U.S.-Sri Lanka Relations: Demons and Demonizing

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 The U.S. ambassador called on the Sri Lankan foreign minister last week.  It seems that Sri Lanka has a new friend, and badmouthing the U.S. is taking place at very high levels.  To understand some of the psychology here, it might be worthwhile to start with the mythic history of this island nation.

The Story of Ram and Ravana

In the Ramayana, the famous Indian national epic, the villain is the demon Ravana, who kidnaps Ram’s wife Sita and sets off a great war.  Let me add a complication here.  In North India Ravana is indubitably the villain.  In South India the story has a different twist:  Ravana is the hero and Ram is not.  And what is the name of Ravana’s domain?  Lanka—which is why Ceylon was renamed after independence from Britain. 

Today the ruler of Sri Lanka is President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who feels that he is being demonized by the West even as his Singalese followers worship him as the hero who delivered the island from a demonic insurgency.  Thus Rajapaksa becomes Ram, and Tiger leader Prabakaran is the Ravana who had to be (and was) slain.

But wait!  There’s another possible demon in the piece.  China.  In this case,  Sri Lanka becomes Sita the lovely bride who is stolen from the West by the dragon from the East in the current war of nerves between the U.S. and China.

Now Ravana, in the mythical epic, is a slippery character with nine heads, not easy to deal with, not easy to kill, and Mahinda Rajapaksa’s character is no less elusive.  On the one hand, he is utterly ruthless.  On the other, he may have preserved the unity of Lanka.  He speaks of democracy, but he is also a nasty electoral opponent.  These many faces were in play last week as his government skirmished with the American ambassador.  

The Strings on the Money Bag

Acording to the Congressional Research Service, US officials cited “human rights concerns” to slash U.S. assistance to Sri Lanka beginning in 2007.  The government in Colombo had decided to wage all out war against the remnants of the Tamil Tigers.  The process was not pretty, which is why good journalists found themselves vulnerable to reprisals, including assassination, another black mark against the Rajapaksa regime. 

USAID in 2005 had been $20.6 million.  By 2007 it had been reduced by half and even that sum was scheduled to be whittled to a mere $6 million by 2009.  That’s a drop in the bucket, a loss hardly worth crying over, monetarily.  Taken as a snub, however, it’s considerable.

Other long standing international donors joined the U.S. in suspending aid or withholding new commitments.  It didn’t seem to matter that the Tigers had been nil respecters of human rights themselves.  Nor should it have. Brutality is brutality, and governments are rightly held to a higher standard.  

The CRS report continues: 

President Rajapaksa has responded with defiance, saying that his country is not dependent on foreign aid and can go it alone, if necessary.  Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother, has decried the “international bullying” on human rights.

Needless to say, President Rajapaksa and his belligerent brother (the demon Ravana had brothers as allies, too) also resent the unsuccessful but energetic efforts by the U.S. and others to have the U.N. Security council censure Sri Lanka for its refusal to heed calls for a cease fire in the waning days of the war.  Those wily Tigers!  They were using thousands of Tamil refugees as human shields to keep their cadres from being slaughtered or driven into the sea.  Conditions in the post-war refugees camps were also severely criticized on humanitarian grounds.  More grist for the resentment mill.

China to the Rescue

However, it is hardly true that Sri Lanka under a re-elected Rajapaksa is going it alone and has forsworn dependence on foreign aid.  It has simply switched benefactors.  What Sri Lanka is getting out of China is probably worth far more to the nation’s prospects for long term prosperity than any lost aid from the West.  

China is spending the equivalent of a billion dollars to build a deep water port in Hambantota on the southern coast of Sri Lanka.  Hambantota will certainly be a valuable asset to the Chinese Navy.  It will be a node on the infamous “string of pearls” that threatens to strangle India, and some Lankan critics of the project note that the funds come as a loan from the Chinese EXIM bank, not as a grant.  What’s more, they complain, imported Chinese labor is doing the construction, which limits the multiplier effect on the Sri Lankan economy.  (Similar complaints dog the Chinese-funded Gwador port project in Pakistan.).  However, a modern port is a big plus for an island nation—and no other source, to my knowledge, has offered to build one on better terms.

