China’s Creditor Imperialism

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Chinese Garment Factory in Senegal | Image: Fibre2Fashion

Just as European imperial powers employed gunboat diplomacy, China is using sovereign debt to bend other states to its will. As Sri Lanka's handover of the strategic Hambantota port shows, states caught in debt bondage to the new imperial giant risk losing both natural assets and their very sovereignty.

BERLIN – This month, Sri Lanka, unable to pay the onerous debt to China it has accumulated, formally handed over its strategically located Hambantota port to the UAsian giant. It was a major acquisition for China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which President Xi Jinping calls the “project of the century” – and proof of just how effective China’s debt-trap diplomacy can be.

Unlike International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending, Chinese loans are collateralized by strategically important natural assets with high long-term value (even if they lack short-term commercial viability). Hambantota, for example, straddles Indian Ocean trade routes linking Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to Asia. In exchange for financing and building the infrastructure that poorer countries need, China demands favorable access to their natural assets, from mineral resources to ports.

Moreover, as Sri Lanka’s experience starkly illustrates, Chinese financing can shackle its “partner” countries. Rather than offering grants or concessionary loans, China provides huge project-related loans at market-based rates, without transparency, much less environmental- or social-impact assessments. As US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson put it recently, with the BRI, China is aiming to define “its own rules and norms.”

To strengthen its position further, China has encouraged its companies to bid for outright purchase of strategic ports, where possible. The Mediterranean port of Piraeus, which a Chinese firm acquired for $436 million from cash-strapped Greece last year, will serve as the BRI’s “dragon head” in Europe.

By wielding its financial clout in this manner, China seeks to kill two birds with one stone. First, it wants to address overcapacity at home by boosting exports. And, second, it hopes to advance its strategic interests, including expanding its diplomatic influence, securing natural resources, promoting the international use of its currency, and gaining a relative advantage over other powers.

China’s predatory approach – and its gloating over securing Hambantota – is ironic, to say the least. In its relationships with smaller countries like Sri Lanka, China is replicating the practices used against it in the European-colonial period, which began with the 1839-1860 Opium Wars and ended with the 1949 communist takeover – a period that China bitterly refers to as its “century of humiliation.”

China Expansion Plan |  Picture: Mirror Business

China portrayed the 1997 restoration of its sovereignty over Hong Kong, following more than a century of British administration, as righting a historic injustice. Yet, as Hambantota shows, China is now establishing its own Hong Kong-style neocolonial arrangements. Apparently Xi’s promise of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is inextricable from the erosion of smaller states’ sovereignty.4

Just as European imperial powers employed gunboat diplomacy to open new markets and colonial outposts, China uses sovereign debt to bend other states to its will, without having to fire a single shot. Like the opium the British exported to China, the easy loans China offers are addictive. And, because China chooses its projects according to their long-term strategic value, they may yield short-term returns that are insufficient for countries to repay their debts. This gives China added leverage, which it can use, say, to force borrowers to swap debt for equity, thereby expanding China’s global footprint by trapping a growing number of countries in debt servitude.

Even the terms of the 99-year Hambantota port lease echo those used to force China to lease its own ports to Western colonial powers. Britain leased the New Territories from China for 99 years in 1898, causing Hong Kong’s landmass to expand by 90%. Yet the 99-year term was fixed merely to help China’s ethnic-Manchu Qing Dynasty save face; the reality was that all acquisitions were believed to be permanent.

China Harbour Engineering Co Ltd | The last contractor for the Hambatota Proect

Now, China is applying the imperial 99-year lease concept in distant lands. China’s lease agreement over Hambantota, concluded this summer, included a promise that China would shave $1.1 billion off Sri Lanka’s debt. In 2015, a Chinese firm took out a 99-year lease on Australia’s deep-water port of Darwin – home to more than 1,000 US Marines – for $388 million.

Similarly, after lending billions of dollars to heavily indebted Djibouti, China established its first overseas military base this year in that tiny but strategic state, just a few miles from a US naval base – the only permanent American military facility in Africa. Trapped in a debt crisis, Djibouti had no choice but to lease land to China for $20 million per year. China has also used its leverage over Turkmenistan to secure natural gas by pipeline largely on Chinese terms.

Several other countries, from Argentina to Namibia to Laos, have been ensnared in a Chinese debt trap, forcing them to confront agonizing choices in order to stave off default. Kenya’s crushing debt to China now threatens to turn its busy port of Mombasa – the gateway to East Africa – into another Hambantota.

These experiences should serve as a warning that the BRI is essentially an imperial project that aims to bring to fruition the mythical Middle Kingdom. States caught in debt bondage to China risk losing both their most valuable natural assets and their very sovereignty. The new imperial giant’s velvet glove cloaks an iron fist – one with the strength to squeeze the vitality out of smaller countries.

- Brahma Chellaney | | Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin,

Project Syndicate

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Rebels Admit Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attack

Militants tell AP reporter they mishandled Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, causing accident
Paul Joseph Watson
August 30, 2013

Syrian rebels in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have admitted to Associated Press correspondent Dale Gavlak that they were responsible for last week’s chemical weapons incident which western powers have blamed on Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, revealing that the casualties were the result of an accident caused by rebels mishandling chemical weapons provided to them by Saudi Arabia.

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Film Trailer: Synopsis for The Act of Killing

imdb.com

Remember the movie G30S/PKI Rebellion, in the era of the New Order was always broadcast on TVRI every night of 30 September? Now comes the film from the other side. Film slaughter millions of people alleged members or sympathizers of the PKI by supporters of the New Order regime. New Order regime itself was mentioned in the history of economic policy as imperialist stooges or rather the Western Bloc sympathizers in Asia. Lessons of 1965 Indonesian Coup - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarwo_Edhie_Wibowo

Anwar Congo and his friends have been dancing their way through musical numbers, twisting arms in film noir gangster scenes, and galloping across prairies as yodelling cowboys. Their foray into film making is being celebrated in the media and debated on television, because Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers.

MEDAN INDONESIA. When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city, Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands. Today, Anwar is revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.

THE ACT OF KILLING is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan genocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. THE ACT OF KILLING is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers. And THE ACT OF KILLING is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.

A LOVE OF CINEMA. In their youth, Anwar and his friends spent their lives at the movies, for they were "movie theatre gangsters": they controlled a black market in tickets, while using the cinema as a base of operations for more serious crimes. In 1965, the army recruited them to form death squads because they had a proven capacity for violence, and they hated the communists for boycotting American films - the most popular (and profitable) in the cinemas. Anwar and his friends were devoted fans of James Dean, John Wayne, and Victor Mature. They explicitly fashioned themselves and their methods of murder after their Hollywood idols. And coming out of the midnight show, they felt "just like gangsters who stepped off the screen". In this heady mood, they strolled across the boulevard to their office and killed their nightly quota of prisoners. Borrowing his technique from a mafia movie, Anwar preferred to strangle his victims with wire.

In THE ACT OF KILLING, Anwar and his friends agree to tell the filmmakers the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. The filmmakers seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.

And so the filmmakers challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres - gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims. Their fiction filmmaking process provides the film's dramatic arc, and their film sets become safe spaces to challenge them about what they did. Some of Anwar's friends realize that the killings were wrong. Others worry about the consequence of the story on their public image. Younger members of the paramilitary movement argue that they should boast about the horror of the massacres, because its terrifying and threatening force is the basis of their power today. As opinions diverge, the atmosphere on set grows tense. The edifice of genocide as a "patriotic struggle", with Anwar and his friends as its heroes, begins to sway and crack.

Most dramatically, the film making process catalyzes an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret as he confronts, for the first time in his life, the full terror of what he's done. As Anwar's fragile conscience is threatened by the pressure to remain a hero, THE ACT OF KILLING presents a gripping conflict between moral imagination and moral catastrophe.

By director Joshua Oppenheimer


References:   
Toronto Report
Synopsis for The Act of Killing
Film Trailer: The Act of Killing - 2012
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing
Lessons of 1965 Indonesian Coup

Indonesian edition: Film The Act of Killing akan Diputar di 60 Bioskop di Denmark

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NATO's Afghan Victory 'Hoax' Fully Exposed

The ferocious attack of Afghan Taliban on Camp Bastion military base in Helmand province of Afghanistan is quite telltale. The base is in the use of both the British and American armies, where on four-month duty tour is stationed as well Prince Harry, the third in the British line of succession. Although he is under the Taliban’s life threat, their spokesman has announced that the Saturday’s attack on the Camp Bastion was meant to avenge the American sacrilegious film derogatory of Islam. 

Prince Harry (Photo: cp24.com

Whatever it is, the deadly Taliban assault has neatly knocked the bottom out of the hoax that both the British and American military high commands have bee parading now for quite some time. They assert that Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban insurgency, which has been primarily under the operational command of the British military since 2006, has been pacified. So much so, the British military commanders have lately been telling their political bosses that the province stands so much secured that the Afghan security forces can now easily control it.

Indeed, on this plea they have just recently even recommended to their government that many more than 500 British soldiers from their 9,000-strong military contingent in Afghanistan they had originally planned could be pulled out by this year’s end. The attack puts paid to their pretence. But then the commanders of the occupation armies have in effect fought the Afghan war throughout on lies and deceptions, not in the battlefield. It is they alone and their gullible political masters who talk of successes. But even their own soldiers confide to their private interlocutors that they have lost the war.

And for this, the military commanders and their naïve governments are squarely to blame. They showed not the spine and the initiatives when they should have. They just kept fiddling with the war, while the Taliban and other insurgent groups were all the while regrouping in their erstwhile strongholds and rearming lethally. And when at long last they ventured out of their Kabul and Bagram redoubts in 2006, they had already lost the war. Not only the Taliban and other insurgents had entrenched in their bastions unconquerably and were resurgent, expanding beyond their strongholds, they were also running parallel governments over a vast stretch of land.

In itself, the 2014 pullout of occupation armies is a big hoax, indeed. It is not the withdrawal of victorious armies. Verily, it is an organised retreat of defeated armies. Some in fact have already hit the retreat. The Dutch and the Canadians have long gone, leaving behind their operational grounds of Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces respectively in turmoil and in the hands of insurgents. The French are flapping their wings feverishly to get out all their troops by this year’s end. Not much could be said about the presence of the other occupation armies till 2014 as the public opinion in all the contributing nations is veering round to quick pullout of their soldiers. In America itself, public pressure is building up fast to this effect.

This public sentiment has been spurred greatly by the growing murderous attacks of Afghan security personnel on their foreign trainers and mates. In fact, the Afghan war, by every account, is now an increasingly unpopular war in every country that has contributed troops to the occupation coalition. And to the great discomfiture of its military commanders and their governments, who all have all long fed their peoples with lies and deceits on their war efforts. They will have much explaining to do to their publics on the expending of so much of blood and treasure on a war that palpably is leaving Afghanistan in no peace but only in turbulence. A patchwork of what the occupiers are boastfully, albeit deceitfully, branding as the Afghan national army and police, predictably will be unable to withstand the fury of the resistance forces that are giving such a tough time to highly-trained occupiers laced with arms from foot to teeth. 

Perceptive Afghanistan-watchers are indeed already predicting a terrible civil strife engulfing the wretched country in times ahead. So much so, a British parliamentary secretary is pleading vehemently for dividing up Afghanistan into eight autonomous regions to avert this eventuality. But it is the Afghans themselves who will eventually decide their destiny, not the outsiders. And certainly the coming times do not bode well for the country and its people. The future, nonetheless, will tell which way the camel ultimately sits in the country. But the hoax of the occupiers, now getting exposed inch by inch, is sure to finally explode thunderously to their utter shame and disgrace.



Reference: Hoax exposed, The Frontier Post

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Why NATO Murdered Gaddafi?

With nothing more than highly suspicious "evidence" of alleged "crimes against humanity" NATO (the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization) massacred thousands of innocent civilians of a free and sovereign nation and executed their popular leader Muammar Gaddafi. The real reason for Gaddafi's death was that he dared to stand up to the financial terrorists who control the IMF and the World Bank.

Gaddafi freed Libya from perpetual poverty by refusing to borrow from the international banking cartel, nationalizing Libya's oil production for the benefit of its own citizens and by providing free education, healthcare and electricity to every Libyan citizen. All Libyans received annual dividends from Libyan oil revenues worth thousands of dollars each year, gas was only $0.14 a litre, plus newly weds were given $50,000 to help them purchase a home, plus the government paid 50% of the cost of a new car.

Under Gaddafi, Libya's literacy rate went from less than 20% to over 80%. Gaddafi believed that housing was a human right. He pledged, and carried through on his promise, to house all Libyans before he housed his own parents (his father died while still living in a tent).

Gaddafi had also nearly completed a mammoth engineering project to bring fresh water from a huge underground aquifer to the surface to irrigate and create new farmland. People willing to learn farming were given free land to use, equipment, livestock and seeds for the project. Gaddafi's Great Man-Made River project was acknowledged in the 2008 Guinness World Records as being the world's largest irrigation project. Gaddafi called it the eighth wonder of the world and he financed it entirely without foreign capital.

Libya was debt free and beholden to no foreign interests. Usury was illegal and all loans were made interest-free through Libya's state-owned central bank. Gaddafi was also trying to introduce a new gold-based currency (the Gold African Dinar) throughout Africa to replace Africa's dependence on the US dollar. If Libya's plans for financial independence spread throughout Africa, the power of the IMF and World Bank to control the conditions of life on this planet would be in serious jeopardy. If he was allowed to continue with his plans, the world would soon begin to understand the Libyan economic miracle that Gaddafi had already achieved.

On July 1, 2011, 1.7 million people, or roughly 95% of the population of Tripoli, assembled in Tripoli's Green Square to protest the NATO bombing of Libya and the attacks against their leader. Watch this video and ask yourself, would a hated leader dare to travel so freely and unprotected through the streets of Tripoli?

The murder of Gaddafi by NATO is itself a crime against all humanity. If the truth was known, Gaddafi should be respected as being one of the top ten humanitarians of all time, along with Lincoln, Kennedy, Gandhi, King and Jesus himself. The saddest thing about his death is not that he was murdered by the evil, government-sanctioned, financial terrorists who decide and control the possibilities for life on this planet. The saddest thing is that over 99% of the people on this planet either don't care at all about Gaddafi, or are glad that he is gone. The power that our ruling elite have over public opinion is truly frightening. Aldous Huxley had it right. We are now living in his Brave New World.

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Gaddafi death: Envoy slams 'sadistic' triumphalism

Dmitry Rogozin (RIA Novosti / Kirill Kallinikov)

Russia’s NATO envoy has written in his microblog that the Western elation over the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could have sadistic grounds.

­“The faces of the leaders of ‘world democracies’ are so happy, as if they remembered how they hanged stray cats in basements in their childhoods,” Russian envoy to NATO and the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, Dmitry Rogozin, wrote in his twitter status on Friday.

This statement apparently is a reply to the international reaction to the death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed as the forces of the National Transitional Council stormed the town of Sirte on Thursday.

Rogozin currently holds the position of Russia’s envoy to NATO and he was among the first Russian politicians to embrace the opportunities of social networks. He often shares his views on international politics via his Twitter account, and these posts have repeatedly made news in Russian and international media.

Rogozin is also the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities – the organization of ethnic Russians living abroad aimed at protecting their interests and strengthening the ties with the Motherland.

On Thursday evening Rogozin told Russian radio Echo of Moscow that NATO was directly involved in the operation to kill the former Libyan leader. “Apparently there were orders that oriented the military servicemen who are in Libya and that directed them to ensure the physical elimination of Gaddafi,” Rogozin said.

The official added that Russia must make a conclusion from the existing situation. “We must bear in mind who we are dealing with in the face of Western democracies,” Rogozin said.

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VIDEOS GALLERIES: Gaddafi Death

Gaddafi Death Timeline

Leaked Documents Reveal U.N. Post-Gaddafi Plans for Libya

Secret Files Discovered Link CIA/MI6 to Rendition & Torture in Libya

 

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Martyrdom for Muammar Gaddafi?

Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner has said that the killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could have the effect of turning him into a national martyr.

Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin expressed regret over the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, while acknowledging the Libyan strongman was responsible for many crimes.

"Murder is a horrible and despicable thing, and people who effectively watched Gaddafi's murder live on television may have had precisely these feelings,” Lukin told Interfax on Friday. “Although Gaddafi himself is responsible for so much bloodshed."

The commissioner said Gaddafi chose the painful path of civil war when anti-government forces demanded he step down.

"A civil war is the cruelest; it does not take into account any laws of an international war,” Lukin noted. “And here one cannot fail to note that Gaddafi himself embarked on the path of the civil war. Initially he was offered the chance to go, but he chose this path – the path of a civil war."

Gaddafi’s failings as a leader and individual notwithstanding, Lukin expressed regret that the deposed Libyan strongman will not have an opportunity to be judged before an international court of law.

"But still it would have been good if he had been captured and tried by an international court,” the Russian official said. “And now he has been brutally killed, and often over time such things give rise to a legend, which can create the halo of a martyr instead of an insane dictator."

Already, international human rights groups are demanding an investigation into Gaddafi’s murder.

UK-based human rights group Amnesty International called for "a full, independent and impartial inquiry" into the circumstances of Gaddafi's killing.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was a friend of the colonel, called the circumstances of his death disgraceful.

"They murdered him," Chavez told reporters.

Before Gaddafi’s death was officially confirmed, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that “Gaddafi’s fate should be decided by the people of Libya.”

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who seized power in a bloodless military coup on September 1, 1969, died following a fierce gun battle with anti-government forces of the so-called National Liberation Army in the Libyan town of Sirte, where Gaddafi was born in 1942.

Gaddafi’s 42-year rule prior to the uprising made him the longest-ruling Arab leader.

The exact circumstances of his death, which some analysts say appears to be the cold-blooded murder of a prisoner of war, will now be the focus of an international investigation.


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BREAKING NEWS: Gaddafi killed, died of wounds - NTC (FIRST PHOTOS)

An image captured off a cellular phone camera shows the arrest of Libya's strongman Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte on October 20, 2011 (AFP Photo / Philippe Desmazes

NTC military chief Bel Haj has confirmed that Colonel Gaddafi has been killed. The fugitive leader died of wounds sustained during his capture near Sirte. Earlier the NTC reported Gaddafi was captured and wounded in both legs.

Gaddafi’s corpse has already been delivered to Misrata, according to Al Arabiya.

There have also been reports that anti-Gaddafi forces have captured the colonel’s son Motassim in the fallen stronghold of Sirte. An NTC commander claims he is also dead.

NTC leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil will address the Libyan nation shortly.

According to Reuters, Gaddafi was wounded and captured near Sirte while trying to flee in a convoy which was attacked by NATO. A NATO official says the alliance is checking reports of Gaddafi's capture.

The Netherlands' prime minister, however, confirms Gaddafi’s detention.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said that the war in Libya is “over.”

The European Union said in a statement that the death of Muammar Gaddafi marks the “end of era despotism.”

A Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) fighter looks through a large concrete pipe where ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was allegedly captured, with a dead loyalist gunmen in the foreground, in the coastal Libyan city of Sirte on October 20, 2011 (AFP Photo / Philippe Desmazes)

White House officials say they monitor the reports but cannot confirm Gaddafi’s status.

A Libyan government fighter says Gaddafi was hiding in a hole in Sirte, shouting "don't shoot, don't shoot."

An NTC official says the head of Gaddafi's armed forces, Abu Bakr Younus Jabr, was killed during the capture of the Libyan ex-leader.

The news comes shortly after the NTC forces took control over Gaddafi's home town of Sirte.

On Tuesday, during her visit to Libya, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she hoped Muammar Gaddafi would be captured or killed. 

However, pro-Gaddafi media denies the reports that the colonel has been killed as “nothing but rumors.” According to Al-Libiya television website, Muammar Gaddafi “is in good health.” The news outlet also warns against fake pictures of a slain Gaddafi that have appeared in the internet.

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Green Committees have confirmed that the leader is alive

Green Committees have confirmed that the leader is alive, and that the enemy is seeking to take advantage of his being currently out of communications. The aim is to please Hillary Clinton who barked at her Arab slaves that she wants Muammar Qaddafi “dead or alive.”

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