interest.
But none of this resulted into a legal system, a tax system, and a system where the government actually does get most of the benefits. Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people instead of giving Norilsk Nickel and the oil companies to Yukos. It could have given everybody their own house and their own apartment, the same thing in the Baltics. And instead it didn’t give the land out to the people. And Russians were paying 3 percent of their income for housing in 1990. And rent is the largest element in every household’s budget.
Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people.”
So, Russia could have had low-price labor. It could have financed all of its capital investment for the government by taxing, collecting the rising rental value. Instead, Russian real estate was privatized on credit and it was even worse in the Baltics.
In Latvia, where I was research director for the Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia borrowed primarily from Swedish banks. And so, in order to buy a house, you had to borrow from Swedish banks. And they said, well, we’re not going to lend in the Latvian currency because it can go down. So, you have a choice; Swiss Francs or German Marks or U.S. Dollars. And so, all of this rent was paid in foreign currency. There came an outflow that essentially drained all the Baltic economies. Latvia lost 20 percent of its population. Estonia and Lithuania followed suit.
And of course, the worst hit by neo-liberalism was Russia. As you know, President Putin said that neo-liberalism cost Russia more of its population than World War II. And you know that to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.
Pepe: Yes, I remember well, I arrived in Russia in the winter of 91 coming from China. So, I transited from the Chinese miracle. In fact, a few days after Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern tour when he went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen. And that was the kick for the 1990s boom, in fact a few years before the handover, and then I took the Trans-Siberian and I arrived in Moscow a few days after the end, in fact, a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union.
But yeah, I remember the Americans arrived almost at the exact minute, wasn’t it, Michael? I think they already were there in the spring of 1992. If I’m not mistaken.
Michael: The Houston meeting was in 1990. But all before that already in, 1988 and 1989, there was a huge outflow of embezzlement money via Latvia. The assistant dean of the university who ended up creating Nordex, essentially the money was all flying out because Ventspils in Latvia, was where Russian oil was exported and it was all fake invoicing. So, the Russian kleptocrats basically made their money off false export invoicing, ostensibly selling it for one price and having the rest paid abroad and, this was all organized through Latvia and the man who did it later moved to Israel and finally gave a billion dollars back to Russia so that he went on to live safely for the rest of his life in Israel.
Pepe: Well, the crash of the ruble in 1998 was what, roughly one year after the crash of the baht and the whole Asian financial crisis, no? It was interlinked of course, but let me see if I have a question for you, in fact, I’m just thinking out loud now. If the economies of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the case of South Korea and Russia, were more integrated at the time as they are trying to integrate now, do you think that the Asian financial crisis would have been preventable in 1997?
Michael: Well, look at what happened in Malaysia with Mohammad Mahathir. Malaysia avoided it. So of course, it was preventable, and they had the capital controls. All you would have needed was to do what Malaysia did. But you needed an economic theory for that.
And essentially the current mode of warfare is to conquer the brains of a country to shape how people think and how they perceive the economy. And if you can twist their view into an unreality economics, where they think that you’re there to help them not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked. That was what happened in Asia. Asia thought it was getting rich off the dollars inflows and then the IMF and all the creditors pulled the plug, crash the industry. And now that all of a sudden you had a crash, they bought up Korean industry and other South Asian industries at giveaway prices.
That’s what you do. You lend the money; you pull the plug. You then let them go under and you pick up the pieces . That’s what Blackstone did after the Obama depression began, when Obama saved the banks, not the constituency, the mortgage borrowers. Essentially that’s Blackstone’s modus operandi to pick up distressed prices at a bankruptcy sale, but you need to lend money and then crash it in order to make that work.
Pepe: Michael, I think we have only five minutes left. So, I would expect you to go on a relatively long answer and I’m really dying for it. It’s about debt, it about the debt trap. And it’s about the New Silk Roads, the Belt and Road Initiative, because I think rounding up our discussion and coming back to the theme of debt and global debt.
The No. 1 criticism apart from the demonization of China that you hear from American media and a few American academics as well against the Belt and Road is that it’s creating a debt trap for Southeast Asian nations, Central Asian nations and nations in Africa, etc…. Obviously, I expect you to debunk that, but the framework is there is no other global development project as extensive and as complex as Belt and Road, which as you know very well was initially dreamed up by the Ministry of Commerce. Then they sold it more or less to Xi Jinping who got the geopolitical stamp on it, announcing it, simultaneously, (which was a stroke of genius) in Central Asia in Astana and then in Southeast Asia in Jakarta. So, he was announcing the overland corridors through the heartland and the Maritime Silk Road at the same time.
