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| From Asiz Haniffa in Washington, exclusive to the Daily News Sri Lanka's aim at the talks in Washington is to build a new relationship with the United States based on economic links that will serve as a model for the rest of South Asia, members of the delegation told the Daily News. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is having a number of meetings in the American capital with key officials to discuss these economic issues, ahead of his meeting with President George W. Bush today (July 24). The Premier kicked off the first round of his Washington meetings on a scorching 100 degree humid summer Monday afternoon when he briefed US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Horst Kohler on the envisaged peace process, his government's economic reform process and efforts to increase trade and investment. In his meeting with Zoellick, that went on for over 40 minutes and included the participation of Deputy US Trade Representative, Ambassador Jon M.Huntsman, Wickremesinghe laid out his government's "overall vision for the economy, which is becoming the gateway to India and the opportunities it could offer the United States as far as investment." He also recalled Sri Lanka's cooperation and coordination from 1989 to 1994 when the country worked extremely closely with the US on trade issues and hoped that both countries could reconnect as they had done at the time. The Prime Minister also recalled the meeting he had with Zoellick when the latter was Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs in the first Bush Administration (headed by the father of the current President George W.Bush) and struck up a rapport which senior US officials and diplomatic sources said could only augur for the good in terms of US support for Sri Lanka's efforts to improve trade and catalyse its economy as it struggles to come out of the malaise that had been imposed by the war with the LTTE. Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Economic Reform and Science and Technology, who accompanied the Prime Minister to the meeting with Zoellick, told The Daily News that no assurances nor any agreements nor any deals on garments exports or anything else had been struck with the US, as had been speculated earlier in Colombo. "I think that was a bit of hype," Moragoda said. "I mean this visit is meant to be a workmanlike visit. We are exploring what the possibilities are and opportunities are." He said that "this is basically an initial phase of reconnection because there has been no meeting with the US Trade Representative at this high level in the past eight to nine years. During the earlier government, most of the dialogue has been at the second-tier." "So it was a matter of reconnection and sort of trying to lay the foundation," Moragoda reiterated. "The idea was to set the foundation, so that after the election we can build on the necessary sort of basic frameworks to be set up at this stage," he said. "So we are looking at these aspects." Moragoda, who met earlier in the day with Huntsman for over an hour and set the background for the meeting between the Prime Minister and Zoellick, said that "what we felt was that working together with the United States," particularly lending Sri Lanka's unstinted support to Washington at the World Trade Organization (WTO) would facilitate the kind of mutual market access that "could make Sri Lanka possibly a model sort of economy and model relationship for the US to use for other cases as well." Wickremesinghe explained to Zoellick how the government had moved expeditiously to liberalize the financial sector, for example, removing the ceilings on foreign investment in the financial sector, and pledged that such reform was also on the cards with regard to telecom. Moragoda said that all this seemed to "resonate well" and predicted that in "the South Asia context we feel that we have the potential to make the US-Sri Lanka relationship what one would call a model relationship." Apparently the larger vision of this so-called gateway into India had obviously resonated well with Zoellick and the other senior US officials who participated in the meeting because the US too is looking to see how to connect with India and capture its consumer market. Zoellick and his team had agreed that Sri Lanka could provide an interesting point given Colombo's close relationship with New Delhi, more so now that both countries had entered into a free-trade agreement and were building on this accord in tangible ways. Besides Moragoda, the Sri Lankan officials who participated in the Prime Minister's meeting with Zoellick included Bradman Weerakoon, Secretary to Wickremesinghe and Saman Udagedera, Minister, Commerce, at the embassy here. Moragoda said that one of the priority areas of discussion with IMF Chief Kohler was the stand-by agreement between the IMF and Sri Lanka and the Prime Minister had expressed a desire to see Sri Lanka quickly metamorphose from the stand-by agreement into a poverty reduction and growth facility before the end of the year.
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