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How’s going green working out for you, Sri Lanka? Reported a few minutes ago by the Times of India: Breaking News Live: Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa flees as protesters storm residence
The mob breaking into his palace does not necessarily mean that a president becomes an ex-president. But that’s the way to bet. Other leaders might like to note how this came about:
What a difference a year makes: the green dream dies in Sri Lanka
UPDATE: Some reports say that (now almost certainly ex-) president Rajapaksa has been seen at Colombo airport. Meanwhile, fancy a dip in the presidential pool?
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This will be spun to be down to ‘global warming’ or maybe ‘mis-gendering’ or perhaps ‘Trump’… no way will be get written up as ‘suicidal green policies’.
Sri Lanka was always a basket case. Assigning the blame to “suicidal green policies” is an claim motivated by the writer’s ideology. The same as the (hypothetical) claim that it’s due to global warming.
Perry de Havilland,
I believe the approved term is “mismanagement”.
Jacob, it’s not the case that Sri Lanka “was always a basket case”. Prior to early 2021 it was poor, but functioning. As the Times article quoted in the earlier post says, there was a sharp decline after synthetic fertilisers were banned.
Isn’t this fertiliser ban what the government of the Netherlands is proposing?
Hasn’t the yellow peril and their ball and chain initiative got something to do with it?
Not quite: in the Netherlands, the government wants a reduction, not a ban, on fertilizers.
Mind you, a reduction of 50% (IIRC) in less than a decade is going to be a disaster for farmers, if it happens.
Dutch farmers have my sympathy, but the Netherlands is not Sri Lanka: there is more to the economy than agriculture.
Incidentally: I don’t know why Sri Lanka decided on a fertilizer ban (i read somewhere it was to avoid importing fertilizers); but the reduction in the Netherlands has nothing to do with global warming afaik. Brendan O’Neill was befuddled on this (and Paul Marks appears to have been misled by O’Neill). The Dutch plan appears motivated by the danger of nutrient pollution of waters, which, unlike global warming (supposedly due to air pollution), is a local and well-documented problem (afaik).
(Still, after so many years, why do the Dutch need to take draconian measures before the end of this decade??)
Sri Lanka decided to stop fertilizer imports because it had no money. It was not a “green” ideology decision. It was a bad decision, but I doubt green ideology was the cause. And I doubt that this was their only bad decision.
Jacob (July 9, 2022 at 9:32 am), I agree with Natalie Solent (Essex) (July 9, 2022 at 10:36 am) that Sri Lanka at the start of 2021 was not a basket case.
In the days when Sri Lanka was Ceylon and part of the Raj, it was anything but a basket case.
At independence, everyone forecast a sunny future for the place. The upper classes of both Buddist Cingalese and Hindu Tamils spoke English at home, and after a century of peace between the two groups under British rule, and some decades of local rule within the empire (with universal suffrage from 1931), the two groups appeared able to coexist. Unlike in the Moslem/Hindu areas, it seemed trouble could be avoided.
After independence, a Marxist called Bandaranaike was elected in the 50s on a platform of Sinhalese nationalism and socialism. How far he was cynically exploiting the ethnic element of his campaign to get power, thinking he could reign in the racial conflicts he had initiated when they had served his turn, versus how far he decided to modify them after his ‘Sinhala Only’ language act had prompted the first ethnic riots, might perhaps be debated. He was killed by a disappointed buddhist monk who had taken his election rhetoric seriously.
(He had curried favour with the western MSM by abolishing the death penalty years before – but his assassin got convicted and hung regardless.)
The next two decades saw his widow and then his daughter ruling the country (but not all of it) as increasingly brutal military repression faced increasingly extreme terrorists, eventually organised as the Tamil Tigers who came to controlled areas of northern Ceylon for decades. Final (re)conquest of these by the government was completed in 2009.
All that created an element of basket-caseness (though maybe not on the all-island scale of today) but there had been an element of recovery since then.
I don’t know Sri Lanka. It is possible (but improbable) that the (ex) president was taken in by environmentalist rhetoric. It seems more plausible to me that he used this rhetoric as a pretext.
And, yes, the past socialist experiment and the long civil war were definitely what made Sri Lanka a basket case (unlike it’s state when it was still Ceylon).
Jacob, it is clear the president was taken in by environmentalist rhetoric. For details, see the article linked in my comment to Natalie’s earlier post. Being short of money can see you buying less than you want of what you need. It does not see you banning the purchase of what you need, and punishing people who trying to point out the problem, and imagining you’re going to survive that.
