Djibouti, the West’s Geostrategic Base in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf: Whither goes?

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, National politics, Political geography, Regional History

Djibouti is a moderately populated mini-state in the turbulent Horn of Africa region§, it’s contiguous neighbours, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia (including Somaliland), are all countries which tend to experience ongoing conflict and instability, as is Yemen, less than 30km away by sea across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Tiny Djibouti, comparatively, is open for business, and an oasis of stability, or so it seems to many interested foreign onlookers.

République de Djibouti 🇩🇯 Size 23,200 sq km. Pop (est. 2023) 976,000 (image: Pinterest)

Position A, geopolitically speaking: Djibouti’s attraction to the US and other Western powers and more recently, to China, is location. The tiny African republic’s prized geo-strategic location intersects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, plumb in the middle of the vital shipping lane between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, which caters for the transit of 20,000 ships annually and accounts for 30% of world trade [Bereketeab, Redie. “Djibouti: Strategic Location, an Asset or a Curse?” Journal of African Foreign Affairs 3, no. 1/2 (2016): 5–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26661713.]🇦

Bab el-Mandeb, oil containers (source: Morocco World News)

Watching the “bad guys”, protecting the West’s interests: Since the 1991 Gulf War and especially since the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist attack, Djibouti’s importance to the military and security objectives of the US and other world powers has grown exponentially. The imperatives of the “War on Terror” and the upsurge in Somalia-based piracy turned Western eyes to Djibouti, situated ideally at the choke-point on the Suez to Indian waterway as the optimal spot to monitor activity in the Middle East and “the Horn” [‘Port in the Desert: Djibouti as International Lessor’, Jessica Borowicz, Aether: Journal of Strategic Airpower and Spacepower, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 2022, www.airuniversity.af.edu]. Today, foreign navies utilise Djibouti’s ports as part of the EU’s anti-piracy operations in the region, the US has a semipermanent base at Camp Lemonnier, with around 4,000 military personnel. France, Germany, Italian, Spain and Japan also maintain bases on Djibouti soil under Djibouti’s “rent-a-space program”. China opened its first base in the country in 2017.

Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti (photo: Facebook)

The rentier state – the Guelleh regime as “big bickies” landlord: Acting as lessor of foreign bases has proved a particularly lucrative earner for the Djibouti government, dominated by authoritarian president Ismaïl Omar Guelleh and his PRP🇧regime. Rents of the bases yield Djibouti an estimated US$119–128m per annum. As noted, “for a country that produces nothing, the income from the military bases has been a lifeline” (Bereketeab), turning round the dire economic prognosis facing the country in the early 1990s.

Ethiopian trade, mutual interest and port leases: An added windfall for the government is the revenues it collects from port leases (Djibouti has seven major ports and terminals). Landlocked Ethiopia is one of its customers, having lost its coastal territory after Eritrea gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. Ethiopia then became further dependent on Djibouti cooperation following the Eritrea-Ethiopia War (1998-2000). Ethiopia since this time has been required to lease port facilities from Djibouti, with 90% of total Ethiopian trade channelled through this route. With a shared major railroad and a shared water pipeline Djibouti’s relations with Ethiopia have generally been good (cf. those with Eritrea which have been less harmonious).

Doraleh Multi-Purpose Port (photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)

Djibouti’s prized non-tangible resources: A third source of revenue for Djibouti is the development aid it receives from donor countries, especially the US, France, other European countries and China. All of this cash inflow (rents + aid + loans) amounts to Djibouti having the largest per capita income in the Horn of Africa region (according to the IMF’s reckonings)🇨and a healthy 6.5% annual economic growth rate (Bereketeab).

