Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, visited Sri Lanka on Wednesday to inaugurate a hydropower plant and irrigation project, and on Friday, Russia took complete control of a Chinese airport, indicating that other members of the Belt and Road Initiative ( BRI ) are intervening to salvage the wreckage left behind.
Sri Lanka is a perfect example of a developing country that Tribal lures into disastrous bill, which frequently saddles China’s client states with loans they can not afford to pay back for infrastructure projects that turn out to be much less successful than promised. In a infamous way, Sri Lanka handed control of its Hambantota Port to China in 2017 when it was unable to pay back its Tribal product.
Sri Lanka’s money continued to collapse after China collected the harbor as collateral, leading to a governmental panic, rolling blackouts, a energy crisis, and food shortages.
This aerial pictures taken on May 6, 2021, shows a perspective of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota International Port. ( Liu Hongru/Xinhua via Getty )
The$ 209 million boondoggle known as the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport ( MRIA ), a notoriously Chinese-financed project in Sri Lanka, became operational in 2013 despite the low volume of flights Sri Lanka needs to serve.
Only a few flights arrive or depart on any given time, according to Forbes, and the aircraft receives the majority of its traffic from visitors who merely want to look at the” stunning, fully modern airports in the middle of the forest.”
If China only needed to borrow about$ 5 billion from Chinese banks to get the idea, it seemed to have had much trouble convincing former senator Mahinda Rajapaksa that the sleepy fishing villages of his home, Hambantota, may become fused into a gleaming innovative know area in which half of the buildings may be named after his household.
China was determined to extricate Sri Lanka from its long-standing relationship with nearby India and convert the island into a hub for trade on the New Silk Road, China’s effort to resurrect the fabled trade route of old.
The airport’s construction was an environmental disaster that destroyed thousands of acres of elephant habitat and disrupted bird migration routes, and most of the flights announced with much fanfare at the inaugural ceremony were quickly canceled, and the facility began losing$ 18 million a year. Despite the fact that the majority of the money disappeared into thin air, the majority of the money was purchased by Rajapaksa’s support for a while. The military has been called out to fend off elephants and buffalo that decided to camp on the runways. A number of the few aircraft that attempted to use the airport were grounded when migrating birds flew into their jet turbines.
On March 18, 2013, at the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in Mattala, Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks waited for President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s arrival.  , ( Sanka Gayashan, File/AP )
In 2015, angry Sri Lankan voters voted Rajapaksa out of office, stalling his effort to realign the island with China. Sri Lanka filed an appeal to the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) for a$ 2.9 billion bailout after defaulting on its external debt in 2022.
On Friday, a statement from the Sri Lankan cabinet said management of the controversial airport would be handed over to two private corporations, India’s Shaurya Aeronautics Ltd. and Russia’s Airports of Regions Management Company, for the next 30 years. The agreement could help Sri Lanka meet the IMF’s demand that many of its state-owned enterprises be privatized to reduce government debt, but the cabinet did not provide any further information about the agreement or what the Russian and Indian companies intend to do with the airport.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Raisi was in Columbo on Wednesday to cut the ribbon on the Uma Oya hydropower plant, a project launched in 2010 with Iranian funding and technical assistance. Sri Lanka made arrangements to pay for the rest of the project when Iranian funding was cut short by international sanctions. Sanctions, technical problems, and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic combined to delay completion by almost ten years.
However, Raisi made an effort to contrast the hydropower plant and the nearby irrigation network with Western” colonialism and arrogance” in her portrayal of Iran as a triumph of “knowledge and technology”
” Our enemies did not want Iran to develop and progress … so the will and determination of the Iranian people were realized, and our enemies were disappointed”, Raisi declared.
Raisi used part of his visit to rail against Israel and demand concessions from Palestinian terrorism, upsetting his host, current Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe.
” When it come]sic ] to the oppressor, when it come]sic ] to the usurper, the Zionist Israeli regime has been committing oppression against the people of Palestine for 75 years, they have been usurping their territory”, Raisi thundered.
” First of all we have to expel the usurpers.  , Secondly, we should make them pay the cost for all the damages they have created, and thirdly, we have to bring to justice the oppressor and usurper”, he ranted.
Wickremesinghe indulged Raisi’s tirades by signing five memoranda of understanding on cooperation with Iran on tourism, science, technology, the arts, and sports.