Sadly Perry is correct – I wish he was not.
The international media has ignored the terrible effects of the “Green” policies of the government of Sri Lanka – instead blaming everything else APART FROM these policies.
Failure to reason things out in advance, to understand what these “Green” taxes and regulations will do, is one thing – but the failure to learn from experience (to push the same policies, around the world, even AFTER their terrible effects become plain) is far more serious.
Sadly the Prime Minister of the Netherlands has learned nothing from this disaster – and is pushing similar policies, as are many other leaders.
The People’s Republic of China Dictatorship must be finding it very difficult to stop themselves collapsing in laughter.
I mean: Sri Lanka had a very long stretch of socialism (which I doubt ever ended), and a long sectarian-civil war — and you try to claim it is an example of failed GREEN policy? Oh, come on. Use some common sense.
Jacob (July 9, 2022 at 2:55 pm), we are using common sense. The country’s state has deteriorated very rapidly during the last year. The association of the country’s current state with the green policies announced loudly just over a year ago is obvious and intimate – a lot more so than with the policies of the pre-2000 period.
That the country was gradually improving in the 2010s decade, the civil war being over (or at least, a lot more over than it had been) is also obvious.
In the sense that greens are watermelons, you can certainly argue that the socialism did not end but re-invented and re-imposed itself under an aggressive green banner. You can also argue that, at bottom, the watermelon is insincerely green and only sincerely red. But the overt excuse for the state’s interventionist policy of the year past was coloured green, not red, and this does affect things. The overt socialism of the past was great at ruining agriculture too, but it did so in the name of mechanising and modernising it, so, for example, it would not have banned industrial fertiliser. Even when the ideology is a mere front for power, it does affect who dies and how they die and when they die – and explaining why it will fail requires addressing its claims.
Thank you.
Thanks to Niall for the brief history of xx century Sri Lanka (July 9, 2022 at 2:33 pm).
This bit seems worthy of further comment:
The take-home message, in my opinion, is that, where there is “diversity”, there will always emerge some politician exploiting it.
Sometimes such politicians will leverage minorities, sometimes the majority; either way, in most cases they will have a competitive advantage over politicians arguing against ethnic partisanship.
It seems the government subsidized imported fertilizer. When it run out of (other people’s) money, they stopped and tried to sell the change as green policy.
To bring up Sri Lanka as poster boy for failure of green policies is ridiculous.
But don’t despair. It is very possible that lights will be off in Germany this winter. Then you can correctly claim failure of green policy.
I think that near-basket-case countries look for ways to make friends and influence people when they realize that self-help won’t work. Becoming Green was one such way that Rajapakso et al. saw as helping him to make friends with outside sources of money and power – i.e., all the cool kids. Become a rabid Greenie, and the world loves you.
So it strikes me that this isn’t an either/or situation. Going Green was certainly the last straw – who would ever conclude “let’s jettison science and adopt mysticism to bring our country into the future”? – but it was just one out of many straws already heaped on the sick camel.
Jacob Green policies have already failed in Germany – ask the Germans who are facing power shortages and sky high prices.
As for Sir Lanka – I am shocked (“shocked I tell you”) that you question the government’s Green sincerity.
By the way – endless government spending and random regulations twisting the economy. Sir Lanka sounds like the United States under Mr Joseph Biden. The United States is not immune from economic law – and neither is the United Kingdom.
By the way – to Putin fans.
If you think Russia is in a secure position, you are mistaken. Mr Putin has sold out the Russian economy to the People’s Republic of China, and he has alienated the powers that Russia could have allied with to secure itself against the PRC.
Jacob: “Sri Lanka was always a basket case.”
Also Jacob: “I don’t know Sri Lanka.”
President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka in 2021: The President urged all to unite to educate the farmer and create a healthy generation at a discussion held at the Presidential Secretariat on Thursday to raise awareness on the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and the ban on such imports.
Also Jacob: “— and you try to claim it is an example of failed GREEN policy? Oh, come on. Use some common sense.”
Really bad article, lazy and bad and wrong. Underlying Sri Lanka’s financial disaster is, actually, the costs of a ruinous subsidy scheme for petrol. The ex’s thing opposite of the articles claim. You owe your readers an apology snd a promise to do better, work harder and more honestly next time. Bac joss taipan.