At the time people didn’t see the reach and depth of all that. And now of course, finally the Trump administration woke up and saw what was in play, not only across Eurasia but reaching Africa and even selected parts of Latin America as well. And obviously the only sort of criticism, and it’s not even a fact-based criticism, that I’ve seen about the Belt and Road is it’s creating a debt trap because as you know Laos is indebted, Sri Lanka is indebted, Kyrgyzstan is indebted etc. So, how do you view Belt and Road within the large framework of the West and China, East Asia and Eurasia relations? And how would you debunk misconceptions created, especially in the U S that this is a debt trap.
Six proposed corridors of Belt and Road Initiative, showing Italy inside circle, on maritime blue route. (Lommes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: There are two points to answer there. The first is how the Belt and Road began. And as you pointed out, the Belt and Road began, when China said, what is it we need to grow and how do we grow within our neighboring countries so we don’t have to depend upon the West, and we don’t have to depend on sea trade that can be shut down? How do we get to roads instead of seas in a way that we can integrate our economy with the neighboring economies so that there can be mutual growth?
So, this was done pretty much on industrial engineering grounds. Here’s where you need the roads and the railroads. And then how do we finance it? Well, The Financial Times article, last week, said didn’t the Chinese know that [with past] railroad development, they’ve all gone broke? The Panama Canal went broke, you know, the first few times there were European railway investment in Latin America in the 19th century, that all went broke.
Well, what they don’t get is China’s aim was not to make a profit off the railroads. The railroads were built to be part of the economy. They don’t want to make profit. It was to make the real economy grow, not to make profits for the owners of the railroad stocks. The Western press can’t imagine that you’re building a railroad without trying to make money out of it.
Then you get to the debt issue. Countries only have a debt crisis if their debt is in a foreign currency. The first way that the United States gained power was to fight against its allies. The great enemy of America was England and it made the British block their currency in the 1940s. And so, India and other countries, that had all these currencies holdings in sterling, were able to convert it all into dollars.
The whole move of the U.S. was to denominate world debt in dollars. So that No. 1, U.S. banks would end up with the interest in financing the debt. And No. 2, the United States could, by using the debt leverage, control domestic politics.
Well, as you’re seeing right now in Argentina, for instance, Argentina is broke because it owes foreign-dollar debt. When I started the first Third World bond fund in 1990 at Scutter Stevens, Brazil and China and Argentina were paying 45 percent interest per year, 45 percent per year in dollars debt. Yet we tried to sell them in America. No American would buy. We went to Europe, no European buy this debt. And so, we worked with Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch was able to make an offshore fund in the Dutch West Indies and all of the debt was sold to the Brazilian ruling class in the central bank and the Argentinian bankers in the ruling class, we thought oh, that’s wonderful.
We know that they’re going to pay the foreign Yankee Dollars debt because the Yankee Dollars debt is owed to themselves. They’re the Yankees! They’re the client oligarchy. And you know, from Brazil client oligarchy is, you know, they’re cosmopolitan, that’s the word. So, the problem is that on the Belt and Road, how did these other countries pay the debt to China?
Well, the key there again is the de-dollarization, and one way to solve it is since we’re trying to get finance out of the picture, we’re doing something very much like, Japan did with Canada in the 1960s. It made loans to develop Canadian copper mines taking its payment, not in Canadian dollars, that would have pushed up the yen’s exchange rate, but in copper.
So, China says, you know you don’t have to pay currency for this debt. We didn’t build a railroad to make a profit and you want, we can print all the currency we want. We don’t need to make a profit. We made the Belt and Road because it’s part of our geopolitical attempt to create what we need to be prosperous and have a prosperous region. So, these are self-reinforcing mutual gain. Well, so that’s what the West doesn’t get — mutual gain? Are we talking anthropology? What do you mean mutual? This is capitalism! So, the West doesn’t understand what the original aim of the Belt and Road was, and it wasn’t to make a profitable railroad to enable people to buy and sell railway stocks. And it wasn’t to make toll roads to sell off to Goldman Sachs, you know. We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.
We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.”
Pepe: Belt and Road loans are long-term and at very low interest and they are renegotiable. They are renegotiating with the Pakistanis all the time for instance.
