PLA : China Eyes 18 Overseas Naval Bases (R)

SOURCE:
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/china-eyes-18-overseas-naval-bases

GEOPOLITICS

China Eyes 18 Overseas Naval Bases

                                BY

               MONIKA CHANSORIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE1iI5cWsPw These developments are in sync with China’s much  pronounced Maritime Silk Route strategy.

With the recent challenging of the notion of the  Indian Ocean Region (IOR) being India's "strategic  backyard", China is gradually upping the ante in the  maritime realm around India — a traditional  strategic nerve centre for New Delhi. Beijing is  sending a tacit signal, wherein it "recognises India's  special role in stabilising the strategic Indian  Ocean Region, but the perception that it is India's  'backyard' may result in clashes..." The caution thrown in by China needs to be read in  conjunction with the cumulative maritime activity of  the PLA Navy (PLAN) and its mounting forays into  the Indian Ocean — the third largest water body in  the world. The expanding strategic naval footprint in  the Indian Ocean by means of acquiring more  maritime bases and berthing facilities is a core  pillar of China's ports Policy. The PLAN's presence  and deployment in the IOR have been on the rise  since 2014, when a Song-class conventional  submarine docked in the Colombo harbour along  with a Ming-class diesel-electric nuclear submarine.  Striking, was the fact, that the submarine docked at  Colombo's South Container Terminal that is built,  run, and controlled by China Merchants Holdings —  thereby raising queries as to why did it not choose to  dock at the Sri Lanka port Authority in Colombo,  which is mandated to accommodate foreign military  vessels? The emphasis to dock at a minuscule  "Chinese facility" well within a Sri Lankan  administered harbour, merits careful analysis. Given its strategic placement, Sri Lanka is fast  becoming the pivot of rising Chinese naval  presence in the IOR, in that, China also has a  substantial controlling stake in the Hambantota  port, withColombo agreeing to grant Chinese state- ownedcompanies operating rights to as many as  four berths in exchange for an easing of loan  conditions.Besides, there are unconfirmed reports  of construction of a Chinese-run aircraft  maintenance facility near Hambantota in order to  service PLAAF assets based in Sri Lanka. In  neighbouring Pakistan, the docking of a Chinese  submarine in Karachi, following the handing over of  the port's operational control to China Overseas port  Holdings is another step towards consolidating  Chinese permanent navalpresence in South Asia. These developments, significantly, are in sync with  China's much pronounced Maritime Silk Route  strategy — a prominent feature of the upcoming 13th  Five-Year Plan (2016-2020). The maritime route is a  proposed sea network of ports, coastal  infrastructure projects beginning in Quanzhou in  the Fujian province and culminating in the northern  Mediterranean Sea. By virtue of this fresh strategy,  Beijing seeks to gain greater access to the strategic  pathways of the Indian Ocean, alleviated access to  the Gulf oil — which consequently shall reduce its  dependence on the passage through the Straits of  Malacca — a key potential vulnerability for China in  the event of a future conflict. China recognises fully well that in order to boost its  naval power projection capability, it will have to gain  greater access to ports and berthing facilities. This  is being increasingly reflected with China's covert  strategy of granting huge loans to smaller coastal  island nations that are in dire need for  developmental funds to improve infrastructure. The  pattern that China is following, almost unvaryingly  for handing out these loans, is that there are "no  conditions and/or transparency measures" while  issuing the loan. As soon as the island nation in  question reaches the stage where it is unable to  repay the loan on time, China thereafter "offers" to  "waive off/relax" loan conditions in exchange for a  "few berths" for that particular naval facility. The  Maldivian project is a case in point, in which China  is developing the iHavan Integrated Development  Project in the northernmost main sea line of  communication joining Southeast Asia and China to  West Asia and Europe. The iHavan project is riding  on huge concessional loans/aid financing from  China and it is being forecast that Maldives shall  almost certainly default on payments, thereby  allowing China to seize a few berthing facilities  there. This pattern could well be adopted in the future with  many other countries, especially since official  Chinese publications including Xinhua have  advocated and "advised" the PLA Navy to build as  many as 18 overseas naval military bases in the  greater Indian Ocean area, possibly including:  Chongjin port (North Korea),  Moresby port (Papua New Guinea), Sihanoukville port (Cambodia), Koh Lanta port (Thailand),  Sittwe port (Myanmar),  Dhaka port (Bangladesh),  Gwadar port (Pakistan),  Hambantota port (Sri Lanka),  Maldives,  Seychelles,  Djibouti port (Djibouti),  Lagos port (Nigeria),  Mombasa port (Kenya),  Dar-es-Salaam port (Tanzania),  Luanda port (Angola) and the  Walvis Bay port (Namibia). The long shadow of China's ports policy in the Indian  Ocean being currently driven and characterised by  both, state- and private-sponsored "infrastructure  investment", foretells strategic ramifications  militarily as these facilities shall end up becoming  communication and surveillance facilities, in  addition to being repair and replenishment centres  for the Chinese Navy — underscoring the  intransigent course of Beijing's influence in South  Asia and the Indian Ocean.

