Sri Lanka will cut a third of its army due to the economic crisis

Jan. 13 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Ministry of Defense of Sri Lanka has announced this Friday that it will reduce the number of troops of the Armed Forces by a third to alleviate as much as possible the deep economic crisis that the country is going through, immersed in difficult negotiations with the Monetary Fund. International (IMF) and still limping from the revolution that broke out in July 2022 due to the rise in prices.

The minister, Premitha Bandara Tennakoon, has framed this decision in the relative external security that the country enjoys after the record number of troops recruited between 2017 and 2019, when the Sri Lankan Army reached 317,000 soldiers, a figure still higher than the the height of the war against the Tamil rebels.

Tennakoon has now confirmed that the current number of 200,783 troops will be reduced by a third, to 135,000, in 2024, at the beginning of a process that will culminate in 2030, when the number of soldiers is expected to be limited to 100,000 , according to the statement collected by the Sri Lankan news portal NewsCutter.

“Military spending is basically state spending that indirectly stimulates and opens avenues for economic growth by guaranteeing national and human security,” he pointed out in the statement, where he called for an exercise in frankness when relating the impact of maintenance of the Army in the country’s economy.

“Military force and long-term economic development are two sides of the same coin that coexist, but are never openly discussed,” he lamented.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Finance, Shehan Semasingh, has also reiterated this Friday the uncertainty surrounding the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, a lack of specificity that “is exacting a high price from the people of Sri Lanka”.

The secretary has explained that, despite the “significant progress in the rescue process”, reflected in the preliminary signing of an agreement at the personnel level, Sri Lanka has not yet received financial guarantees from its bilateral partners and, as a result, ” has not been able to obtain the approval of the Executive Board of the IMF”, as indicated during the regional economic conference Voice of Global South Summit, collected by the Colombo Page portal.