Michael: China’s intention is not to repeat an Asia crisis of 1997. It doesn’t gain anything by forcing a crisis because it’s not trying to come in and buying property at a discount at a distressed sale. It has no desire to create a distressed sale. So obviously, the idea is the capacity to pay. Now, this whole argument occurred in the 1920s, between [John Maynard] Keynes and his opponents that wanted to collect German reparations and, Keynes made it very clear. What is the capacity to pay? It’s the ability to export and the ability to obtain foreign currency. Well, China’s not looking for foreign currency. It is looking for economic returns but the return is to the whole society, the return isn’t from a railroad. The return is for the entire economy because it’s looking at the economy as a system.
The way that neoliberalism works, it divides the economy in parts, and it makes every part trying to make a gain, and if you do that, then you don’t have any infrastructure that’s lowering the cost for the other parts. You have every part fighting for itself. You don’t look at in terms of a system the way China’s looking at it. That’s the great advantage of Marxism, you’ll look at the system, not just the parts.
Pepe: Exactly and this is at the heart of the Chinese concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, which is the approximate translation from Mandarin. So, we compare community with a shared future for mankind, which is, let’s say the driving force between the idea of Belt and Road, expanded across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America as well with our good old friends’, greed is good” concept from the eighties, which is still ruling America apparently.
Michael: And the corollary is that non-greed is bad.
Pepe: Exactly and non-greed is evil.
Michael: I see. I think we ran out of time. I do. I don’t know if Alanna wants to step in to wrap it up.
Michael: There may be somebody who has a question.
Pepe: Somebody has a question? That’ll be fantastic.
Alanna: There is a question from Ed Dodson. He wanted to know why there are these ghost cities in China? And who’s financing all this real estate that’s developed, but nobody’s living there? We’ve all been hearing about that. So, what is happening with that?
Michael: Okay. China had most of its population living in the countryside and it made many deals with Chinese landholders who have land rights, and they said, if you will give up your land right to the community, we will give you free apartment in the city that you could rent out.
So, China has been building apartments in cities and trading these basically in exchange to support what used to be called a rural exodus. China doesn’t need as many farmers on the land as it now has, and the question is how are you going to get them into cities? So, China began building these cities and many of these apartments are owned by people who’ve got them in exchange for trading their land rights. The deals are part of the rural reconstruction program.
Alanna: Do you think it was a good deal? Vacant apartments everywhere.
Pepe: You don’t have ghost cities in Xinjiang for instance, Xinjiang is under-populated, it’s mostly desert. And it’s extremely sensitive to relocate people to Xinjiang. So basically, they concentrated on expanding Urumqi. When you arrive in Urumqi it is like almost like arriving in, Guangzhou. It’s enormous. It’s a huge generic city in the middle of the desert. And it’s also a high-tech Mecca, which is something that very few people in the West know. And is the direct link between the eastern seaboard via Belt and Road to Central Asia.
Pepe Escobar at the Khunjerab pass, China-Pak border, on New Silk Road overdrive.
Last year I was on an amazing trip. I went to the three borders, the Tajik-Xinjiang border, Kyrgiz-Xinjiang border and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border, which is three borders in one. It’s a fascinating area to explore and specially to talk to the local populations, the Kyrgiz, the Kazakhs and the Tajiks. How do they see the Belt and Road directly affecting their lives from now on? So, you don’t see something spectacular for instance, in the Xinjiang – Kazakh boarder, there is one border for the trucks, lots of them like in Europe, crossing from all points, from Central Asia to China and bringing Chinese merchandise to Central Asia.
There’s the train border, which is a very simple two tracks and the pedestrian border, which is very funny because you have people arriving in buses from all parts of Central Asia. They stop on the Kazakh border. They take a shuttle, they clear customs for one day, they go to a series of shopping malls on the Chinese side of the border. They buy like crazy, shop till it drops, I don’t know for 12 hours? And then they cross back the same day because the visa is for one day. They step on their buses and they go back.
So, for the moment it’s sort of a pedestrian form of Belt and Road, but in the future, we’re going to have high-speed rail. We’re going to have, well the pipelines are already there as Michael knows, but it’s fascinating to see on the spot. You see the closer integration; you see for instance Uyghurs traveling back and forth. You know, Uyghurs that have families in Kyrgizstan for instance, I met some Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan who do the back-and-forth all the time. And they said, there’s no problem. They are seen as businessmen so there’s no interference. There are no concentration camps involved, you know, but you have to go to these places to see how it works on the ground and with Covid, that’s the problem for us journalists who travel, because for one year we cannot go anywhere and Xinjiang was on my travel list this year, Afghanistan as well, Mongolia.
These are all parts of Belt and Road or future parts of Belt and Road, like Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Russians as well; they want to bring Afghanistan in a peace process organized by Asians themselves without the United States, within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, because they want Afghanistan to be part of the intersection of Belt and Road and Eurasian Economic Union. This is something Michael knows very well. You don’t see this kind of discussions in the American media for instance, integration of Eurasia on the ground, how it’s actually happening.
Michael: That’s called cognitive dissonance.
Alanna: To try to understand it gets you cognitive dissonance.
Pepe: Oh yeah, of course. And obviously you are a Chinese agent, a Russian agent. And so, I hear that all the time. Well, in our jobs we hear that all the time. Especially, unfortunately from our American friends.
Alanna: Okay. I know you have other things to do. This has been fabulous. I want to thank you so much, both of you, uh, with so easy to get attendance for this webinar. There were 20 people in five minutes enrolled and in two days we were at capacity. So, I know there are many more people who would love to hear you talk another time, whenever you two are so willing. And I think you both got much out of your first conversation in person. Everybody listening knows these two wonderful gentlemen, they have written more than 10 books, and they have traveled all over the world. They are on the top of geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis, and they are caring, loving people. So, you can see that these are the people we need to be listening to and understanding all around the world.
So, thank you so much. Ibrahima Drame from the Henry George School is now going to say goodbye to you and will wrap this up. Thank you again.
Pepe: Michael it was a huge pleasure. Really, it was fantastic. Really nice, we’re on the same website. So, let’s have a second version of this.
Ibrahima: So, let’s have a second version of this two months from now. Thank you very much for participating and I really hope you liked this event. And, we also want to ask for your support by making a tax-deductible donation to the Henry George School. I believe I shared the link on the chat. Thank you. And see you soon.
Pepe: Thank you very much. Thanks Michael. Bye!
Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s a former Wall Street analyst political consultant commentator and journalist. He identifies himself as a classical economist. Michael is the author of J is for Junk Economics, Killing the Host, The Bubble and Beyond, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Trade Development and Foreign Debt and The Myth of Aid , among others. His books have been published translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish and Russian.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War;Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge . He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030 . Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused….
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I…
Eurythmics,1983
(written for future Ranjan/s?)”
I
was sent to jail for 19 years on false charges. If you see the Video tape
recording of what happened between me and the magistrate on that unfortunate
day, you can see how I was framed.”- February, 2019.
Ven. Galagodaatte Gnanasara (Bodu Bala Sena).
Note:
I get no pleasure by writing this two-part essay, in this fashion and tone. But
Ranjan R’s trademark/slogan has been the phrase, Bitter Truth, which was
neither truth, half-truth nor naked truth. A sick society made him sicker
making him an emperor in new clothes. The yahapalana agents, especially,
Sumanthiran must take full responsibility for the crime and sin of destroying
him. Their (RanilW/SajithP/TNA/JSB) shameless behavior in and outside the
Diyawanna restaurant, reminds, the proverbial cat on the rock. Hence, the good,
the bad, and the ugly of this sin deserves to be recorded; one has a moral duty
to bell these cats.
Introduction
The
question asked in the title above came to my mind after seeing the spontaneous
outburst of sympathy for Ranjan (R) when he was convicted for abusing the court
system. While what R did to judges in this case was clear cut with no doubts at
all, his supporters are outraged that the law was interpreted so harshly, and
this law must be changed ASAP. Some even proposed ways to make conviction
nullified by giving a presidential pardon to both R and Duminda Silva
simultaneously! In this one-sided, R is a saint blind alley, where judges, laws
and politics are all mixed, the only sane opinion I saw was by the famous
criminal law attorney, Tirantha Walaliyadda, who said that the right thing that
should happen is for Duminda to ask for a full bench re-hearing of his case so
that the previous five-bench decision would be re-examined. He says if
president Gotabhaya does anything else it would be political suicide because then
there is no point having a separate judiciary, good or bad.
I
compared this outrage with the petition signed by ex-PM Ranil’s wife Maithree
against any presidential pardon to Ven. Galabodaatte Gnanasara from a framed”
conviction, about which part 2 of this essay will discuss. The swing of opinion
from keeping a socially engaged monk in the Welikada hell, to salvaging at any
cost, a bull-in-a-China shop politician R from prison, I felt was due to the
sting the black-white crowd got from the court, unmasking their lurking in the
dark dreams. The court decision is a blessing in disguise for the Sinhala
Buddhists in the country because, it exposed how two projects (1) the
anti-Mahavamsa and (2) the Orumitthanadu, operate together, behind the scene,
to balkanize real estate called Sinhale,
and to dynamite the 2,600- year-old civilizational foundation of the Sinhala
Buddhist nation.
From
this perspective, it is not difficult for a Sinhala Buddhist to see how an
unfortunate panchaskandaya (a collection of flesh and bones made of elements- earth, water, fire,
and air), known as Ranjan/Alponso (R) ended up as a
victim of the 2015-19 yahapalana international project.
Is <4-RI> in 2021 greater than <19-RI>
in 2018?
In this Corona infested world where King
Pasenadi Kosol’s Sixteen Dreams have come true, Sumanthiran (S) was able to
mesmerize, mostly useless MPs in the Diyawanna restaurant, that his client
Ranjan (R), was given a historically unprecedented punishment
by the SC. Even Ali Sabri has given his silent accent to this theory of S. Not a single panchaskandaya was there
to refresh S’ dishonest brain, that only a few years back, a Buddhist monk who
engaged in a dialogue with a magistrate about yahapalanakaraya’s hunt of
soldiers (rana viru dadayama) was given 19 years of RI, by a combination
of three or four judges, two lawyers and the AG’s department (the Court of
Appeal judgement had at least one fatal error, and a critical analysis of that
judgement printed at that time will be reproduced in part 2 of this essay). The
SC decision denying an appeal request was a gross violation of the principles
of Natural Justice. Any way, it was a
case of ripening or fulfilling of the prophesy made by Mrs. Chandrika, before a
Muslim gathering that, Balu sena will be sent to balu kuuduwa (dog
cage) soon.”
Pro bono Sumanthiran
In an adversarial system of justice, where
lawyers thrive like sharks, it was S’ free of charge court appearances that
emboldened and blinded R in his bitter truth crusade with a mini Rasputinian
cloak. His sex advisory was free of charge like S’ services for him. He
displayed with confidence on the wall of his government subsided apartment the
long list of cases pending against him. It was next to many film acting awards
he received. R was living in a delusion-fill world. Perhaps, Hirunika was the
hardest hit victim of his fantasy machine. R failed to understand the American
slang that there is no free lunch in this world, though he was a proud owner of
the business cards of the American ambassador and her political deputy that he
kept in his pocket.
For the larger Eelam project of S, R was a
bundle of raw flesh, a wet clay figure to mold, delivered directly by Jehovah
or by some other, not Mother Theresa. Both S and R, are Christian souls who
could compare their salvation notes. R was an asset to S from another front.
Due to his popularity in the cinema industry, he got elected as an MP,
following the Upeksha Swarnamali syndrome of politics: if you are a popular
actor/actress you are in for politics with wisdom). So, R became the ideal
candidate to be used and abused in the Orumitthanadu project, which comes under
the larger, buried but not dead, anti-Mahavamsa project.
Anti-Mahavamsa
project
The word Orumitthanadu denotes the Eelam
project which began initially in 1921/24 culminating with the 2015-2019
Orumitthanadu Drafted by S, RanilW and JayampathiW who escaped to Geneva. S was
so sure of reaching his Nirvana (heaven), but then President Sirisena exploded
an anti-yahapalana bomb derailing almost 100 years of separatists’ labour. The anti-Mahavamsa project on the other hand
had been a colonial desire to civilize Sinhale people by Christianizing them,
so that they will be faithful lambs guided by priestly shepherds. But beginning
with governors North and Brownrigg, white rulers realized that the village temple
was the major obstacle to their civilizing efforts for the colony. The temple
and the village are attached to each other like a tree with its bark. The Sanga
functioned as the Guardian Angles of the land, language, and the religion of
Sinhale for the past 2,600 years. The two political parties” then, monks and
Villagers, are so intertwined, that during WW-II, war admiral Layton
entertained a plan to arrest all the monks and keep them in internment camps,
in case the Japanese army lands in Ceylon.
Kind-hearted women
In 1948 people of
Sinhale were not given back, at least a reasonable or justifiable portion of
the rights and heritage they lost in 1815. When communal representation,
anchored on the colonial policy of divide and rule started in 1832, changed to
territory-based representation in 1931, the Sinhala black whites, who quickly
became Donoughmore Buddhists (identified as O! my God Buddhists by Ven. Elle
Gunawansa), were thoroughly Europeanized to even discuss the need for
correcting, reasonably, adverse effects of genocidal treatment, humiliation,
and discrimination, people of Sinhale had undergone for over 400 years.
Whatever bitter truths
that Ranjan (R) was talking about, the naked truth has been the game of
treating Sinhala Buddhists as kind-hearted women until the 2020 general
election. After 1948, several adjustments attempted to remedy Sinhala Buddhist
grievances, but the black-white establishment aided and abetted by foreign
agents, obstructed, sabotaged, and derailed each of them one after the other.
Such actions fall under the umbrella called the Anti-Mahavamsa project. The
expectation of Sinhala Buddhists and poor Christians is that President
Gotabhaya will be able to usher an era of a society based on the Buddhist
Middle Path, which in its political manifestation means, all beings (which
includes animals, plants and trees) be free of sorrow, healthy, and happy.”
This could create a Corona-free world than all UN and Geneva Human Rights
Declarations together!
Gotabhaya: a pain in
the neck!
The arrival of a
non-politician to the political scene became an obstacle to black whites
operating within the false democracy of partisan politics. Therefore, unknowing
to the country the Eelam project and the anti-Mahavamsa project joined hands.
Ranjan Alponso was handpicked by S and RanilW as the one-man demolition crew.
Just like John F.
Kennedy (1961) had to appoint his younger brother Robert as his Attorney
General as ‘demanded’ by his father, helped John F. Kennedy to avoid a 3rd
world war, MahindaR’s decision in 2005 to bring his brother Gotabhaya from USA
as his defence secretary, resulted in ending a 30-year war in just 3+ years. No
wonder Prabakaran tried to assassinate Gota on December 1, 2006. Ranjan became
the yahapalana prostitute to use every word he can to sling mud at the
president copied by Harin Fernando who fears the word Gotabhaya.
Ranjan’s two job assignments
*1 War crimes and
foreign judges – Both RanilW and S wanted to bring foreign judges to adjudicate
tiger cases. This was what they wanted all along and promised to deliver to
Geneva after 2015. For this some idiot must be willing to be used and abused,
to take a missionary-like path to ridicule the Sri Lankan courts and judges as
corrupt, biased puppets. R’s strategy was to utter this as many times as
possible using his popularity as an actor, and then approach all kinds of
judges for corrupt deals, secretly recording conversations to use them as
evidence. As time goes may be, he thought that such recordings would help in
defending the contempt case against him! When the country is one huge triangle
of evil, there is no doubt that the judicial system needs an overhauling as
proposed by Nagananda Kodituwakku or revealed by Victor Ivan’s Court is Silent
documentary, or by Sugandhika Fernando’s eyewitness evidence. Judges and
lawyers are panchaskandas full of Lobha-Dvesa
and Moha (greed, jealously and delusion). But label them all as thieves
with one stupid mud brush is like throwing a spanner into a running machine,
well-oiled or half-oiled. The whole system is sure to collapse. Did S or RanilW
not know this?
*2 Attack Buddhist
monk using abnormal cases as a side support for the robe-hunting work of the
yahapalana crowd, while making disparaging comments about the DNA defects of
prince Siddhartha and princess Yashodara, the heart of Buddhist lore! This was
like Abdul Razik’s comments about the Triple Gem in Buddhism, or Mangala S
dropping one gem from the Triple. R’s assigned task was to demoralize Buddha
Sasanaya, already facing issues due to the operation of White Man’s Law. While
Muslims are given religious courts as far back in 1951, suggestions made by
white judges in colonial days to have separate jurisdictional system for monks
was ignored by Sinhala Buddhist politicians.
There are enough
evidence showing that RanilW was behind R, supplying him much needed oxygen. R
went on rampage like the proverbial woodpecker until he hit his fateful banana
tree. Sinhale is protected not by Vigneswaran’s five lingams that he says
brought from pre-historic India to bless this island, but by Four guardian gods
(Satarawaram Devivaru). Otherwise, who could think this island would not
have become a Palestine, Lebanon, or a Syria in South Asia, despite 72 years of
destruction by the selfish Sinhala politicians. So, R’s bitter truth project
died with a new life, where he will be sitting on top of pinnacles of hundred
years of human excreta on a daily basis, separated only by a thin concrete
slab. It is one toilet pit for 80 prisoners, as revealed by attorney, major
Ajith Prasanna who just came out on bail from remand prison after 360 days. His
sin was talking on behalf of unjustly imprisoned war connected soldiers! There
were no NGOs, no you tube bloggers, no Kishani Pintos, no Basil Fernandos or
Asanga Welikalas from Aberdeen to utter a word about him. This is the cruel
world we live in fighting for a non-existing rule of law and a bogus
representative democracy.
Limitless idiosyncrasy
R was such an idiot,
with either low self-esteem or inferiority complex, that even after he was
handcuffed as a convict, within the court premises, shouted at the top of his
voice calling the judges thieves, and he will never withdraw his opinion about
them. This means, Harin Fernando, MP, a new Ranjan in the making, will have to
wear his black shoal for at least 10 years. Sumanthiran, who says that under
the new ICCPR Act, a convict should be given at least one opportunity to appeal
against his/her punishment, will have a hard time in getting a sympathetic
second hearing from a court unless his client plead insanity.
A human tragedy!
I feel sorry for Ranjan. As Gamini Fonseka once said, R was a young actor
growing up with no fear to tell the truth. Arundika Fernando, minister gave 3
incidents of what young Alponso (R) did in the past. For example, he was caught
carrying a safe robbed from a jewelry shop during the 1983 riots. May be, he
was able to get himself reformed. But his lying before a national TV, as if he
saw how the child Seya was molested cannot be excused under any grounds. He
thrived in a corrupt society, high and low in status. The tape revealing how
Dilrukshi Dias was probing him enthusiastically for the truth, whether the
rumor that he (R) and (the late) Soma Edirisinghe had an illicit affair, was
evidence for the Rasputinian image he earned among women, married or not.
His popularity was used by UNP politicians in elections. Gradually, he
drifted toward dishonest politics, each step on the way getting immoral boost
of approval from his masters. If he were the reformist that he said he was, he
could have done lot of work to remedy the bitter truths he revealed. Instead,
all of it became empty noise and no voice. He was incapable of developing a
single project deserving public credit. Distribution of foods and goods is OK,
but Palitha Thevarapperuma did a better politically neutral, sincere service in
this regard. In R’s work one could always see a fine anti-government propaganda
coming out of his mouth.
Within the Yahapalana
international project, there was perhaps one soul who could have saved R from
his predicament. It was Sumanthiran. Knowing that R had no escape route from
his debacle, S should have used his psychic power to save him from ‘hell’, by
threatening to withdraw from appearing for his cases, because S was R’s God on
earth. He placed his heart and brain on S’ hands. Instead, he was led an abyss.
Why S failed to psychologically salvage R from self-destruction is puzzling.
Perhaps, Sumanthiran wanted R to become a basket case of pain in the neck in a
sick, corrupt society, a kind of sadistic pleasure for his Eelam ilk. If only, R
had seen the Singalovada Sutra, at least once, instead of reading bogus
books on Buddhism, he would not have fallen into this human trap. Kiriella who
once said, any idiot can win wars if there is money,” and Sajith should have
warned R to change his behavior then, instead shedding crocodile tears before
the Speaker to let R come to parliamentary sittings. This is not to protect R,
but to continue to use R and abuse parliamentary privileges for the cheap
political game Sajith is playing again an abuse of his position as LoO (PM in
waiting in UK tradition).
Despite the R debacle, SJB and TNA continue to
scratch each other’s backs secretly, and inside parliament by coming to help
each other in heated or irrational debates or otherwise. The efforts to
salvage R by hook or by crook, is due to a mutual guilt and defeat of the
yahapalana international project. It is now clear, this project did not
originate in Singapore in 2003/2006 with a secret meeting of Mangala
Samaraweera, dean Colombo law faculty (a Tamil Eelamist?) and some agents of
the global Tamil government in exile as we previously thought. It is but,
revamping of the buried (but not dead), larger anti-Mahavamsa project aimed at
balkanization of Sinhale. It is an irony that the statement Ven. Gnanasara was
found fault with, that we do not want white mans’ law anymore,” is now
repeated by Sumanthiran and Ali Sabry both, in a sugarcoated fashion, careful
enough to not upset the supreme court!
Part- 2: How six
lawyers framed and convicted Ven. Gnanasara on a contempt of court charge.
Ayurvedic practitioner Dhammika Bandara said he was not responsible for Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi contracting COVID-19, as she had failed to follow his advice on taking the syrup made by him.
In a Facebook post, he said when taking his herbal syrup, people should avoid smoking, consuming alcoholic liquor and avoid eating meat.
Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi did two things which I advised her to avoid. Therefore, I cannot take responsibility for she had fallen ill now,” he said in the post.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa says the first batch of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines manufactured in India is expected to arrive in Sri Lanka on the 27th of January.
Accordingly, Sri Lanka will be receiving the 500,000 vials of doses with the first vaccine consignment.
The President’s remarks came during the ‘Gama Samaga Pilisandara’ programme held in Walallawita, Kalutara today (January 23).
He noted that Covid-19 jabs will be first administered to medical officers, Public Health Inspectors (PHIs) and other health sector workers who are on the front line of coronavirus outbreak in the country.
Officers of tri-forces who work closely with medical staff and people who are more vulnerable to virus infection will be given the jabs subsequently, the President added.
The National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) yesterday approved the emergency use of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines in Sri Lanka.
Indian High Commission in Colombo later said the Sri Lankan government has conveyed that approval was granted for the emergency use of COVISHIELD vaccines.
COVISHIELD is the local name for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine developed in the United Kingdom.
The shots developed by UK-based drugmaker AstraZeneca and Oxford University are being manufactured at India’s Serum Institute – world’s largest vaccine manufacturer.
The vaccine, which is known as COVISHIELD, is developed from a weakened version of a common cold virus (known as an adenovirus) from chimpanzees.
It is administered in two shots – the second dose must be taken four to six weeks following the first.
Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs, which require 70C temperature for storage, COVISHIELD can be safely stored at temperatures of 2C to 8C, which is about the same as a domestic refrigerator.
India on Wednesday (January 20) began supplying Covid-19 vaccines to six neighbouring and key partner countries. Thereby, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Seychelles became the first recipients of India-manufactured vaccines.
The vaccines supplied to neighbouring countries are sent as grants and India’s External Affairs Ministry said the vaccines were not part of COVAX – the United Nations-backed global effort aimed at lower-income nations to obtain the jabs.
Sri Lanka has reported two more coronavirus related deaths today (January 230, the Director-General of Health Services confirmed.
One of the deceased is a 69-year-old male from Mount Lavinia who had passed away at the Homagama Base Hospital yesterday (January 22). He had been transferred from the Colombo National Hospital upon being diagnosed with COVID-19. The cause of his death has been determined as COVID-19 pneumonia and a kidney infection.
The other victim is an 82-year-old woman from the Ranala area who succumbed to COVID-19 pneumonia and kidney disease. She had also passed away yesterday at the Homagama Base Hospital from the Colombo National Hospital upon being identified as a COVID-19 patient.
Accordingly, Sri Lanka has reported 280 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic thus far.
Sri Lanka’s Covid-19 numbers saw another surge today, as 371 more persons were tested positive for the virus.
Department of Government Information confirmed that all 371 of the newly-identified patients are close contacts of earlier cases linked to the Peliyagoda fish market.
Accordingly, a total of 724 new cases have been reported within the day.
As per statistics, the total number of Covid-19 infections confirmed in the country to date now stands at 57,587.
Recoveries from the virus meanwhile climbed to 49,261 earlier today, as more patients regained health.
However, 8,048 active cases are still under medical care at selected hospitals and treatment centers located across the island.
Sri Lanka has also witnessed 278 deaths related to Covid-19.
Covid-19 positive Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi is currently receiving treatment at an intermediate hotel quarantine centre in Hikkaduwa, the minister’s media secretary said.
Minister Wanniarachchi was tested positive for Covid-19 yesterday (January 22) in a rapid antigen test.
She is the fifth Member of Parliament to contract the virus after State Ministers Dayasiri Jayasekara and Piyal Nishantha, MP Rauff Hakeem and Minister Vasudeva Nanayakkara.
Early evidence suggests the variant of coronavirus that emerged in the UK may be more deadly, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said. How does this affect the road out of lockdown?
However, there remains huge uncertainty around the numbers – and vaccines are still expected to work. The virus’s reproduction rate is estimated to be at or below one for the first time since early December – which means the epidemic is shrinking in the UK. So what does this mean for the UK? Could we see travel restrictions imposed due to the new transmissibility of the new variant? How does this affect the road out of lockdown? Newsnight’s Policy Editor Lewis Goodall reports.
Some viewers may find this film distressing As the UK coronavirus death toll reaches record levels, Newsnight returns to Salisbury District Hospital joining the ITU staff for a full 12 hour shift as they struggle to cope with the relentless influx of patients.