MALDIVES ; CHINA'S SMASH & GRAB NEO-COLONIALISM OUT TO TEST TESTOSTERONE OF B****A REPUBLIC IN MAKING

SOURCE:

http://www.firstpost.com/world/maldives-crisis-not-just-an-internal-political-struggle-its-an-unfortunate-result-of-chinas-smash-and-grab-neo-colonialism-4340341.html




[ Forget  'MORAL PRODUCTIVITY' . PLA's  occupation of DOKLAM has opened the back door entry to occupation of BHUTAN without firing a shot and by the same token MALDIVES strangulation by China will reduce the INDIAN NAVY to Indian Coast Guard status  & Indian maritime interest to a village sized   " Fishery POND commercial activity".  It is time to act now or never. Mr Modi   it  is 'NOW ' the time to show   testosterone  levels  or   get lost in the back waters of Geo-politics as a Banana entity                                              
                                                                    -VASUNDHRA  ]




                                        MALDIVES, CHINA

                                         &

                                  REPUBLIC  IN  MAKING

Great powers must exercise its rights, 

                                          or 

risk being trampled over by other 

                              great powers.

   

Maldives' Crisis Not Just An Internal Political Struggle, It's an Unfortunate Result of China's Smash and Grab Neo-Colonialism

CURTSEY

SOURCE:

http://www.firstpost.com/world/maldives-crisis-not-just-an-internal-political-struggle-its-an-unfortunate-result-of-chinas-smash-and-grab-neo-colonialism-4340341.html

Writing in an Indian newspaper on Wednesday, former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed has again urged India to intervene and restore democracy in the Maldives. While New Delhi is still calibrating its response amid media reports that it has kept the military on standby and is mulling over imposing some sanctions, it is worth remembering that the turmoil in the atoll nation is not just internal politics, it has deep strategic ramifications for India.

Some commentators have argued that the 1988 Operation Cactus-style military op cannot be replicated in 2018 and India would do well to bide its time as the political theatre unfolds. The contention is that any Indian intervention at this stage could be strategically counterproductive and morally indefensible. This argument rests on an assumption that the Maldivian flux is essentially domestic.

[ Forget  'MORAL PRODUCTIVITY' . PLA's  occupation of DOKLAM has opened the back door entry to occupation of BHUTAN without firing a shot and by the same token MALDIVES strangulation by China will reduce the INDIAN NAVY to Indian Coast Guard status  & Indian maritime interest to a village sized " Fishery POND commercial activity".  It is time to act now or never. Mr Modi time  it  is 'NOW ' the time to show   testosterone  levels  or   get lost in the back waters of Geo-politics as a Banana entitity -  VASUNDHRA  ]

It is not. It will be a mistake on India’s part to see the crisis in isolation, as a context-free internal struggle for power which doesn’t have any geopolitical spill. That is the certainly the line China wants the international community to take. Its state-controlled Global Times has already fired the first salvo, warning India against “meddling” in Male’s “internal affairs”.

The unrest in the archipelago is in equal parts strategic and political and has been a long time coming. China lies in the thick of it. Beijing has wormed its way into the Maldives and now threatens to permanently alter the balance of power in South Asia by co-opting the island nation into its aggressive maritime expansion strategy.

China’s long-term strategic objectives in Maldivian thrust involve laying a ‘string of pearls’ around India by acquiring naval bases, exercising hegemonic control over key shipping lanes stretching from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and throwing around its global military might.

As this column has argued in the past, letting panda-hugging Abdulla  Yameen get away with his authoritarian excesses won’t just be detrimental to Maldivian and India’s interests, it will be tantamount to endorsing the actions of a president who is complicit in China’s efforts to turn the atoll nation into another of its vassal states.

Incidentally, a major part of Nasheed’s column in The Indian Express agonises over the deep Chinese influence in Maldivian economy which is rapidly turning into strategic muscle. The former president writes: “Foreign powers, among them China, are engaged in a ‘land grab’ of Maldivian islands, key infrastructure, and even essential utilities. Shrouded in secrecy, all manner of projects have been awarded to foreign state-run companies.”

In an earlier interview to Reuters, Nasheed had said China has already seized around 16-17 islands through an “opaque leasing process” in the Maldives that consists of around 1190 islets scattered over the Indian Ocean. Only a handful of these is inhabited by the locals.

“It always starts with a real estate project, but it can be turned into something (else)... that China has actually grabbed more land,” the news agency quoted him, as saying.