French foreign legionnaires in Djibouti (photo: Julien Hubert/Armee de Terre)

Djibouti, a stamping ground for the US, France…and the PRC: US military analysts by and large see Djibouti as the best current option in the region for staging military bases, an “anchor of stability in a volatile region” (Borowicz), with some observers even viewing Djibouti as a “front-line state” of America (Bereketeab), so its clearly happy to pay the high tenancy fees. France, with its “small but mighty force” on-site [‘Inside France’s Small But Mighty Force in Djibouti’, Frédéric Lert, Key.Aero, 01-Aug-2022, www.key.aero] and an involvement with the East African microstate that stretches back over 130 years, no doubt agrees.🇩 And the Guelleh regime is certainly happy with its cut of the deal…with China entering the scene, suggesting a potential new theatre for US v PRC rivalry, Guelleh can play one patron off against another for increasingly higher stakes, he has “agency” in the game, which J-P Cabestan defines simply as “the ability of any country to make independent decisions and strengthen its bargaining power” [CABESTAN, JEAN-PIERRE. “African Agency and Chinese Power: The Case of Djibouti.” South African Institute of International Affairs, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29586.]

China’s Djibouti military base (source: adr1682305408 Thanh, Flickr)

Djibouti a haven of stability?: But is Djibouti really as stable a state as many in the Pentagon seems to believe? President Guelleh for now keeps a tight rein on things internally in Djibouti, effective opposition to the PRP has been neutralised,🇪but what of the future? Below the surface there are a raft of variables that might threaten the status quo. The great mass of Djiboutians have gained virtually nothing from the massive injection of money into Djibouti’s treasury which remains firmly in the hands of Guelleh and his fellow Somali subclan cronies in the political elite. Ordinary citizens wallow in various stages of poverty with unemployment conservatively estimated at 60% but really higher. Disenfranchised, predominantly illiterate, facing the ever-likely possibility of food shortages and drought, for the young Djiboutians a future with little prospects, the further erosion of basic rights and freedom of expression by an authoritarian regime, a combination of these factors might propel the unprivileged masses to demand a real improvement in their lot and failing that, ultimately regime change [EELCO KESSELS, TRACEY DURNER, and MATTHEW SCHWARTZ. “Front Matter.” Violent Extremism and Instability in the Greater Horn of Africa: An Examination of Drivers and Responses. Global Center on Cooperative Security, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep20264.1.]

Horn of Africa (map source: Nystrom Herff Jones Education Division)

Potential external destabilisers, a war-prone region and radical Islam: External factors could equally impact Djibouti’s stability, prompting a rethink by the lessees of the bases as a long-term option. Conflicts and civil wars emerging in Somalia, Eritrea or Ethiopia could spillover into Djibouti, eg, emanating from a sudden surge in refugee numbers.🇫 The affinity of Djibouti’s Issa Somalis and the Afars with their ethnic brothers and sisters respectively in Somalia and Eritrea could worsen this occurrence (Kessels et al).🇫It should also be remembered that Djibouti’s track record in avoiding conflict and violence is not a clean slate…in its relatively short existence the country has experienced civil war (1991-94) and a brief border conflict with Eritrea (2008), and the cause of the 1990s civil war—uneven power sharing by the Issa powerbrokers with the Afars—is an unresolved issue that continues to fester. A further threat of instability to Djibouti lies in the terrorist agenda of Al-Shabaab,🇬a jihadist fundamentalist organisation based in southern Somalia, which perpetrated a suicide bomber attack in Djibouti City in 2014 and has called on jihadists to target French and U.S. interests in Djibouti [Ahram Online (Egypt), 27-March-2021].

Djibouti women and children (source: aho.org)

A “Trojan Horse” for both sides? Maintaining full sovereignty amongst the mega-powers?: With both the US and China now heavily invested in Djibouti and each using it as a conduit to spread its geo-strategic influence, will an escalation of neo-Cold War rivalry played out here upset the balance in Djibouti? While foreign military forces being based indefinitely on Djibouti territory might provide reassurance to the country, there is a downside to Djibouti being completely dependent on big power external support and large foreign forces within its borders for it’s security and survival: Djibouti’s sovereign status as a free and independent nation is questionable…with a host of foreign patrons holding a significant share of the firmament the regime risks becoming compromised and losing support (Bereketeab). Most worrying (in US eyes) is the danger of Djibouti falling prey to “debt-trap diplomacy” due to it becoming over-dependent on China. Beijing is bankrolling many of Djibouti’s major infrastructure projects (water and gas pipelines, railroads, port upgrades, etc) big time! As a result, China has rapidly become the tiny African country’s major creditor (holding 91% of its external debt)(Borowicz; Cabestan). The upshot in the longer term is that the Guelleh PRP regime may end up being viewed by its own citizens as lacking legitimacy, a further pathway to internal turbulence and instability and enforced change.

