City Life

Flying into Colombo’s civil war on tourist-less Sri Lankan Airlines, my eye was caught by three plugs in the in-flight magazine from the country’s investment board: ‘Generous Fiscal Incentives’, ‘Transparent Legal System’, and ‘One of the Most Livable Countries in Asia’. The 70,000 who have died since 1983 in the former Ceylon’s intractable conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese would clearly disagree with the last one. But the praise for Sri Lanka’s rule of law provided pause for thought, since I had been summoned to a rural court deliberating the ownership of a property I bought here in 2003, a happier time when a fourth plug, ‘Liberal Business Environment’, was briefly true. It’s a gorgeous plot that two fishermen now claim is theirs. Our titles prove conclusively otherwise — but I’ve had to instruct two lawyers, the second to shadow the treacherous first who we suspect of colluding with the fishermen. He was ‘too busy’ to brief me when our case inexplicably flared up in April, but not too busy to bank the retainer I stupidly paid him, 50 times what he charges Sri Lankans, before his chicanery was rumbled and the matter sorted.

‘Generous Fiscal Incentives’ seems an apt advertisement for public service here, for Sri Lankans bewail that their government is for sale. Police posts along Colombo’s locked-down corniche are sponsored by a leasing company. A steelmaker advertises on the checkpoint to the besieged military HQ, occasionally infiltrated by Tamil Tiger separatists intent on suicide-bombing. And President Mahinda Rajapakse’s cult of personality is plastered over state-owned banks, though the central bank governor insists he is independent. The statistics tell their own story: interest rates over 18 per cent, inflation at 16 per cent and a money supply that grew by 17 per cent in April to finance an unwinnable war.