Allowing for some exaggeration from an exiled former president at odds with the current regime, Nasheed isn’t too far from the truth.

For a country that didn’t have even an embassy presence in the Maldives up until 2011, China has acquired a massive amount of sway into Maldivian economy and is now moulding the nation’s politics in its favour.

President Yameen has defied international pressure to promulgate emergency and martial law in the faraway islands, jailed a former president after letting cops break into his residence at the dead of night, let loose security forces in Supreme Court complex, arrested the chief justice and another Supreme Court judge and forced the apex court to revoke its decision of setting free key political prisoners.

For a leader who apparently enjoys little grassroots support and international credibility, Yameen’s wanton excesses and stubborn defiance raised speculation that China is giving him tacit support. It may be noted that Beijing, unlike the international community, has gone out of its way not to comment on the political instability  in the Maldives or censure Yameen’s undermining of the Constitution or crushing of civil liberties, rule of law and democracy. A pliant figure as the head of state in a strategically important location certainly serves its purpose.

“Nobody should underestimate the influence of China over Yameen. We saw that in the manner in which he recently signed the FTA with China. I think it (support from China) has allowed him to be bold,” Abdulla Shahid, former speaker of the Maldivian Parliament, was quoted as saying in The Times of India.

As Anand Kumar had argued in a 2012 paper 'Chinese Engagement with the Maldives: Impact on Security Environment in the Indian Ocean Region', China’s strategic objectives in the Maldives hadn’t been very successful due to President Nasheed, who was perceived to be ‘India friendly’.

“However, as Chinese economic engagement in the Maldives increases, it might affect the close relationship between India and the Maldives,” he wrote rather presciently in academic journal Taylor and Francis Online.

China’s engagement with Yameen regime has been vast and swift. The measure of its influence lies not merely in the fact that Chinese influence is ubiquitous in the paradisiacal islands from rush of tourists (more than 30 percent of total footfalls), signboards, restaurants, menu cards, contractors, enterprises, hutments, inter-island bridges, ports and other mega infrastructure, Beijing has been able to co-opt India’s close neighbour as a key member of its Belt and Road Initiative and even weigh upon the political establishment to amend the Constitution and change land-holding clause.

It is not a coincidence that following the announcement of China-Maldives maritime silk road partnership in 2014, a year later the Yameen regime “amended the Constitution to allow foreigners to own land in the country on freehold basis on condition that the investment should be to the tune of at least $1 billion and 70 percent of the project should be on reclaimed land. It's no surprise that these two clauses looked like they were tailored for China.”

Chinese expansionism is also evident in the way it has taken over the Maldivian economy. The free-trade agreement, Maldives’s maiden, allows its fishermen access to world’s largest consumer market. But the balance of trade is hopelessly skewed. The FTA has seen Maldivian imports rise 200 times of the export figure with China and Hong Kong.

Yet another island nation’s sad descent into Chinese debt-trap has begun. From a trade surplus, the country now runs a deficit. The debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at 34.7 percent, and is slated to cross the 50 percent mark within the next three years, reckons IMF.

The two-kilometre China-Maldives Friendship Bridge, linking capital Male with an airport island is being funded by China and is being developed by a Chinese firm, reports Yuji  Kuronuma in  Nikkei Asian Review. On Hulhumale, a reclaimed island, “another Chinese company is constructing 7,000 homes. The contractor has taken out a loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China... More projects are underway elsewhere, like a housing complex surrounded by a forest on Addu Atoll.”

Along with Chinese presence, a simultaneous churn has seen lessening of Indian footprint. The volume of Chinese imports has crossed Indian goods, and Indian companies are being kicked out of Maldives. GMR, for instance, was asked to leave after its contract to develop the Male International Airport was prematurely cancelled by the Yameen regime.

GMR moved an international tribunal, but the compensation of $270 million was promptly paid by the Maldivian government leading to suspicion in India that China had filled Yameen’s purse. As Indrani Bagchi had reported in The Times of India, in August last year, Yameen disregarded India's request to deny permission to three Chinese warships from docking in the Maldives.

In his newspaper column, Nasheed mentions the airport deal as indicative of the hold China has over the Maldivian economy. “The development of the Ibrahim Nasir international airport is a case in point. President Yameen has revealed a plan to finance the project through $800 million worth of foreign loans — in 2014, China’s EXIM Bank gave a $373 million concessionary loan to upgrade and develop the airport... As I watch my country in exile, I fear that piece by piece, island by island, the Maldives is being sold off to China,” the exiled president writes.