Another important quid pro quo is operating here.  China’s veto power has protected Sri Lanka from seriously consequential censure for human rights violations in the Security Council and elsewhere.  For China this is entirely consistent behavior.  China, which buys much-needed oil from Sudan, did not join in the effort to seek the arrest by the International Criminal Court of Sudan’s President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir “for crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed in its western Darfur area.  Of course, the U.S. has also been known to get into bed with bad regimes when national interests required  unsavory romances.  The difference is this: China makes few or no moral clams for itself.  It can be criticized for reprehensible policy choices, but not for hypocrisy, which almost always seems worse. 

China has also provided military aid, becoming

its biggest arms supplier in the 1990s, when India and Western governments refused to sell weapons to Colombo for use in the civil war.  Beijing appears to have increased arms sales significantly to Sri Lanka since 2007, when the US suspended military aid over human rights issues. 

It’s hard not to conclude that Sri Lanka’s current leaders do not consider the U.S. to be the essential nation any more.  That being the case, the need to be discreet and circumspect in public is diminished.  There’s another development that has a bearing here.  It has to do with Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, a case just argued before the Supreme Court. Before we get to that sensitive issue, however, let’s take a look at the anti-U.S. sniping that’s characterized the last few weeks.

Loose Lips Sink Friendships

During an interview on February 10, it seems, Sri Lanka’s Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa—who is also the brother of the president, remember—complained of the “alleged coup plans of former army chief and presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka,” who had attracted considerable support from Tamil voters as well as from members of the non-Tamil opposition, thus depriving Mahinda of the nearly unanimous re-election he had expected.  Said Gotabaya:

We are 100 per cent convinced that western countries with vested interests were backing him.  Even the U.S...spent lots of money on his campaign.

Now what does Gotabaya mean by “the U.S.” here?  Sounds like he’s referring to the government, which would be a grave allegation indeed.  Was this a slip of the tongue?  Or was it a calculated dig, an intended innuendo?  Obviously, I’m not privy to classified aspects of U.S. policy, but all that’s probably incontrovertible about money flow is that U.S.-based Tamils belonging to a large and prosperous diaspora probably were contributing to the Fonseka campaign, just as they contributed, equally controversially,  to the fighting Tigers.  It would deeply irk the Rajapaksas to learn that the Tamils, though beaten on the battle field, can continue their fight for freedom or autonomy in the arena of public opinion from foreign safe havens.

Or can they?  See below.

At any rate, given the implied accusation, it’s not surprising that the U.S. ambassador Patricia Butenis met with Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama on February 18th  to express her concern over “reports inimical to the bilateral relations carried by some section s of the Sri Lanka media.”  This is diplo-talk.  She’s careful not to start out by accusing the government of more than being misquoted.

At the time of the demarche, the Foreign Minister laughed off the Ambassador’s concerns.   Madam, he said, you must have noticed that Sri Lanka has a robust free press—at least, I’m disposed to note, when the butt is the U.S. and not the Rajapaksa government.  However, the foreign minister went on to say, according to media reports, “Sri Lankan authorities do not give any credence to the palpable misinformation concerning alleged moves involving the United states [,] aimed at undermining the leadership of President Rajapaksa, and destabilizing his government.”

Slyly put and not very comforting!  Moreover, by Feburary 20th the innuendo was back.  While meeting with Australian and Sudanese envoys, that very same foreign minister complained “that some countries were channeling funds via international and local non-governmental organisations to destabilise democracy.”

Notice the change of phrasing here, along with the weasel word “via”?  It’s hard for many outsiders to understand the extraordinary freedom that non-governmental organizations in the U.S. enjoy, so it’s common for foreigners to imagine that the U.S. is nothing but a collection of deployable “fronts.”  But the U.S. is an immigrant nation, and every immigrant nationality has called into being its own, totally independent organizations for benign and not so benign purposes, including the desire to influence events in the home country.   So Tamils in the U.S. (and Canada and elsewhere) want to help Tamils in Sri Lanka in one way or another. 