Xi Zinping hosting Pres. Guelleh (“let’s do business!”) (photo: chinadaily.com.cn)

§ “Djibouti” in the native Afar language means “boiling pot”, an apt name for the country’s hot and arid, sub-tropical desert climate

🇦 around 6.2 million barrels of crude oil per day passed thru the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in 2018 (Borowicz)

🇧People’s Rally for Progress, which has provided both presidents of Djibouti since independence from France in 1977 – Guelleh, preceded by his elderly uncle, Hassan Gouled Aptidon

🇨in an impoverished “Horn” that is of itself not saying a lot

🇩to the tune of a hefty US$720m injection annually

🇪although opposition parties are now legal, all the political cards are stacked in PRP’s favour, opponents has been ruthlessly suppressed, driven into exile or co-opted into the ruling camp

🇪unfortunately it’s always on the cards that Yemen given its perpetual state of civil war could see upsurges in refugee numbers fleeing across the strait

🇫a revival of the earlier Somali “ethno-nationalism”—an attempt to unite all ethnic Somalis from the different East African countries into one Pan-Somali state—could also have a destabilising outcome

🇬Arabic: “The Youth”

The Passport in History: Travel Papers to Regulate Mobility, Identity and Control

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
National politics, Political geography, Regional History, Travel

We live in an age fraught with concerns about security in the wider world, a symptom of which is the ongoing demand for more secure passports enhanced by ever smarter applications of technology – biometric data (eg, photographs, fingerprints and iris patterns), ePassports (embedded microprocessor chips), etc. The international passport today is a much valued and for some a lucrative commodity𝔸, but when did people first start to use passports as we understand the concept?

Passports or their document antecedents were known to exist in ancient civilisations – artwork from the Old Kingdom (ca.1,600 BC) depict Egyptian magistrates issuing identity tablets to guest workers; in the (Hebrew) Bible Judaean governor Nehemiah furnishes a subject permission to travel to the Persian Empire; Ancient Chinese bureaucrats in the Han Dynasty (fl. after 206BC) issued a form of passport (zhuan) for internal travel within the empire, necessary to move through the various counties and points of control.

Henry V

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In medieval Europe the prototype travel document emerged from a sort of gentleman’s agreement between rulers to facilitate peaceful cross-border exchanges (‘The Contentious History of the Passport’, Guilia Pines, National Geographic, 16-May-2017, www.api.nationalgeographic.com)…it provided sauf conduit, allowing an enemy safe and unobstructed ”passage in and out of a kingdom for the purpose of his negotiations”. This convention however was ad hoc, haphazard and capricious, the grantor’s ‘authority’ bestowed on the traveller might not be recognised at any point in his or her travels (Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (2005)). The Middle Ages nonetheless did bring advances in the formulation of travel documents for extra-jurisdiction movements. Individual cities in Europe often had reciprocal arrangements where someone granted a passport-type paper in their home city could enter a city in another sovereignty for business without being required to pay its local fees (‘When were passports as we know them today first introduced?’, (Rupert Matthews), History Extra, 29-Sep-2021, www.historyextra.com). King Henry V, he of lasting Agincourt fame, authorised just such a early form of passport/visa as proof of identity for English travellers venturing to foreign lands, leading some to credit him with the introduction of the first true passport. The issuing of travelling papers sanctioned by the English Crown were enacted by parliament in the landmark Safe Conducts Act of 1414.

A ‘passport’ letter furnished by King Charles I to a overseas-bound private citizen of the crown, dating from 1636

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Before the rise of the nation-state system in 19th century Europe, large swathes of the populations of the multitudinous political entities—largely comprising serfs, slaves and indentured servants—routinely required “privately created passes or papers to legitimise their movement” (‘Papers, Please: The Invention of the Passport’, (Eric Schewe), JSTOR Daily, 17-Mar-2017, www.daily.jstor.org). Kings, lords and landowners all issued ad hoc laissez-passer of their own definition and design (Baudoin, Patsy. The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 343–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40294299). A systemic, standardised passport would not materialise until the 20th century.

It was only with the arrival of world war in 1914 that governments, motivated by security needs, turned their attention to tightening up entry requirements between the new nation-states, putting immigration quotas on the agenda (US legislators for example were eager to check the flow of immigrants into the country). Spearheaded by the newly created League of Nations (and aided by the availability of cheaper photography) a passport system began to evolve that was recognisably modern. The League in 1920 introduced a passport nicknamed “Old Blue”—specifying the size, layout and design of passports for 42 of its nations—thus establishing the first worldwide passport standards𝔹. Passports “became both standardized, mandatory travel documents and ritual tools reinforcing national identity” (Schewe).

Later the “Old Blue” passport was expanded into a 32-page booklet which included basic data about the holder such as facial characteristics, occupation and address. “Old Blue” had remarkable longevity, remaining the norm for passports until 1988 when it was superseded by a new, burgundy-coloured passport as the international standard (‘The World’s First Official Passport’, Passport Health, www.passporthealthusa.com).

(Source: WSJ Graphics)

Marc Chagall (self-portrait): one of a number of famous Nansen passport holders

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End-note: Married women travellers and the ‘stateless’
As the standardised international passport took shape, married women (unlike single women) were not admitted initially into the ranks of passport-holders in their own right, rather they were considered merely “as an anonymous add-on to their husbands’ official document”, eg, ”John Z and wife” (the wife’s public identity at the time still tied very much to that of their spouse‘s). In 1917 newly married American writer Ruth Hale’s request for a passport in her maiden name to cover the war in France was denied (‘The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names’, (Sandra Knisely), Atlas Obscura, 27-Mar-2017, www.atlasobscura.com). Also bereft of passports in the modern-state system were those refugees who found themselves stateless in the turbulent aftermath of WWI. To address this crisis the League of Nations issued ”Nansen passports”ℂ from 1922 to 1938 to approximately 450,000 refugees. Originally intended for White Russians and Armenians (and later for Jews feeing persecution under the Nazis), the “Stateless passports” allowed their holders “to cross borders to find work, and protected them from deportation (‘The Little-Known Passport That Protected 450,000 Refugees’, (Cara Giaimo), Atlas Obscura, 07-Feb-2017, www.atlasobsura.com)𝔻.

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝

𝔸 like the small island-states Malta and Cyprus who happily sell their citizenship to anyone who can afford it (up to US$1,000,000)

𝔹 “Old Blue” was originally written in French, just like the origin of the word ‘passport’ itself — passeport, from passer (“to pass” or “to go”) and port, meaning ‘gate’ or ‘port’

ℂ named after their promoter, Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen

𝔻 the Stateless passports didn’t of course stop the numbers of stateless refugees from continuing to escalate alarmingly…the UNHCR estimates that the global number of stateless persons is now more than 10,000,000

Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, National politics, New Technology,, Society & Culture, Town planning

Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).

↟ Costa’s plan for Brasília (Source: nickkahler.tumblr.com)

Bland homogeneity?
Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)

↟ Highway hell? (Photo: BBC)

The car is king!
In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).

Source: airshipdaily.com

A lack of a pulse?
Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.

↟ Taguatinga, one of Brasilia’s irregular satellites (Photo: Frederico Holanda/ Researchgate)

The creation of two segregated communities
Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!

Source: modern diplomacy.eu

”A monument to technocratic rationalism”
One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.

↟ Niemeyer’s Alvorada (Presidential) Palace, Brasília (Photo: wikimapia.org)

Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).

—————————————-———
⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow
⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx
⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns
⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s

Hambantota, Sri Lanka: The Short, Troubled History of an International Airport and Deep-water Port

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Aviation history, Economics and society,, National politics

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Rusted-on aficionados of the unerringly “on the ball” 1980s BBC political satire Yes Minister will no doubt have total recall of the classic episode where Sir Humphrey Appleby defends the existence of a brand spanking new, impeccably clean and spotless hospital which remains resolutely and defiantly free of patients. Well, Sri Lanka has it’s own non-fictional version of this writ large with the Mattala Airport.

