Course correction in our foreign policy

In no arena was the aberration that was the past nine years of governance more starkly apparent than in Sri Lanka's foreign relations and foreign policy. Some may argue that in its policy towards the internal ethnic conflict, too, the Rajapaksa regime was an aberration in that no other previous regime had attempted a purely military 'solution'.

Others may dispute that, pointing to the vigorous military campaigns conducted by successive governments against the secessionist insurgency. But it is noteworthy that those previous regimes always did conduct political negotiations at various stages and even implemented political reform, however piecemeal.

Apologists for the Rajapakse regime will point to the vaguely mandated 'select committees' and 'commissions' that did function during this period but none of these even remotely approached the degree of authenticity of the political initiatives of the past that addressed the country's most critical problem.

Indeed, those past political initiatives - ranging from numerous and laboriously undertaken political negotiations to actual reform of State structures and even federalist proposals - seem creative and genuine in intent when compared with the military bludgeoning that the otherwise highly professional armed forces were compelled to carry out against a section of the country's citizenry at the behest of the government.

The distortion of the country's foreign relations in these past nine years can be described quite simply: a disproportionate economic, political and military bilateral relationship with one country.

It is 'disproportionate' in that this singular bias was notwithstanding the carefully nurtured edifice of multi-lateral relations with a set of countries across the global geo-political spectrum, relations that balanced both economic interests as well as neighborly amity and security throughout six decades of this country's post colonial life.

Sri Lanka's modern inter-state relationship with China has been honourably consistent from the earliest years of the People's Republic.

Indeed, Sri Lanka was among the first of the newly post colonial states that resisted western pressure to recognise the Taiwan-based 'nationalist' Chinese government in place of the People's Republic that was established on the Chinese mainland.

Even as the communist regime remained a beleaguered and marginalised state, Sri Lanka cemented the 'Rubber-Rice Pact' in 1952 that provided China with much-needed rubber products in the face of Western instigated trade resistance on the part of other rubber exporters in the region. This mutual bilateral loyalty has endured since between two countries whose historic ties go back over a millennia.

It is entirely due to the clumsy execution of foreign policy, or, the lack of a clear-cut foreign policy on the part of Colombo that has resulted in these bilateral relations being distorted to a degree that the one-sided dependence engineered by the Rajapaksa regime has come to be seen as negative and harmful to both countries.

After all, it has been Colombo that has ignored all other international relationships and neighbourhood dynamics. It has been Colombo that obtained massive commercial loans at high interest rates from China, a country that, for so long, had been happy to gift Sri Lanka much infrastructure facilities - such as the iconic BMICH and Supreme Court complex.

It has been Colombo that set aside normal competitive bidding procedure for investments and projects and encouraged Chinese companies to invest in unsolicited projects of a scale that is transforming or threatens to transform local development and demography in ways that, being uncharted, are unpredictable and potentially harmful.

It has been due to this wanton recourse to the easy money of invasive Chinese corporates brushing aside local business entrepreneurship that has begun to generate negative perceptions within the country towards another country that only wants to be our ally and not our new colonial hegemony.

All of this finally ended with the worst possible outcome in terms of Sri Lanka's international relations. On the one hand, former friendly nations in the west, previously carefully cultivated through our Non-Aligned policy, felt estranged enough to be unsympathetic to our country's internal agony of ethnic conflict and civil war.

On the other hand, our immediate neighbours, puzzled by Colombo's sudden foreign policy squint eastwards and away from South Asian realities had to struggle and even risk their own internal political dynamics - such as Tamil Nadu's natural ethnic sympathies - to try to accommodate our geo-political gymnastics.

Hence the Geneva trap on the Western front and, the heated cacophony of ethnic sympathy across the Palk Straits. It can only be the most inept policy management that results in two attack submarines of a great power quite remote from the Indian Ocean surreptitiously docking in the Colombo port barely a hundred kilometres away from the main counter great power that is our immediate neighbour and rightfully dominates the Indian Ocean region.

That the new regime in Colombo, post January 8, has been so swift to embark on an international diplomatic 'offensive' says much about the political and management acumen of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe regime and its several close allies.

Even in the midst of a heavy work schedule to meet the electoral promise the of the '100-day' program, President Maithripala Sirisena and External Affairs Minister Mangala Samaraweera are set to be extremely busy with a program of international visits to revive that previously nurtured, genuinely non-aligned and, pragmatic edifice of multi-lateral inter-state relations that will, once again, place our country in the warm clasp of friendship all around us.