Colombo, November 25
Sri Lanka will work with India and it won’t do anything that will harm its interests, newly elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has said ahead of his visit to New Delhi later this week.
Rajapaksa, who is considered pro-China, said he wanted Sri Lanka to be a “neutral country” and work with all the countries.
“We will work with India as a friendly country and won’t do anything that will harm India’s interests,” said Rajapaksa, who will travel to New Delhi on November 29 on his first official trip abroad as Sri Lankan President.
“We want to be a neutral country,” Rajapaksa, who was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s President last week, said in an interview.
Rajapaksa said he wanted to work very closely with both India and China. “We want to work with all the countries and we don’t want to do anything that will harm any other country for that matter, we understand the importance of Indian concerns, so we can’t engage in any activity which will threaten the security of India,” he added.
Noting that the Indian Ocean is an important place and plays an important role in the present day geopolitics, he said Sri Lanka was placed in a very strategic location and all sea lanes passed close to the country from east to west. “So, these lanes should be free and no country should control these sea lanes,” he said.
Asserting that Sri Lanka’s involvement with China during the presidency of his elder brother Mahinda (from 2005-2015) was “purely commercial”, he said, “I invite India, Singapore, Japan and Australia to come and invest here. Don’t allow only China to invest.” He vowed to create an investment friendly environment in Sri Lanka.
Rajapaksa also said that giving away the Hambantota port to China on a 99-year lease was a mistake by the previous government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena.
“The deal has to be renegotiated,” he said. “Giving a small loan for investment is a different thing but giving a strategic important economic harbour is not acceptable.” China, which acquired Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port in 2017 as debt swap, has been ramping up its ties with the island nation and expanded its naval presence in Indian Ocean with an established logistics base in Djibouti. — PTI
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/37ADxS8
via Today’s News Headlines
No comments: