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Sri Lanka FOREIGN RELATIONS
The two most important factors in Sri Lanka's foreign
relations since 1948 have been a commitment in principle to
nonalignment and the necessity of preserving satisfactory
relations with India without sacrificing independence. India had
almost fifty times Sri Lanka's land area and population and forty
times its gross national product in the late 1980s. Its point of
view could not be ignored, but neither the country's political
leaders nor the person in the street (especially if he or she
were Sinhalese) wanted the island to become an appendage to
India's regional power ambitions. The July 29, 1987, Indo-Sri
Lankan Accord and the involvement of a large number of Indian
troops in the northeast, however, seemed to many if not most Sri
Lankans to be an unacceptable compromise of national
independence.
Sri Lanka's first prime minister, Don Stephen Senanayake, had
committed the country to a "middle path" of nonalignment to avoid
entanglement in superpower rivalries
(see Sri Lanka - Independence
, ch. 1).
But nonalignment has had its modulations in the decades since
independence. UNP governments were generally friendlier to the
West than those formed by the left-leaning SLFP. Sirimavo
Bandaranaike deeply distrusted Washington's intentions and
cultivated close and friendly relations with China in the early
1960s, a time when that country was vocally committed to the
worldwide export of "wars of national liberation." Jayewardene
gave Sri Lanka's foreign policy a decidedly Western orientation
after he came to power in July 1977. This change was motivated
largely by the desire to secure aid and investment in order to
promote his government's economic liberalization program. At the
same time, Sri Lanka shared with Western nations apprehensions
concerning India's apparent determination to make the Indian
Ocean region an Indian sphere of influence and its preservation
of close ties with Moscow.
Although the 1972 constitution declared the nation a republic
and ended its dominion status within the Commonwealth of Nations,
Sri Lanka, like India, remained a Commonwealth member in the
later 1980s. The country also belonged, like other South Asian
states, to the seven-member South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC), a group formed in the early 1980s to
deliberate on regional problems. SAARC provided a context in
which South Asian states other than India could discuss the Sri
Lankan ethnic issue. But few observers regarded SAARC's role in
any resolution of the crisis as anything more than peripheral.
Some observers interpreted Sri Lanka's unsuccessful bid in 1982
to gain membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) as an attempt to put a little comfortable distance
between itself and India. The application was rejected,
ostensibly on geographic grounds.
Data as of October 1988
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