Tornado Alley (PROG)

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In China’s shadow, U.S. rushes back to neglected Indian Ocean island

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By Liz Sly
September 3, 2023 at 1:00 a.m. EDT


The port in the city of Victoria, on the island of Mahe, Seychelles. (Eduardo Soteras for The Washington Post)

MAHE ISLAND, Seychelles — At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force tracking station that monitored Soviet satellites from this island’s soaring tropical forests was a focus of Seychelles life. The American servicemen and technicians living nearby hosted barbecues and bar nights to which all Seychellois were invited, distributed cookies and milk to local children and taught them basketball.

Then, the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed and in 1996 the Americans left, dismantling the tracking station and shutting down their embassy — citing budgetary reasons for abandoning what had seemingly become an irrelevant corner of the world.

Today, the compound where Americans and Seychellois partied is home to the Seychelles Tourism Academy, where young islanders training to be tour guides, hoteliers and masseuses take classes, among other subjects, in Chinese — just one small manifestation of a new geopolitical rivalry that has now lured the Americans back.

In June, Seychelles became the latest in a string of small nations around the world in which the United States has established, restored or is planning to open an embassy as part of a broad pushback against the influence China has acquired during more than two decades of neglect or disinterest on the part of the United States.


Students attend a Chinese class at Seychelles Tourism Academy, in Mahe, Seychelles. During the Cold War, the location of the academy was the site of a U.S. Air Force tracking station that monitored Soviet satellites. (Eduardo Soteras for The Washington Post)

All are in small islands that had been judged insufficiently strategic by Washington to merit the cost of maintaining a diplomatic presence, including Seychelles, Tonga and the Solomon Islands, where embassies have been opened this year, and Maldives, Vanuatu and Kiribati, where embassies are planned, according to the State Department.

Seychelles offers an example of the ways America’s absence opened the door to Chinese influence. In the 27 years since the United States pulled out, China has built schools, hospitals, houses for low-income families and public amenities, winning sympathy among Seychellois who felt abandoned by the U.S. departure.

“They do the little things that America doesn’t do. This is where the Americans are weak. There is nothing we can say America built,” said Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan in an interview. “This is why countries like China have come in, because there was a vacuum.”

[...]



“We cannot say we are naive. We do understand the competition going on. In the Cold War we had the United States and the Soviet Union and now it is the United States and China,” Seychelles Foreign Minister Sylvestre Radegonde said in an interview. “Someone woke up and realized how important it is to counter the Chinese influence.”

The United States now has ground to make up, he said. “When you are late at a party, the party starts without you, so you have to make up time. It’s a fact that China has been a long time here. They have a lot of sympathy.”

[...]

When the new U.S. Embassy in Seychelles was launched in June, Richard Verma, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, became the most senior U.S. government official to visit the nation since the 1990s.

Chinese officials like to note the contrast.

“Our foreign policy is to treat every country, big or small, as an equal,” said Mu Jianfeng, China’s charge d’affaires in Seychelles. “I don’t know why they closed and I don’t know why they opened,” he said of the Americans. “But if they think Seychelles is important they will have an embassy here.”

[...]

Doing the little things

[...]

China built the stately white-pillared National Assembly building where the democratically elected parliament meets, and the adjoining Supreme Court, both important symbols of the country’s identity as a nation. It’s in the process of completing a new headquarters for the state broadcasting company, which will more than double the network’s space.

Thousands of Seychellois live in housing built by China and made available at subsidized prices — a shortage of housing for the least well-off is identified by Seychelles officials as one of the country’s biggest social needs.

[...]

The Chinese have invited hundreds of Seychellois on visits and scholarships to China, and China’s Confucius Institute teaches Chinese classes in primary schools, the university, which China built in the 1980s, an adult education center in the capital and at the Seychelles Tourism Academy.

Ramkalawan, the president, stressed that he, along with many Seychellois, is delighted the United States has returned. The Seychelles has been pushing almost since the United States left for the embassy to come back, and “we’re happy it happened under our watch,” he said.

But now that the United States is back, the pressure is on to live up to expectations, he said.

