Enter The Dragon: China Bankrolls Sri Lanka’s Post-War Development
Marwaan Macan-Markar
Hambantota, Sri Lanka – This small town with its narrow streets and slow pace of life on Sri Lanka’s southern coast has always belonged to the geography of off-beat trails. Visitors drawn to its solitary hotel are largely day-trippers stopping to take a quick look at Hambantota’s quaint, yet colourful fishing harbor and the vast stretches of the nearby salt pans.
But when it did make the news, headlines about tragedy and death on a massive scale dominated. The powerful Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 pummeled this stretch of beach, leaving a trail of bodies in the thousands and reducing communities already laboring under poverty in ruins.
Before that, in the late 1980s, the surrounding areas were added to the list of the country’s “killing fields.” Then, government troops were locked in a brutal battle to suppress a Marxist uprising led by disaffected youth. Headless bodies and torched corpses littered roadsides. Read More
