The sprawling skyline of Colombo bristles with cranes these days. A $300-million (U.S.) port complex is under construction, on reclaimed land, and will include hotels and recreation facilities. Also underway are an architecturally innovative performing arts centre -- a gift of the government of China -- plus jutting glass banks, office towers, and luxury resorts.
Colombo’s is one of the best-performing stock exchanges in the world, as local business people are quick to point out, and the economy is one of the fastest-growing in a fast-growing region, with growth predicted to hit seven per cent this year.
And the government of president Mahinda Rajapaksa is eager to tell potential investors all about the peace dividend just waiting to be collected in Sri Lanka.
It’s two years this month since Mr. Rajapaksa succeeded in crushing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and ending a decades-long civil war. And now, in the words of Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris, “there is an economic renaissance.”
And no wonder, he added – since his is a country “abundantly blessed by nature”, with 96 per cent literacy, where English is widely spoken, and where government is funneling money into infrastructure development.
Mr. Peiris is on a tour of the region to spread this news, and will bombard journalists who inquire with a list of all that’s expanding: there are so many tourists pouring into the country that local operators can’t build hotels fast enough to house them all, he claimed. Fortunately, foreign investment is also pouring in, he said, including a huge investment from Hong Kong-based Shangri-La Asia Limited to build a 500-room luxury hotel and apartment complex on the Colombo seafront.
Mr. Peiris was also at pains to stress, in a recent conversation, that economic development is underway in the Tamil north, which was frozen in time under LTTE control and which remains under the control of the Sri Lankan armed forces. He talked about new initiatives to develop the fisheries and fruit exports from the north. He talked about bank loans for small business. He described “a country coming alive again” and said that economic development in the north is a priority for the government in order to ensure that all communities feel the benefit of peace.
Some of the drivers of development in the north will be the Tamil diaspora (more than a million Tamil Sri Lankans are believed to have fled during the years of the war) – the largest population of whom live in Canada, with an estimated 300,000 in Toronto alone. The names on the manifests of flights coming in to Colombo show that plenty of Tamils are coming back, he said. (They might be interested to know government is still keeping close track.) “We do not wish to demonize or isolate the diaspora -- we wish to engage them,” he said. The government is inviting them home to rebuild: “We say, 'Don’t you want to associate yourselves with the very refreshing developments taking place in our country? Be part of the exercise to make your life better.'”
But conversations with Tamil business people -- not one of whom would be quoted on the record, in a country routinely criticized by human rights groups for the brutal treatment of government critics -- tell a different story. Only the army is permitted to operate restaurants and small shops in the north, said one man who owns a half-dozen convenience stores, and these are the extent of the local economy. Tamil fishers are still barred from working in most areas due to what the government calls security concerns (in the war years, the LTTE brought in arms by sea).
And, one well-off Tamil exporter and developer said, while the government is spending money up north, only Sinhala investors are winning government tenders for construction or redevelopment jobs. “You can hardly find a single contract that has gone to a Tamil company,” he said.
Mr. Peiris denied there was any preference given to Sinhala investors.
“The opportunity is uniformly available,” he told The Globe and Mail. “It is available to all. There is no level of discrimination.”
His pledge, however, is impossible to confirm, since the government still controls all access to Tamil areas.