The economic hegemony is being translated into a strategic grip. The totality of Chinese neo-colonial tactics in the Maldives can’t be understood if we disregard the military objective. As Professor N Manoharan writes in an Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies article, “Maldives has emerged as an important 'pearl' in China’s ‘String of Pearls’ construct in South Asia. Given (its) strategic location in the Indian Ocean, Beijing has been vying for a maritime base in the atoll with the primary motive of ensuring the security of its sea lanes, especially the unhindered flow of critically-needed energy supplies from Africa and West Asia through the Indian Ocean.”

As China ramps up its infrastructure projects through a predatory pricing mechanism, like many other South Asian nations including Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Maldives will also be forced to lease or sell its real estate to tide over the debt-trap. This is post-Cold War-era colonialism, where economic tools have replaced military instruments.

Monika Chansoria writes in Sunday Guardian how China “is developing the iHavan Integrated Development Project in the northernmost main sea line of communication joining Southeast Asia and China to West Asia and Europe.” This project is being run on “huge concessional loans/aid financing from China and it is being forecast that the Maldives shall almost certainly default on payments, thereby allowing China to seize a few berthing facilities there.”

India’s actions in the Maldives will have a larger bearing on how smaller South Asian nations adjust themselves in relation to China and India. The dynamic is in a flux. Underlined by Gandhian principles, India’ foreign policy has a strong moral component. At times, however, 

it is immoral not to act in self-defence. 

Great powers must exercise its rights, 

or risk being trampled over by other 

great powers.

Maldives Crisis Spirals: Indian Tanks, Special Forces on Standby

SOURCE:

Indian troops, which are being led by a unit of the army’s special forces, remain on standby at an IAF airbase.(Photo:

SOURCE;

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/maldives-crisis-spirals-indian-tanks-special-forces-on-standby

Maldives Crisis Spirals: Indian Tanks, Special 

                          Forces on Standby

                                          BY

                         CHANDAN NANDY

  

Besides small arms and mortars, a “few tanks”

  

  form part of the 400-600 Indian army soldiers’ weaponry in the event of their departure for Male, the Maldives capital, once the military top brass receives political clearance to deploy for the island nation besieged by its own troops.

The Indian troops, which are being led by a unit of the army’s special forces, remain on standby at the IAF’s Yelahanka airbase since Monday evening after a 15-day state of emergency was declared in Maldives by President Abdulla Yameen, even as former head of state Mohamed Nasheed appealed to New Delhi, seeking military and diplomatic intervention to stem the deepening political crisis in that country. Nasheed, the exiled former Maldives president, heads the Maldivian Democratic Party which functions out of Colombo.

Also Read: Maldives Political Crisis: Why Was Emergency Declared in Maldives?

The SoP and the Objective

If they go in, Indian troops' task would be to:

1. Step in to restore order in Maldives where the ensuing political chaos could lead to instability, in which opposition leaders in greater numbers could become targets of state repression.
2. Secondly, New Delhi would, by letting its army launch an operation in Maldives, send out a signal that just as in 1988, it is prepared now to act decisively to go the aid of an ally.
3. Thirdly, an airborne and ground operation would establish India's intent and role in the Indian Ocean, besides signalling regional powers such as China and Pakistan that it reserves the right to act in its own self-interest.

Defence ministry sources said that “if and when” the army receives a “green signal” the Indian troops will be flown over the Indian Ocean by IAF’s Boeing C-17 Globemaster IIIs and Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules military transport aircraft which are in “full readiness” at Yelahanka. The Quint has verified the information from more than one source.

The sources claimed that even as the assessment of the higher echelons of the national security leadership do not foresee the use of tanks, the defence establishment felt that “abundant caution” required dispatching the armoured vehicles.

The C-17s are capable of carrying heavy armoured tanks, the defence sources said, adding that the Globemasters have sufficient room to fit two tanks per aircraft.

Also Read: Maldives Emergency: Disturbed By The Situation, Says MEA

Maldives Spirals Into Crisis

The decision to keep army troops on standby arose after Yameen declared emergency after that country’s Supreme Court ruling ordered the release of nine opposition political leaders on finding their arrest and trial politically motivated and, therefore, “flawed”.

This led Yameen to defy the Supreme Court’s order before paving way for the arrest of the Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed and Justice Ali Hameed, plunging Maldives into the most serious crisis since Nasheed resigned in February 2012, following opposition pressure backed by a section of the army and the police.

While it may appear that the initial build-up and preparedness would culminate in immediate action on the part of New Delhi, the lapse of a full 24 hours after Maldives slipped into political crisis indicates that the Indians would observe caution and restraint and not exhaust the diplomacy option to resolve the crisis in Maldives.

According to sources, however, the continuing presence of the troops and aircraft at Yelahanka indicates that the Indian political and security establishment have not entirely given up on the military option. Indian military observers feel that the 400-600 troops on standby will be “sufficient” to deal with the Maldives’ armed forces, which is between 5,000-10,000 men.

Also Read: Operation Cactus: The Day India Saved the Maldives