Claim: Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the United States Institute of Peace credits Sri Lanka’s bounce back from economic crisis to Ranil Wickremesinghe’s administration.
Fact: The claim is partly false. Lu praised Sri Lanka as a “comeback story” example from South Asia, referring to how the country has recovered from the severe economic crisis of 2022. He does not mention Wickremesinghe, and in fact speaks of other reasons how Sri Lanka achieved the bounce back, which has been edited out.
A TikTok video, carrying a clip of Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the United States Institute of Peace, speaking at a discussion about their new Indo-Pacific Strategy on 15 February 2024, is going viral. Users sharing the video claim that the think tank member attributed Sri Lanka’s comeback story after its economic crisis to the administration of Ranil Wickremesinghe. However, Newschecker found the claim misleading.
The TikTok carries a Sinhala text on top which reads, “The whole world is scared of [Ranil] Wickremasinghe’s management. Only us Sri Lankans are afraid of the people joining him.”
The TikTok has been going viral since August in the lead-up to the Presidential election in September and the Parliamentary election in November 2024 in Sri Lanka, the first elections after the economic crisis in 2022.
Fact check/Verification
Newschecker first looked for the source of the video clip used in the TikTok, and came across a full video from this event where Lu spoke, on the official website of US Institute of Peace, posted in February 2024.
At the event, Lu is joined by several other staff members dealing with the organisation’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.
12 minutes into the recording, Lu refers to Sri Lanka as a great “comeback story” in that the country managed to get back to normal with the support of friends like India, China, Japan, and the US.
He says, “In the region I work at, there is no greater comeback story than the story of Sri Lanka… It’s a very different place. The currency is stable, the food and fuel prices are stable. They’ve got reassurances in their debt restructuring and IMF money is flowing.”
The Newschecker team noted that the TikTok has cut off Lu’s speech at this point, just before Lu explains how and why Sri Lanka is now in this state. He goes on to say,
“How did they do that? The answer I would offer is that they did it with some little help from friends. This Indo-Pacific Strategy is based on the premise that the United States and like-minded partners are going to try to offer a better proposition. I will explain this in the context of Sri Lanka. In the beginning, Sri Lanka really needed humanitarian assistance. What we saw was countries like India coming forward with concessional loans that allowed Sri Lanka to continue bringing vital supplies of food and fuel during the most difficult times. USAID provided hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural inputs––fertilisers, seeds––so farmers could grow their own crops. On the debt side, if you follow Sri Lanka at all, you know they have a really heavy debt burden. The Creditor Committee led by Japan, France, and India negotiated for months to find a formula to allow Sri Lanka to restructure their debt in a sustainable way. And that formula put pressure on the Chinese to go along with those debt reassurances. That opened up IMF funding and the changes that you see in the economy today.”
The Newschecker team noticed that neither does Lu refer to Wickremesinghe, nor does he credit these developments to his administration. In fact, referring to a specific loan scheme Sri Lanka received, he says that it was not for a specific government in power, but for the private sector to make money for the Sri Lankan people.
“Vikram [another speaker] mentioned this 533 million dollar from the US Development Finance Corporation, just announced in November [2023]. That was a loan not to a (specific) government. It was a loan to the Colombo West Container Terminal. That’s a private sector project that’s going to make money for the Sri Lankan people.”
The Newschecker team looked for any reliable news reports about Lu’s remarks about Sri Lanka’s recent economic crisis and Wickremesinghe and did not come across any to support the claim made by the TikTok.
Conclusion
Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs at the United States Institute of Peace has not credited Sri Lanka’s comeback from the economic crisis to the Wickremesinghe administration.
Result: Partly False
Our sources
Recording of a discussion at the United States Institute of Peace about their new Indo-Pacific Strategy, held on February 15, 2024
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