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Kerry Heads To Sri Lanka On Historic Visit To Mend Ties

Kerry Heads To Sri Lanka On Historic Visit To Mend Ties

Washington (AFP) – Top U.S. diplomat John Kerry left early Friday on a landmark trip to Sri Lanka, the first such visit in a decade to the Indian Ocean island as it returns to the diplomatic fold.

Kerry is due to arrive around dawn Saturday in Colombo, becoming the first U.S. secretary of state to set foot in the South Asian nation since Colin Powell, who visited in 2005 in the wake of the devastating Asian tsunami.

Kerry will meet with new President Maithripala Sirisena, who was elected on January 8 as he unseated long-time strongman Mahinda Rajapakse at the ballot box.

The U.S. diplomat will also meet Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, a senior State Department official said, adding Kerry would also hold talks with political leaders from the Tamil minority.

The United States and Europe have hailed Sri Lanka’s stunning democratic transition hoping to turn the page on years of discord caused by the former regime’s brutal crackdown on separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.

Rajapakse won a landslide re-election victory in 2010, but critics say he failed to bring about reconciliation in the years that followed his crushing victory over the Tamil Tiger separatist group in 2009.

Sirisena has taken steps towards reconciliation with ethnic minority Tamils following the decades-long war which claimed at least 100,000 lives. There were allegations that at least 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed.

His government has pledged to investigate war crimes allegedly committed during the conflict in sharp contrast to former strongman Rajapakse who insisted no civilians were killed by his troops.

Colombo has sought “to indicate their desire to sort of reset Sri Lanka’s relations with the world community,” the State Department official said, welcoming the new government’s new 100-day reform program.

Under the plan, the government pledged to carry out a corruption probe into the Rajapakse regime and cooperate with a UN inquiry into any human rights abuses carried out in the civil war.

“The visit is intended to show that the U.S. government supports and applauds this vision, this effort,” the State Department official said.

It also aims to show there is a “future where we have a very good and mutually helpful relationship with a country that can be… a real beacon of democracy, of human rights, of reconciliation, where civil society and religious minorities can live freely.”

The UN, backed by the United States, has been investigating possible war crimes during the civil war for more than a year. In February however, the UN postponed its report at Colombo’s request to allow more time for Sri Lanka to complete its own investigation.

“We’ve always said that we support a domestic-driven process that is credible and viewed as credible by the Sri Lankan people,” the U.S. official said.

From Sri Lanka, Kerry is due to travel to Nairobi and then on to Djibouti before returning to Washington around May 8.

He will become the first ever secretary of state to visit Djibouti, a Horn of Africa country which has been thrust into the spotlight as thousands flee the chaos in Yemen, lying just across the narrow Red Sea Straits.

Photo: (©afp.com / Kena Betancur) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry left on a landmark trip to Sri Lanka, the first such visit in a decade to the Indian Ocean island as it returns to the diplomatic fold.

Sri Lanka Stuck With Former President’s White Elephants

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka — This remote coastal scrubland, a haven for wild elephants and migratory birds that is several hours away from the nearest city, seems like an odd place to attempt to create a major commercial hub.

Yet such was the whim of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a local son who, thanks to Chinese loans, poured immense sums into pet projects during the decade he held this island nation in his grip.

Since he was voted out of office in January, Rajapaksa’s extravagant spending in his home district, much of it named for himself, looks ever more like monuments to folly.

A giant Indian Ocean harbor being blasted out of the island’s southern shoreline is costing well over $1 billion, and officials say it is unlikely to break even for years. A $210 million international airport built two years ago has hundreds of employees but receives just a few passengers a day.

The 35,000-seat Mahinda Rajapaksa International Cricket Stadium and a new convention center are rarely used, as are miles of expansive new highways that get little traffic apart from the occasional herd of cattle.

“It’s a crying shame how much money was spent,” said Harsha de Silva, deputy minister for policy planning and economic affairs in Sri Lanka’s new government. “Why is an airport in the middle of nowhere? Why are you building a road to the middle of nowhere?”

It’s not as though Sri Lankans didn’t ask those questions before, but under Rajapaksa’s increasingly despotic administration, dissent was ignored or punished. After his narrow and surprising election defeat, the country of 20 million is waking up to the excesses of his rule.

SriLankan Airlines, the deeply indebted national carrier, announced that it would cease operating from Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in the town of Mattala, north of Hambantota. The twice-daily flights were losing the airline $8 million a year, company officials said.