Source: BBC

This real life ”Yes Ministeresque” moment has been acted out in Hambantota on Sri Lanka’s southeastern tip. Over a decade ago the government decided to build a no-expenses-spared showcase city with state-of-the-art facilities. The commercial venture was nothing if not ambitious…the focal point being a new international ‘greenfield’ airport, Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (මත්තල රාජපක්ෂ ජාත්‍යන්තර ගුවන්තොටුපළ), pride of place in “a multi-billion dollar city in the middle of the jungle”. The plan included a swish, diversified facility deep sea port, an industrial zone and a test-standard cricket stadium [‘Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis Is So Bad The Government Doesn’t Know How Much Money It Owes’, Wade Shepard, Forbes, 30-Sep-2016, www.forbes.com;]. ‘The Story Behind the World’s Emptiest International Airport’, Wade Shepard, Forbes, 28-May-2016, www.forbes.com].

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M Rajapaksa with Indian PM Modi (Source: the week.in)
Rajapaksa, eponymity in overdrive 
 What made Hambantota, a small, backwater fishing town (population even now no more than about 56,000) four-and-a-half hours drive from the capital Colombo a candidate for such a major economic development? It owed its meteoric elevation in part to a genuine need for (overdue) reconstruction after the destruction wreaked by a 2004 tsunami, but another significant factor is that Hambantota is the home region of Sri Lankan strongman and former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa (Mahinda’s younger brother Gotabaya is currently the country’s president). Hambantota bore all the hallmarks of a massive vanity project – in an initiative that would have satisfied Alexander the Great’s lust for eponymous self-glorification, the airport, the sea port, the cricket ground, everything was slated to be named after the senior Rajapaksa!  
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“White elephant“ of an airport

Image: sundayobserver.lk
The showcase airport in Hambantota (opened in 2013), so far, has been an unmitigated dud! International carriers after sampling the route have given the destination a wide birth (FlyDubai was the last to bail out in 2018), with the airport’s sole remaining activity resting on the wings of the island-state‘s national carrier (Sri Lankan Airlines — SLA). The reality for Mattala Rajapaksa Airport (HRI) is a starkly sober one…its core activity reduced to the farcical situation of just one solitary flight a week with a loss of $US18 million a year (Shepard, ’World’s Emptiest International Airport‘). Industry assessments of HRI as ‘uneconomical’ are commonplace, even insiders have joined the chorus…a former CEO of SLA described the airport as “at best a white elephant with a very small catchment area” [‘Sri Lanka suspends joint venture at the worlds emptiest airport’, CAPA, 24-Jul-2020, www.centreforaviation.com]. Integral to the fiasco has been the authorities’ failure to establish the basic building blocks necessary for international airport success – a sizeable local population; an intrinsic reason for tourists to come(𝒶); and a decent amount of commercial infrastructure to support it (‘Story Behind the World’s Emptiest International Airport’). 
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Source: scmp.com
International deep-water port blues ළ ළ ළ The construction of Hambantota’s new deep sea international port—in its a short history following much the same “snowy-coloured pachyderm” trajectory as the Rajapaksa airport—drew a similar level of flak from critics…one described the costly project as a “42 million dollar rock”. Opened in 2010, Rajapaksa’s plan had been “to turn his own sleepy little constituency into a new global shipping hub”. Despite reporting a 2016 operating profit of US$1.81 m, the port has underperformed and its long-term economically viability has big question marks over it. Some Sri Lankans questioned the need for a new port when Colombo’s port already serviced needs adequately well (‘Sri Lanka’s Debt Crisis’). And the signs have not been promising, international shipping companies by and large have spurned the port’s facilities.  Government hopes that the new port would develop into an all-purpose hub, attracting the lucrative oil trade business skirting the Indian Ocean rim route and perhaps even rival Singapore in the region, seem to have been consigned to the realm of pipe-dreams. More immediately worrying for Sri Lanka is that it’s incapacity to repay the high-interest Chinese loans forced it into doing a “debt-for-equity swap” leaving the PRC in virtual control of the port [‘Why India is buying the world’s emptiest airport’, David Brewster, The Interpreter, 14-Jul-2018, www.lowyinstitute.org]. 

