Sri Lankan Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris on Tuesday urged Washington to seize business and other opportunities in post-war Sri Lanka rather than focus only on alleged human rights abuses in the country.
Visiting Washington after Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse’s party won parliamentary elections last month, Peiris parried criticism from human rights activists and others amid a week of talks here to push for closer ties.
A year after the end of the civil war, “the circumstances are propitious for a certain strengthening and deepening of the relationship between Sri Lanka and the United States,” Sri Lanka’s chief diplomat said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“We are not in any way resentful of the focus on human rights. That is understandable. We are not complaining about it,” Peiris told a gathering hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“But we are making the point that the relationship should not be one-dimensional. There are many other things that Sri Lanka and the United States can do together,” he said.
Rajapakse has come under fire at home and abroad for allegedly violating human rights in the final military campaign against the Tamil rebels and of suppressing dissent since his resounding re-election victory in January.
Representatives from the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International aired some of the alleged abuses in a question-and-answer session with Peiris following his speech about post-election and post-war developments.
Business opportunities abound, said Peiris, who was minister for international trade in the previous government.
“In particular, as we open up the country, as we rebuild the infrastructure, I think there is a great deal of scope for American companies to come in and participate fully in that exercise,” he said.
Pieris talked of a new “mood of optimism” in Sri Lanka, adding the “whole country was coming alive” as foreign tourists begin arriving in large numbers and foreign investors eyed hotel construction.
He also urged Washington to find ways to work with Colombo, which now chairs the Group of 15 developing countries, in order to pursue “common interests” like tackling climate change and access to markets.
He also said that, because conditions had changed in his country, he would also seek changes in US policy that bar US training of the Sri Lankan military.
Pieris said he met on Monday with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and met on Tuesday with US senators and congressmen. He plans to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tomorrow after she returns from east Asia.
Clinton’s spokesman Philip Crowley last month urged Sri Lanka’s new government to use its mandate to pursue a “healing process” as the Indian Ocean island recovers from decades of war.
Apparently responding to the appeal, Peiris said the “principle effort of the government is to do everything possible to heal the wounds of the past ... and to make the transition to democracy ... as smooth as possible.”
He said the new government has moved fast to repeal most of the emergency measures that had been in place for years.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing