The flag follows trade on China’s Silk Route
soon come to own and control.
China has billions of dollars strategically invested in Lanka to safeguard, even by her military might should it come to that, so much so that the Lankan government is looking more and more a caretaker of Chinese property in this 25,000 square miles of land rather than the landlord of all he surveys.
In the early 17th century the British East India Company, a joint stock company owned by wealthy merchants and members from Britain’s aristocracy began trading with the Indian subcontinent and the Orient. After years of doing business, trade wars with other foreign powers in the region compelled the British Government to send its naval fleet to protect its countrymen’s investments and pecuniary power. It ultimately led to the creation of the British Empire which held India as the Kohinoor diamond in its Empire’s crown. It’s the classic example where the flag soon followed trade.
And this week, with the arrival of China’s Defence Minister to the island, wonder whether it’s another classic case of history repeating itself? That the Chinese flag is following Chinese trade on the silk route to regional domination? And whether the once proud pearl of the Indian Ocean, is now just another captive bead, dangling helpless in the wily Chinaman’s necklace? American Government’s fixation of granting supremacy to Israel’s concerns and granting them a free hand to do as they wished on Palestinian territory.
Trump’s move to abandon the two-state concept in solving the long drawn Israel-Palestine conflict which had been for long the cornerstone of US policy; his suggestion to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a very sensitive issue, the blind eye cast towards Israel building houses on Palestinian territory and settling Jews upon its soil have great human rights ramifications which the US government will find hard and embarrassing to defend as a high profile member of the UN’s Human Rights Council. And while the great land of liberty is busy promoting Israel as the dominant power in that godforsaken region of conflict, the US government may well have thought it prudent to soft pedal on human rights issues committed elsewhere in the world by small nations of no great significance in its blinkered eyes.
The fallout from that policy is the windfall the Lankan Government reaped this Thursday. It has nothing to do with the government’s shabby performance in granting justice to all who were denied it during the war years. The Lankan government was only the beneficiary of the world’s sole superpower’s new policy and received its reprieve in the manner hundreds of criminals serving time in the country’s prisons receive presidential amnesty and are freed on Vesak day. Not because they are deemed innocent and deserve to be freed on account of good behavior but because a higher noble Buddhist motive to show compassion on that thrice blessed day, moves the President to show clemency.
Much remains to be done to build a lasting peace. The Government should utilise the time granted to make a genuine attempt to revive the reconciliation process even if it means having to dump the chauvinistic stance, political pressure from nationalistic bigoted joint opposition forces have forced it to adopt. It cannot wait for another Vesak.