ByShamindra Ferdinando Sri Lanka hadn’t been able yet to convince Russia to resume Aeroflot flights and tourists from there to Sri Lanka suspended in the wake of the detention of SU 289 at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) on the afternoon of June 02, authoritative sources said. Sri Lanka grappling with an unprecedented foreign exchange […]

Thursday 18th August 2022 Speculation is rife that former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is planning to return to Sri Lanka. The question, however, is not whether he is coming, but what he is doing overseas. The anti-government protesters who engineered his ouster called upon him to ‘go home’; they did not ask him to flee the […]

” Sri Lanka cannot do without IMF’s support. Having declared its inability to service its foreign debt, Sri Lanka is struggling to reach a consensus with lenders and the IMF. Two of Sri Lanka’s major creditors, India and China, locked horns over a port visit by a Chinese ship. Sri Lanka should be wary of […]

By Uditha Devapriya Divided from the Indian subcontinent, yet also deeply connected to it, Sri Lanka has never had an opportunity of forging and shaping a foreign policy of its own. The high point of its foreign relations, under the three Bandaranaike administrations over a period of 20 years, did signal an effort, and a […]

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s two years in office – a period of unprecedented political turmoil, uncertainty and further deterioration of Parliament – should be thoroughly examined. In fact, the UNP, with the support of the then President Maithripala Sirisena, paved the way for Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s candidature, at the 2019 presidential election, by blocking Mahinda Rajapaksa’s path […...

SL too on agenda BY S VENKAT NARAYAN Our Special Correspondent  NEW DELHI, August 6: India is maintaining a studied “loud silence” on the tensions between China and the United States and the developments in the Taiwan Straits in the wake of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taipei last week. The decision […]

After the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy, attention has turned to the state of affairs in other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bhutan and Bangladesh. All three countries have either curtailed imports or are planning to do so, to salvage their fast-depleting foreign exchange reserves and avoid a Lanka-like forex crisis. While the […]

by Chandre Dharmawardana, chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca. The forex crisis had forced the government to jettison its initial set of economic managers of the Central bank who looked for home-grown solutions and opposed dealing with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The President re-instated a set of managers whose ideas were more orthodox and aligned with the neo-liberal bankers […]

Calls for unity in a country torn apart by nationalism and monetary instability

By Kalinga Tudor Silva One of the important ways, the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka has directly impacted our lives is having to go through long and seeming unending queues, to access petrol, diesel, kerosene and even our dear passports. Queues have multiplied, sprung up on either side of the road and across the […]

Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka housed ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa following the recent crisis, until he was forced to flee the country entirely. That continues a trend of the city, and especially its strategic deep-sea port, being in the news for all the wrong reasons. In 2017, when Sri Lanka found itself struggling to make […]

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) says Sri Lanka’s growth is forecast to contract by 7.6% in 2022 and economic activity will remain subdued in 2023.In its latest Asian Development Outlook Supplement, the ADB said the island nation is beset with multifaceted and deepening challenges emanating from long-standing fiscal and current account deficits that have led to […]

For the majority of the troubled economies of the global South, it will be a case of narrowing foreign policy options. For many of these countries, the IMF is ‘the banker of last resort’ and this generally means that they would need to be ‘in the good books’ of the chief financiers of the IMF; […]

By Michael Rowand As Sri Lankan protesters stormed the presidential residence in Colombo, the Chinese Embassy released no statements and did not tweet. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered no comment until Monday afternoon, well behind others such as India, the European Union, and the United States. The French Embassy even retweeted a tweet […]

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