But how to do so, in these post 9/11 days, without being indited for giving “material assistance” to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, which has been legally designated, for good reason, as a terrorist group?

The Legal Demon: Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project 

In fact, this problem has arisen in regard to other nationalist groups.  For instance, “the Humanitarian Law Project and its president, Ralph Fertig, a retired United States law judge, wants to provide training in peaceful dispute resolution to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged a separatist guerilla campaign against the Turkish government....”  But anti-terrorism laws are “unconstitutionally vague,” and it's almost impossible to know what can be safely said or done for restive minorities in other countries.  Hence, the case recently argued before the Supreme Court, of which the New York Times  editorialized:

The law prohibits giving not only weapons and money, but also less concrete support, like advice and “service.” The plaintiffs argue that these prohibitions go too far, infringing on their rights to free speech and association. Supporters of the law argue that it reasonably seeks to put groups like Al Qaeda and Hamas off-limits and to prohibit people from working with them.
   
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, rejected the broadest challenges to the law but ruled that some of its provisions — making it illegal to provide “training,” “expert advice or assistance” or “service” — are unconstitutionally vague. That ruling improved the law, but there is room for improvement. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that it is still so broad that it could encompass anything from publishing an opinion piece written by a spokesman for a terrorist group to filing a friend-of-the-court brief in support of L.T.T.E. in this lawsuit.
   
There needs to be strong protection for a core area of protected speech and advocacy. Americans should be able to make arguments to a court on the behalf of terrorist groups. That is crucial for the legal system to work and for the constitutionality of laws of this kind to be tested. They should be able to print the views of these groups for journalistic purposes, either to report the news or to convey a range of opinions. People also need to be free to speak independently about these groups.

If the Court decides for the plaintiffs, the brothers Rajapaksa will not be happy. I have written earlier WV pieces contending that the bloody campaign to defeat the Tigers can be justified only if a victorious government uses that victory to right the wrongs against a Tamil population.  There are many way that can be accomplished, but so far there has been little progress.   According to the latest footdragging,  Rajapaksa wants to wait until after the upcoming parliamentary elections to do anything.  Should it become possible for Tamils in the U.S. to legally explain and support militant Tamil demands for a proportionate role in the governance of Sri Lanka, the pressure will be on the Rajapaksas to deliver. No wonder they are annoyed with the U.S.  (For more on the Tamil take on the issue, read this.)

Circle within Circles

Construction in Hambantota continues apace, as does work on the port in Gwador—and on new Chinese-built ports in Chittagong in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Burma.  All are for purely commercial purposes, China insists, but if I were an Indian strategist watching China strengthening its blue water navy and building ports East, West and South of me, I would be a little worried.  As UPI reports, "this is causing grave concern in India, which is vying for the same energy and mineral resources as China" and "raises the prospect, distant though it may be, of a confrontation between the two."

Meanwhile, here’s a wonderful irony.  China Daily reports that the dragon is beginning to feel uncomfortably encircled by U.S. missile defense systems installed in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Germany.  China, deeply concerned that India will become part of this encirclement, is evidently counting on India’s long standing need to be an independent  power on the international scene to prevent this pearl from being added to U.S. defenses.  We shall see.   
 
Back to our epic.  Ram, with the help of the monkey army under the command of the god-king Hanuman, rescued Sita, killed Ravana and left his palace in flames. So China cleverly preys on Sri Lanka’s primordial resentment of India in order to complete its string of ship-tending pearls.  No doubt Delhi’s more recent hegemonic ambitions were resented in Colombo, especially since they didn’t come with billion dollar investments, but the Rajapaksas might think back to the days, many hundreds of years ago, when China last floated an enormous blue water navy.  It’s primary purpose?  To collect tribute from the less powerful nations whose ports its ships called upon.