Other reports (unconfirmed) have him (and a lot of luggage) boarding a navy ship. Whether the latter is to distract from his escape via the former, or the former to distract from his escape via the latter, or two twitterers, one at the airport and the other in the docks, both have active imaginations and a keen eye for what will get them retweeted, I leave to readers to guess for themselves.
As his (possibly sole) remaining earning model is to extract as high a price as he can for formally becoming ex, I suggest he may delay admitting it, though probably not as long as Doenitz did. (In the early 1950s, in jail, Führer Doenitz was still insisting that only a fresh election in which the Nazi party was allowed to participate could legally replace him.)
“The President urged all …”
As Paul Marks guessed, I never take at face value anything any politician says. Not in Sri Lanka, not in Israel, not in the UK nor the US, not even the EU.
Paul Marks
Do come off it! Russia helped the USA in its “war against Al Quaeda” to be rewarded with a friendly, democratically elected Ukrainian President overthrown by a CIA coup, Ukraine being armed by NATO, and then applying to join NATO, whose now sole aim is to prolong and expand the (declining and terminal) American Empire.
What choice did Russia realistically have, except to be friendly with a near neighbour which is economically powerful, geopolitically both realistic and in the ascendant and about to become the largest economy on Earth?
Regrettably the USA has followed the British “playbook” to the letter; believe you can order world affairs forever, issue guarantees to nations you cannot realistically help (Poland/Ukraine), allow your ruling class to try to look after other countries rather than than your own, expend money on the same and print it believing that’s just fine because your money is a “reserve currency”…and the beat goes on…
Oh…and concentrate on “green crap” rather than energy security, LBGT, BLM playtime while the adults (you’ll find them in China) get on with real things.
And we were warned… Kennan, Mearsheimer, Matlock…but what did they know…
The people in countries like Germany, Denmark, Norway, California, maybe the UK too, genuinely support green suicidal policies like “net zero” – and that’s why they are implemented in those countries. That is why these countries march toward inevitable blackouts.
To claim, or hint or believe that people in Sri Lanka care about green policies is ridiculous. They care most about their next meal, no matter what nonsense their president utters.
Niall Kilmartin
Ceylon was never part of the raj, though post-independence India has used muscle there from time to time.
Solomon Bandyknickers won in 1956 – and got what he deserved, but too late as the Trojan Horses flew out of Pandora’s Box (to echo Ernest Bevin). There have been some vaguely decent periods since, but from the later 1950s those who could got out or encourages their children to get out (not just the non-Sinhalese, because, as one told me, the better class of Sinhalese used English and only spoke the local language to the servants…)
James Hargrave (July 11, 2022 at 2:15 pm), you are completely correct that, though parts of Ceylon were ruled via an East India Company structure for a few years in the 1790s, the island’s governors were reporting directly to Britain by 1800 and so were never part of the Raj as strictly defined, since ‘the Raj’ refers to Britain’s post-mutiny replacement of the East India Company’s role in administering India. I confess to having used ‘The Raj’ in a colloquial rather than strict sense. I should have just said ‘the Empire’.
Indeed so, and IIUC that was as much or more the case with upperclass Tamils, which was one of the reasons why the departing British did not expect trouble, but then (as per my long comment above notes, and as your contempt for him suggests you too know), a marxist Sinhalese noticed that the British, even well before they had departed, had given the servants votes, and were no longer around to mediate, so maybe inflaming ethnic rivalries could serve to get him elected. (BTW, I like your Bevin quote. I have a low opinion of Bevin, and will guess its humour was wholly or largely accidental, unless you can tell me otherwise.)
says a line (with link) in the ‘Foreign Policy’ article I mentioned. The 2010s were one of the “vaguely decent periods” you mentioned.
Niall Kilmartin
I have more time for Bevin – I knew his son-in-law slightly.
Here is what the Guardian says about Sri Lanka:
“What no one expected was the sheer incompetence of his [president Gotabaya Rajapaksa] increasingly autocratic rule. Taxes were cut, interest rates reduced, vast new loans sought, money printed – all at exactly the wrong time. Covid brought a collapse in tourism and remittances, both big sources of foreign exchange. A decision to make agriculture in Sri Lanka fully organic – largely an effort to greenwash an inability to afford fertilizer – crashed the entire sector. Soon, Sri Lanka was in a full economic meltdown.”