The new president, Maithripala Sirisena, ordered a review of all of Rajapaksa’s projects — a long list. To cement the government’s victory in a 26-year civil war against northern Tamil rebels, Rajapaksa embarked on a $6 billion infrastructure spending binge starting in 2009.

More than two-thirds of the projects, including the port and airport at Hambantota, were financed by Chinese banks at interest rates as high as 6.3 percent annually, several times what other lenders offered, without open bidding, officials say.

Authorities are investigating whether contracts were padded to benefit members of Rajapaksa’s government, which included more than two dozen members of his extended family. No charges have been filed.

In the meantime, finance officials are exploring ways to restructure the Chinese loans. Government lawyers are poring over contracts, trying to scale back some projects that haven’t yet begun, such as a 500 acre development on reclaimed land in the capital, Colombo, where the Rajapaksa envisioned luxury high-rises and a Formula One racetrack.

Rajapaksa and members of his family did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview last month with the South China Morning Post, he defended his actions.

“I wanted development for Sri Lanka, and China was the only one which had the resources and the inclination to help me,” Rajapaksa said.

Opponents counter that he built by fiat, bypassing environmental studies and economic assessments, and that China, seeking to boost its influence on the doorstep of rival India, took advantage of his haste.

“They were vanity projects for Rajapaksa, plain and simple, and China was quite happy to nurture his vanity,” said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a think tank in Colombo.

Business leaders in Hambantota said they were never consulted about the giant structures that began proliferating in their district like mushrooms after a monsoon.

Rajapaksa inaugurated the country’s second international airport with fanfare in March 2013, with state media proclaiming it “an initiative that changed the face of global aviation.” By mid-2014, however, its financial state was already precarious: Under questioning from opposition lawmakers, aviation officials reported that the airport’s total revenue in one month was 16,000 rupees, or about $120.

With SriLankan Airlines having pulled out, only one commercial airline operates at Rajapaksa International: low-cost carrier Flydubai, which arrives every morning via Colombo, disgorging a few European tourists bound for the island’s southern beaches. An hour later, it returns to Dubai.

For the rest of the day, the fountains and air-conditioning are switched off to save costs and the airy, modern passenger terminal is vacant except for some of the 500-odd employees who remain on the payroll.

The 3-square-mile site has upended the local ecosystem. Wild elephants often roam up to the airport perimeter, which is ringed by an electric fence. Peacocks have occasionally flown into the runway area and collided with moving aircraft.

“It was not the most logical place for an airport,” said Prithiviraj Fernando, chairman of the Center for Conservation and Research, an independent environmental group.

Aviation officials are reportedly considering marketing the airport as a transshipment hub for global couriers such as FedEx and UPS, or converting it into a flight school.

Officials seem more optimistic about the Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port, which was carved out of bedrock on a 4,000-acre site next to Hambantota town. Sri Lanka has long sought a second port to alleviate congestion in Colombo and take advantage of its position near shipping lanes connecting Southeast Asia with Africa and the Middle East.

But experts say Hambantota harbor requires near-constant dredging, possibly interfering with sea life. The better choice, they say, would have been a site on the eastern edge of the island, Trincomalee, one of the best natural deepwater harbors in the Indian Ocean.

According to a report in the Sunday Leader newspaper, a study showing the challenges at the Hambantota site was submitted to Rajapaksa in the early 2000s, when he was minister of ports and fisheries.

“He didn’t care,” Saravanamuttu said. “He thought that if he ruled long enough, from here to eternity, he could move the capital down there.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: The deserted international airport in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, constructed in 2013 as a vanity project by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, now receives only one flight per day. (Shashank Bengali/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Sri Lanka Road Trip Finds North And South Still Divided After Civil War

Sri Lanka Road Trip Finds North And South Still Divided After Civil War

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

ALONG THE A9 HIGHWAY, Sri Lanka — The road from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s graceful seaside capital in the south, to the northern town of Jaffna has rarely been a straight shot. Most of the 250-mile journey follows the A9 highway, which slices through palm groves and green carpets of farmland that were the main battlegrounds of the country’s three-decade civil war.

During the worst fighting between an army dominated by the Sinhalese ethnic majority and rebels from the mainly Tamil north, long stretches of A9 were closed to civilian traffic. As the main supply line for Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for an independent homeland, it held immense strategic value.

The highway was “the sole, fraying thread binding the north to the south, holding together the notion of an undivided Sri Lanka,” wrote journalist Samanth Subramanian in his 2014 book on the war, “This Divided Island.”

Since 2009, when the rebels finally succumbed to a ruthless army offensive, the highway has been refurbished by a government seeking to swiftly sew up the wounds of the conflict.

