Sri Lanka is having regular consultations with the US with regards to the Hambantota Port as well as dealings with the Chinese, President Ranil Wickremesinghe said.<\/p>\n
He also dismissed fears that the Hambantota Port will be used by China for military purposes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Chinese don\u2019t own the port. We own the port, but we have given all the operations of the port to China Merchants. This is because we found that the Colombo Port Authority was unable to manage the port, and we were making big losses. There were no takers for the port, except China Merchant. Our other option was to close it,\u201d the President said.<\/p>\n
He said the security of the port is controlled by the Government of Sri Lanka, and the Southern Command of Sri Lanka\u2019s Navy will remain in Hambantota.<\/p>\n
\u201cA number of US and Japanese warships have visited the port. The port has no basic military value. The Chinese will not use it for military purposes. They can\u2019t. We have had regular consultations with the US in regard to this port as well as dealings with the Chinese,\u201d the President said.<\/p>\n
The President also said that looking at the arrangement at the ports that the Chinese are building in Africa and somewhere in the Bay of Bengal, the Hambantota port will be a crucial port as far as commercial activities are concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this will be one of the ports where the goods are assembled and reshipped to other destinations. I can\u2019t see a military use for it and the Chinese haven\u2019t the ability to have a large number of warships in the Indian Ocean any way, to counter India and the US,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
President Ranil Wickremesinghe expressed these views during an interview organized by Harvard University through Zoom technology.<\/p>\n
Courtesy: Colombo Gazette<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sri Lanka is having regular consultations with the US with regards to the Hambantota…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-srilankan-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12358,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12356\/revisions\/12358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globaltamilnews.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}