• Cui Bono in a post-truth world? 

“If you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute” runs a wry idiom in New England, where the weather may change dramatically in minutes. However, these days, blaming the weather for pretty much everything is fashionable – be it global warming or cooling, no rain, or too much rain, drought, floods, or a snow blizzard in winter.

Recently, the news was filled with stories of anthropogenic climate catastrophes, from “poisoned fog” from land-locked dust bowl New Delhi, India, directly targeting windblown coastal Colombo, to cattle dying due to cold weather in the Eastern Province. Additionally, there were biowarfare-lab-made Fall Army Worms (Sena Caterpillar), and coconut White Flies destroying crops in a mysteriously co-ordinated attack on national food security this holiday season, as imported goods flooded Sri Lanka on the (neo)liberal US “force”-backed President’s orders, rapidly deepening the US dollar debt trap, ex-post the staged default.

Meanwhile, two United Nations (UN) Climate Conferences (the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change [COP-27] and the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), offered contradictory messages about who must bear the cost for the “loss and damage” caused by climate change amid a global and local corporate media blitz of climate disaster stories with narratives of famine in the background. Indeed, climate and debt anxiety cross-messaging with electric car and green technology advertisements, as well as disinformation following two years of a confusing Covid-19 infodemic increasingly characterise an anxiety-gripped “risk society” in a post-truth world.

At the COP-27 Anthropocene climate catastrophe show in Egypt in November last year (2022), countries of the Global South called for the industrialised North, which is currently responsible for over 92% of cumulative carbon emissions, to pay up for the “loss and damage” to the environment.

Land and ocean grabbing for blue-green debt bondage

Strategic Sri Lanka at the centre of the Indian Ocean, which succumbed to a staged default for the first time in its history as an independent country last year (2022), is currently in IMF and colonial Club de Paris debt negotiations that include green and blue bonds or “debt for nature” swap (DFNS).

A blue-green deal of up to $ 1 billion in climate-focused finance is planned, according to a Reuters report. However,  countries in the Global South had pointed out that industrialised Euro-American nations that caused the carbon emissions and ozone holes must pay up for any green transition at COP-27, rather than appropriate the forest lands and ocean resources of debt-trapped countries in the name of “environment conservation” that takes the form of corporate green bonds, or DFNS. Moreover, the valuation of the blue ocean and green forest “assets” to be traded are opaque, with no mention of the submarine undersea data cables in the strategic island’s maritime exclusive economic zone.

The proposed blue-green bond trade, as part of debt restructuring, would again benefit the unknown international sovereign bond (ISB) holders and hedge funds of countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which include BlackRock that staged the default in Sri Lanka amid a triple whammy of Covid-19, climate catastrophe, and debt disaster narratives in the global and local corporate media.

Meanwhile, a recent  2020 OECD report found that the richer nations have never reached the promised $ 100 billion for climate financing, and what is worse is that instead of providing the promised climate fund, a majority of the climate finance from high-income nations to low-income countries took the form of loans that deepen debt traps.

The IMF and the Paris Club are pushing for a quick debt restructuring deal in Sri Lanka that would include green and blue (forest and ocean) bonds, and the unbundling and sale of strategic lands, coastal areas, energy, transport, telecom, and State-owned assets, enterprises, and infrastructure amid “expert” narratives of famine and climate crisis. These narratives enable disaster capitalism à la Canadian social activist Prof. Naomi Klein’s classic work The Shock Doctrine, this time with a blue-green mask in the strategic Indian Ocean island in the crosshairs of geopolitical tensions as a cold war heats up in the Indian Ocean region.

Some have suggested that the forests and oceans of Sri Lanka are doubly valuable, even priceless, due to the island’s geostrategic location on major trade, energy and submarine or undersea data cable routes, in the age of big data and the information economy. The island has also been dubbed an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, with the country increasingly an economic proxy war site in the West’s confrontation with China, much like Ukraine is a proxy war site in the confrontation with Russia. The Sino-Russia pact of “limitless” co-operation in the long-predicted Asian 21st Century seems to have unnerved the West.

Meanwhile, in small print, there was also the news that India would enable Sri Lanka to trade in Indian rupees, aiding the quiet de-dollarisation process in this dollar debt-trapped island, which was, till recently, listed as South Asia’s only upper middle-income country by the World Bank. Before the dramatic default triggered currency devaluation, Sri Lanka had the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the best social indicators in the region.

Odious debt bondage and the semiotics of a chilling killing: Cui bono?