“America has to shape up. Americans have to participate.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/01/seychelles-china-us-diplomatic-relations/

See also:

Flashback - How 2 Gulf Monarchies Sought to Influence the White House
'Trump Organization: Allen Weisselberg pleads guilty to tax crimes"
[...]
A cooperating witness in the special counsel investigation worked for more than a year to turn a top Trump fund-raiser into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to interviews and previously undisclosed documents.
P - Hundreds of pages of correspondence between the two men reveal an active effort to cultivate President Trump on behalf of the two oil-rich Arab monarchies, both close American allies.
P High on the agenda of the two men — George Nader

[Outed from link Sept. 3, 2023... Mr. Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the effective ruler of the Emirates, also attended a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles that Mr. Mueller’s investigators have examined. The meeting, convened by the crown prince, brought together a Russian investor close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump’s team during the presidential transition, according to three people familiar with the meeting. ]
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/us/politics/george-nader-special-counsel-mueller-cooperating-seychelles.html ,

a political adviser to the de facto ruler of the U.A.E., and Elliott Broidy, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — was pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar and repeatedly pressing the president to meet privately outside the White House with the leader of the U.A.E.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169884517

FactCheck Q&A: are Indigenous Australians the most incarcerated people on Earth?
2015 - "A guide to Australia’s Stolen Generations" POST ONE ON THE VOICE TO THAT ONE???
[...]
Pearson’s spokesperson was accurate to say the US had the highest overall rate of imprisonment in 2010, but things have changed since then.
P - The World Prison Brief now names Seychelles .. http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/seychelles .. as the country with the highest adult imprisonment rate .. http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All . That’s based on data from 2014, which showed Seychelles had an imprisonment rate of 799 adults per 100,000 people.
P - The US is currently in second place, having reported 666 adult prisoners per 100,000 people .. http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america .. in 2015.
P - As a total population – including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – Australia currently ranks 93rd on the World Prison Brief list, with an imprisonment rate of 162 adults per 100,000 of the total population in 2016.
P - But, as Pearson highlighted on Q&A, we get a very different result when we look at the incarceration rate for Indigenous Australians.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155986002

Prince has gone more domestic, with James O'Keefe.
[...]Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups
[...]Mr. Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws. Last year, the House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/us/politics/george-nader-special-counsel-mueller-cooperating-seychelles.html .. of his meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January 2017.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=154221910

What Mueller Found on Russia and on Obstruction: A First Analysis
"Mueller report findings: Mueller rejects argument that Trump is shielded from obstruction laws"
[...]No, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, and no, he did not conclude that President Trump had obstructed justice. But Mueller emphatically did not find that there had been “no collusion” either. Indeed, he described in page after damning page a dramatic pattern of Russian outreach to figures close to the president, including to Trump’s campaign and his business; Mueller described receptivity to this outreach on the part of those figures; he described a positive eagerness on the part of the Trump campaign to benefit from illegal Russian activity and that of its cutouts; he described serial lies about it all. And he describes as well a pattern of behavior on the part of the president in his interactions with law enforcement that is simply incompatible with the president’s duty to “take care” that the laws are “faithfully executed”—a pattern Mueller explicitly declined to conclude did not obstruct justice.
[...]At the same time, several self-described Russian oligarchs actively reached out to establish their own contacts with the Trump administration, in part in response to discussions with Putin. Two such oligarchs—Petr Aven and Kirill Dmitriev—worked through business associates in unsuccessful attempts to arrange a meeting with Kushner, though Dmitriev was able to successfully pass a paper on U.S.-Russian relations to him. Through another associate, George Nader, Dmitriev also made contact with Erik Prince, a financial supporter and close associate of the Trump campaign, though he had no official position. The three met in Seychelles in January 2017, but redactions in the Mueller report leave substantial ambiguity regarding the subject matter of their discussions. Prince claims that he reported on his meeting with Dmitriev to Trump campaign official Steve Bannon, but Bannon disputes this—a discrepancy, the report notes, that investigators were unable to resolve.
2019 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148328827