Chinese motives in the region 
The speculation among China-watchers is that Beijing has eyed off the new port as a potential naval base for it in the Indian Ocean region. Co-existing with this conjecture and part of Beijing‘s Belt and Road Initiative is that the view that China wants to build a SEZ(𝒷) around Hambantota. Both of these relate to the “String of Pearls” theory hypothesised by the US that China’s intention is to establish a network of military and commercial posts across the breadth of the Indian Ocean littoral – and extending to connect with the Chinese mainland, the construction of ”various land and maritime trade routes as part of China’s larger military ambition” (this has also been described as China’s “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”)(𝒸) [‘Here is All You Should Know About ‘String Of Pearls’, China’s Policy to Encircle India’, Maninder Dabas, India Times, Upd 23-Jun-2017, www.indiatimes.com. To this end Beijing already has established naval ports in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Malaysia, in addition to Sri Lanka. India recognises such a development as an inherent threat to its security and interests. One scenario postulates that a free trade agreement between China and Sri Lanka with the established foothold in Hambantota could provide a Chinese back door into Indian markets [‘China trick: Unviable port turns strategic asset’, Colonel R Hariharan, The Times of India, 17-Dec-2017, www.timesofindia.com)].

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Indian countermove
New Delhi took a proactive approach to what it sees as China’s encroachment on its turf by negotiating a joint venture with Colombo concerning the HRI airport, putting up US$300 million to buy out Sri Lanka’s huge debt to China (Brewer). In return India would secure a 40-year lease over the airport. New Delhi’s motives for such a venture were less commercial (eg, a new, handy destination for Indian tourists) than they were geo-strategic, a move to stymie the Chinese incursion in its backyard and growing influence in the region…it would also, it was mooted, ”give India considerable control over how the port is used” (Brewer). Everything looked set to go ahead when the (Gotabaya) Rajapaksa government in 2020 suddenly stepped back from the joint venture with India, indicating instead that private enterprise within Sri Lanka would be offered the chance to invest in the HRI project [‘Sri Lanka, not India, will develop Mattala airport: Gotabaya Rajapaksa‘, Meera Srinivasan, The Hindu, 19-Dec-2019, www.thehindu.com].

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Mattala Rajapaksa Airport

Covid-19 and the loss of tourism revenue has devastated the Sri Lankan economy leaving the country staring at the abyss, but years of bad economic policies by successive governments have led to the present dilemma. A succession of costly government infrastructure projects, as typified by Rajapaksa’s Hambantota project financed by massive domestic and external borrowing, contributed to the national economy’s decline. The upshot? A total debt blow-out between 2009 and 2014 for Sri Lanka, domestic debt tripled while foreign debt doubled…the largest external creditor has been China, which was all too-ready to step in with the money after allegations of Civil War crimes against the Rajapaksa government soured relations with Western regimes(𝒹) [‘There is no money left’: Covid crisis leaves Sri Lanka on brink of bankruptcy’, Minoli Sousa & Hannah Pietersen, The Guardian, 02-Jan-2022, www.theguardian.com].

Image: Lonely Planet

End-note: While Hambantota Port’s backers talk up its prospects (port “fully functional within 12 months”), the deal handing China a 99-year lease on the port in return for the funds needed to pay back loans and investors, has raised concerns that the Rajapaksa government has ensnared Sri Lanka in an ever-spiralling debt trap [‘Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port to be fully functional by 2022’, The New Indian Express,  12-Jul-2021, www.newindianexpress.com].

PostScript: Defacto colony? Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu from the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives in April 2022 observed that “China is now part of the political architecture of Sri Lanka”.

 

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(𝒶) the hope had been that the airport would lure tourists to wildlife parks and beaches in the south but this notion hasn’t as yet born any fruit

(𝒷) Special Economic Zone

(𝒸) another part of the ‘String’ is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

(𝒹) as at 2021 Sri Lanka owed more than US$5 bn to China alone

 

 

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