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Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Politics

Real winners of Sri Lanka’s election: A people emboldened to force change

Supporters of Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake cheer outside the president's office as he arrives to be sworn in as Sri Lanka’s tenth president in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, September 23, 2024 [Eranga Jayawardena/ AP Photo]

Colombo, Sri Lanka — Transport a Sri Lankan citizen from the early 1990s to the past week of the island’s politics, and you may just break their brain.

Back then, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the Marxist outfit that the country’s new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, now leads, was reviled in swaths of southern Sri Lanka for having twice attempted violent revolution. Between 1987 and 1989, the JVP unleashed new horrors upon a nation already rent by ethnic war in the north.

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