Sinhalese have begun to visit the Tamil region, their blue-striped tour buses visible at Buddhist shrines or hastily erected war memorials along the A9. Tamils observe the outsiders warily; relations between the two peoples, who share an island scarcely larger than West Virginia, are still marked by suspicion and mutual misunderstanding.

The authoritarian former President Mahinda Rajapaksa last year briefly barred foreigners from entering the north without permission, a panicky move before an election that he would eventually lose. With a new government having lifted the restriction, I set off recently along the A9 for the nine-hour ride from Colombo to the Jaffna peninsula, the Tamil’s historical heartland.

At the wheel was Nuwan, a young, solidly built Sinhalese whose slight mohawk gave his head the appearance of a bullet. Like most southerners who grew up in the war years, he had never been to the north.

We climbed above Colombo’s humid tropics into verdant hill country and then turned north onto the A9, which sloped gently into a flat, arid stretch of rice fields. Nuwan marveled at the smooth ribbon of road — I had to ask that he stop taking cellphone pictures of the landscape while driving — but then subtle markers of strife began to appear.

In the town of Tirappane, we were greeted by a giant election billboard showing a beaming Rajapaksa, clad as always in the gleaming white tunic that advertised him as a devout Sinhalese Buddhist.

The war had neatly cleaved Sri Lanka along confessional lines, between Sinhalese Buddhists and the multi-faith Tamils. In the south, the eggshell domes of Buddhist shrines seem to be the only religious sites, but now we began to see the trapezoidal towers of Hindu temples, studded with brightly painted gods, and more sober-looking mosques and churches.

We reached Omanthai, a dot on the map where government forces still maintain a checkpoint. During the war and for most of its aftermath, foreigners had to disembark here and duck into a shed to submit to army questioning. On this afternoon, bored-looking soldiers did not even look at me, and after Nuwan entered his license number in the army ledger we were back on our way.

Occasionally I would see the Sinhalese tour buses parked along the roadside, or Sinhalese families picnicking in the shade of a tree. In Kilinochchi, the Tigers’ former capital, several buses were stopped next to what looked like a giant funnel tipped onto its side.

It was a water tank that had been toppled during the fighting, the steel rebar reaching out from the concrete husk like tentacles. The government had turned it into a war memorial, planting a tidy garden with flowers and a large stone tablet declaring that the damage had been done by rebel “terrorists in the face of valiant troops.”

A few Sinhalese families milled about, staring gravely at the detritus. Some wandered into a gift shop where souvenir T-shirts and caps were for sale. I would later meet Tamils who deeply resented the monument, viewing it as a bid by Rajapaksa to rub their noses in the rebels’ defeat.

“They take pictures like they’ve never seen a water tank before,” said Christie Shanthni, an outspoken 50-year-old coordinator of a women’s cooperative in Kilinochchi. “We don’t mind if they come here, but I often wonder how they would feel if we went around in busloads celebrating the exploits of Tamil fighters.”

A few years after the fighting ended, with tens of thousands of war deaths, Shanthni visited the former bunker of the Tigers’ slain leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, which the government opened to visitors in the coastal area of Mullaitivu. She and her companion were the only Tamils there, she recalled, and they understood little because the tour guide spoke only Sinhalese.

The government reportedly destroyed the bunker in 2013, perhaps fearing that it would contribute to Prabhakaran’s cult-hero status.

Before I left Colombo, a friend advised me to visit a bank, saying, “You don’t want to get stuck in the north without cash.” That would have been difficult; every little town along A9 had multiple banks with ATMs, part of the economic development that Rajapaksa often boasted he brought to the north.

Yet Tamils saw that too in a darker light. The banks and lending companies offered easy financing for motorcycles, appliances, and other consumer goods that were suddenly available in this long-shuttered economy. Many families plunged into debt — another ploy by the south, in the eyes of some, to subjugate the Tamils.

The afternoon light melted into the horizon as we pulled into sleepy Jaffna and I alighted at my guesthouse. At breakfast, I met a Sinhalese man who had immigrated to Los Angeles and was visiting the north for the first time with his mother.

Jaffna was nice, he said, except he was surprised that almost no one spoke Sinhalese. I watched him struggle to communicate with the Tamil-speaking kitchen staff in English, just as I did. It suddenly struck me that he, a native Sri Lankan, and I, an American visiting for the first time, were almost equally foreign in this war-scarred place.

Photo: Shashank Bengali via Los Angeles Times/TNS