Sri Lanka’s new Foreign Secretary Jayanath Colombage conceded in an interview this week that the nation’s decision to hand over a major strategic port to China for 99 years was a “mistake” and that, under recently inaugurated President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the country will pivot to an “India First” approach.
Rajapaksa and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, swept to a resounding victory in August’s elections that result in four Rajapaksas joining the nation’s parliament in addition to the brothers. As president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who ruled from 2005 to 2015, presided over much of Sri Lanka’s pivot to closer ties with the Chinese Communist Party. The New York Times has reported that evidence exists the Chinese corporation that built the seized port at Hambantota gave Rajapaksa millions of dollars.
Now, under his brother, the nation’s top diplomat is vowing that Sri Lanka will keep some distance from China.
“President (Gotabaya Rajapaksa) has stated that in terms of strategic security, we will follow an ‘India first’ policy. We cannot afford to be a strategic security threat to India and we don’t have to be. We need to benefit from India,” the Times of India quoted Foreign Minister Colombage as saying in a televised interview in Sri Lanka on Monday.
Colombage also reportedly described handing over the Hambantota port as a “mistake.”
In an interview with similar themes published by Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror on Wednesday, Colombage similarly stated that Rajapaksa seeks to assuage concerns in India that Sri Lanka has moved too close diplomatically to China. The Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has moved to distance itself from China, banning mobile phone applications made in China from use in the country and seeking to attract global companies out of China with its “Make in India” initiative. India and China also experienced its deadliest military exchange in half a century in July on their mutual Himalayan border, caused by Indian troops asking People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers why they were erecting tents on sovereign Indian territory.
“Sri Lanka does not want to be caught up in the power game. Sri Lanka wants to develop friendly international ties with everybody,” Colombage told the Mirror.
Addressing Hambantota specifically, Colombage explained the strategic importance of the port geographically, in the heart of a major Asian trade route.
“The Hambantota Port is located at the most strategic point in the Indian Ocean. That is the centre of the ocean. It is exactly in the centre between Singapore and Dubai, and Shanghai and Rotterdam as far as the distances are concerned,” Colombage said. “The busiest shipping lane in the world is just 12 nautical miles south off Hambantota. … We need a port there.”
The foreign minister then appeared to blame India and the former administration of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s predecessor, Maithripala Sirisena, for China taking the port over.
“Everyone knows, we initially offered it to India. India did not undertake it for whatever the reason. May be it was because of lack of capacity. Or, they could not take that decision at that moment. Then, it went to a Chinese company,” Colombage said. “We had given the Hambantota Port on a 99-year-lease to China Merchants Port Holding Company, which India, Japan, and America considered as wrong. We actually made India jittery during the period between 2015 and 2019. But India is comfortable with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.”
Colombage also rejected, however, bringing Sri Lanka closer to Western free states, arguing that the bests interests of Sri Lanka require closer ties to its immediate neighbors.
“We see a clear shift in the world economic order from the west to the east or Asia for that matter. Therefore, our main focus should also be on neighbourhood — South Asia, Africa, the Middle-East, ASEAN and Far East,” Colombage said. “We have maintained a non-aligned policy since independence. We also see that we have been having somewhat of a Western-oriented diplomacy. We venerate the West virtually.”
“Our foreign policy should not be tailored to what is best for another country. It should be tailored for what is best for Sri Lankans and Sri Lanka,” he concluded.
The Hambantota port is, in many ways, the crowning achievement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a plan to convince developing nations to allow China to build major transportation infrastructure there that they cannot afford. China offers predatory loans that the country cannot repay and, when the nation defaults, seizes what it built. The money goes to paying Chinese companies — which vow to hire locally and create jobs, but rarely do — that then seize the property.
China seized Hambantota in 2017, receiving a 99-year lease on the property.
Sri Lanka is currently in the middle of a strict Chinese coronavirus lockdown to prevent the virus from spreading further, significantly hurting laborers who say they cannot access jobs. In mid-August, port workers in the capital, Colombo, organized a protest demanding an explanation for why Chinese workers at the Colombo port were allowed to work without interruption, but they could not find a way to generate money, banned from the work sites.
“They kept these gates closed restricting the employees while the Chinese freely roam,” Kanishka Heshan, one of the protesters, told local reporters.
All the aforementioned players were pivotal to Sri Lanka’s involvement with BRI. Wickremesinghe was prime minister in 2002 under an SLPP president, when Sri Lanka agreed to allow China to build to Port of Hambantota, which it lost to China in 2017. Mahinda Rajapaksa succeeded him in 2004.
Under Sirisena, Sri Lanka responded to the loss of Hambantota by signing more BRI contracts worth over $50 million, despite the fact that it could not pay back the original loan it took out nearly two decades prior.
The United States issued sanctions on several of Chinese companies involved in BRI projects on Wednesday, including the company that built the port of Hambantota, China Harbor Engineering Corp. China Harbor is a subsidiary of China Communications Construction Co. (CCCC), one of five receiving sanctions and part of 24 companies in total now restricted from doing business in America.
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