Recently, a member of a powerful business family was found deceased in what seemed, at first glance, to be a mafia-style staged crime that seemed designed to send a chilling message and to silence those among the business community and the wider society who question the official narrative and quantum of debt, bonds, and bond scams at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), in a world where debt data like Covid-19 fatality rates and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated weather data are a numbers game with contradictory models.

Dinesh Schaffter, a scion of a powerful and respected business family, was a primary material witness at the Presidential Commission of Inquiry that investigated the 2015 CBSL bond scam that is widely alleged to have been authorised by then-Prime Minister and current President Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2015 also to fund his party’s (United National Party) election campaign. Schaffter, the Managing Director of First Capital Holdings, a company that had also placed bids at the time, had raised questions regarding the bond auction. Subsequent court action revealed insider trading allegedly by primary dealer Perpetual Treasuries, with Wickremesinghe’s friend in Singapore, then-CBSL Governor Arjuna Mahendran, and his son-in-law Arjun Aloysius of Perpetual Treasuries, all part of the bond scam network.

The semiotics of the guillotine-style killing, with the victim left in his own car at the Colombo General Cemetery indicates a crime staged to send a chilling message to those who may seek the truth or dare speak truth to power. This is at a time when a group of high-powered international academics have called for transparency and information disclosure regarding the identities of the bondholders, whose names are kept secret while the country is mortgaged in IMF and Paris Club negotiations to pay and benefit bondholders.

The academics have also called for ISB holders who lent at predatory rates claiming “high risk” to bear the cost of their predatory practices and to take the losses, rather than have the IMF and the colonial Club de Paris act as their debt collectors, while passing on the burden of this odious and illegitimate debt transacted between two corrupt parties (corrupt politicians and hedge fund bond traders) to the citizens of debt-trapped countries in the Global South, who had little to do with these transactions and are denied the right to information on the identities of the bondholders.

It is the bonds, stupid! The right to information

Forensic audit reports on the 2015 bond scams were embargoed by then-CBSL Governor Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy, who is now an “advisor” on debt restructuring talks with the IMF. Is it not time to first reveal the findings of the 2015 bond scam audit reports in full to Parliament and the people of Sri Lanka? The three Governors of the CBSL who were involved in bond scams and/or cover-up “investigations” include Ajith Nivard Cabraal, Mahendran, and Dr. Coomaraswamy.

However, rather than call for information disclosure, Opposition members trade in salacious stories about beds, bestiality, bondage, and the sexual preferences and exploits of the President (who now enjoys Presidential immunity), as well as his advisors, which are widely circulated in corporate and social media channels to distract from the thickening plot of past and future bond scams conducted with impunity and immunity to beggar the country by successive Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa (a reference to former Presidents Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa) governments.

The apparent staging and semiotics of the assassination of Schaffter, who was to depart for London, England on the eve of his death, points to powerful local and global interests and networks behind the scene, drunk with a sense of immunity and impunity. The perpetrators of the crime in broad daylight in central Colombo clearly felt well protected, and no investigation could or would touch them, as the progress of the investigation seems to show.

The chilling killing would simultaneously stymie any bond scam investigations and search for information on the identities of the bondholders. This is also evident in the ongoing cover-up “investigation”, including the absurd narrative that the victim died by suicide.

It appears that Schaffter knew too much and was willing and able to ask questions at a time when bond trading related to the country’s debt default is under scrutiny, with calls for transparency and information demanded from ISB traders and bondholders complicit in the default being made by academics and civil society groups, as the IMF prepares to asset-strip the country to benefit Euro-American creditors.

Finally, the semiotics of Schaffter’s assassination and the ongoing cover-up “investigations” are similar to the Islamic State (IS)-claimed Easter Sunday attacks that also targeted the Chinese-owned Shangri La Hotel in Colombo, where the leader of the suicide attacks, Zahran Hashim, died with another suicide bomber in 2019. This was shortly after the World Bank had “upgraded” Sri Lanka to an upper-middle income country, forcing the country to borrow from private capital markets and bond traders to recover after the hybrid economic war-style Easter attacks. At that time, Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister.

Four years after the mysterious Easter Sunday 2019 crime, the smokescreen of investigations by various local and international intelligence agencies has thickened, while investigators and court cases continue to ignore prima facie evidence regarding the external geopolitical motives and local, global, and diasporic transnational networks that are as clear as daylight behind the 2019 IS-claimed Easter Sunday crime.

(The writer is a social and medical anthropologist)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.