Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has restated Sri Lanka’s commitment to non-alignment in an interview with CNN, saying conflicts such as the war in the Middle East “serve no one” and that the country’s position in the Indian Ocean makes staying clear of great-power confrontation a national interest rather than a preference.
The interview was conducted by Richard Quest and runs just over three minutes. CNN published it on 22 October under the headline “Sri Lankan PM: Conflicts like the Iran war serve no one”; the Daily Mirror wrote it up on Sunday.
The argument for staying out
Amarasuriya’s case was geographic before it was ideological. Sri Lanka sits astride the Indian Ocean shipping lanes, and that location, she said, makes it important to stay clear of geopolitical conflicts at a time of rising global tension. Avoiding entanglement in international power struggles is essential to the country’s national interests and economic stability — particularly, she said, as Sri Lanka absorbs the impact of rising fuel prices and global energy costs.
She was candid that the balancing act has not always worked. Maintaining relations with China, India and the United States simultaneously has historically been a key challenge for Sri Lankan foreign policy, the Prime Minister said, and aligning too closely with any single power had not worked to Sri Lanka’s advantage.
That is a notably blunt formulation from a sitting head of government, and it is the sentence that does the most work: it frames non-alignment as a lesson learned from past costs rather than as inherited doctrine.
The economy and the IMF
Turning to recovery from the 2022 financial collapse, Amarasuriya said Sri Lanka had made significant progress through fiscal discipline, structural reforms and efforts to combat corruption.
She also addressed a question her government has faced since taking office: why it continued with the International Monetary Fund programme after years of political criticism of the arrangement. Her account was that the programme was already in place when the administration arrived, and that discussions with IMF representatives revealed common ground on fiscal discipline and governance reforms.
Context
The interview lands in a week when the war’s economic transmission into Sri Lanka is the dominant domestic story. The energy ministry says the government has at times spent up to 30 percent of its foreign exchange reserves in a single month on fossil fuel imports, and the Energy Minister has signalled that the disruption may push the country past its 70 percent renewable electricity target. Sri Lanka has also been dealing with the war’s effects in its own waters, where 27 crew were evacuated from Iranian tankers off Galle after falling ill.
Not reported
CNN’s page carries the video and a one-line summary — “Richard Quest sits down with Sri Lankan Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya” — rather than a transcript, so the quoted phrasing in this article follows the Daily Mirror’s write-up. The two outlets differ slightly in framing: CNN’s headline specifies “the Iran war”, while the Daily Mirror renders the Prime Minister’s remark as covering “the war in the Middle East” generally.
Ada Derana also filed on the interview, under the headline “‘Wars like Iran conflict serve no one’s interests’: PM Harini” (adaderana.lk/news/250500), but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 41 consecutive days and no publication date could be extracted, so it is named here rather than cited.
Neither filing states where or when the interview was recorded, whether Sri Lanka has been asked by any party to take a position on the war, or what practical form the stated neutrality takes — on port calls, overflight, or votes at the United Nations.
