In a dramatic turn of events, this morning Sri Lanka’s parliamentarians elected a new head of state: the man nicknamed the “wily fox”, Ranil Wickremesinghe. This follows months of chaos in the Sri Lankan capital. Amidst widespread outrage over a devastating financial crisis, former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa secretly fled the island last week and is now reported to be hiding out in Singapore. However, despite change at the top, trepidation remains.
Wickremesinghe remains deeply unpopular, having failed to be elected in his own constituency less than two years ago. He reconciled with his former rival Rajapaksa months ago to become prime minister again, and to many Wickremesinghe’s ascent proves exactly why politics here remains broken. This may be a case of replacing one ultra-nationalist figurehead with another.
Rajapaksa’s spectacular ousting was the climax to months of protest. As a journalist I had covered some large protests but this was by far the biggest. The streets were packed for miles around, with crowds demanding Rajapaksa resign. Heavily-armed soldiers stood on guard but within hours they were outnumbered. Thousands burst into Rajapaksa’s official presidential residence. Dozens posed for selfies as they took a dip in his private pool. The images were unprecedented. Just days later, having fled fearing prosecutions for financial crimes and for war crimes, Rajapaksa finally resigned.
When he came into power in 2019, Rajapaksa pledged to turn the island into “Vistas of prosperity and splendour” — the title of his election manifesto. The opposite happened, as he took a series of policy decisions that quickly led to financial ruin. Maintaining a massive military ate away at government finances. Despite the pandemic slowing down global tourist arrivals, Rajapaksa also insisted on a series of ill-planned and populist tax cuts that hit government income further.
Meanwhile, his so-called “Buddhist philosophy” and drive for “self-sufficiency” led to an abrupt ban on chemical fertilisers, badly impacting much of Sri Lanka’s rural population.
Sri Lanka, meanwhile, had a set of expensive international loans to repay, including to China, which had helped finance a deadly military offensive that Rajapaksa oversaw as well as a series of failed construction projects led by his family. In May this year, a debt repayment of US$78 million was due and for the first time in history, Sri Lanka defaulted. The Sri Lankan rupee plunged to become the worst-performing currency in the world. Inflation, which was already at a record high, soared to above 50 per cent. Basic goods imports stopped and the island ground to a halt.
Ordinary people are suffering as a result. Hospitals have warned that medicine supplies are running low. Widespread malnutrition is looming.
Despite the picturesque scenery and delectable food, Sri Lanka is a deeply troubled island, with a history of brutal violence. Hundreds of miles away from Colombo in the north-east, a region which ethnic Tamils have historically inhabited, opposition to the Rajapaksa regime started long before the current wave of protests in the south.
Decades of conflict with the Sri Lankan government, which has been dominated by ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists, have devastated the region. I come from Mullaitivu, a district that has borne the brunt of that conflict. Thirteen years ago, Gotabaya Rajapaksa personally oversaw much of its destruction.
As defence secretary, and with his older brother Mahinda then president, Rajapaksa launched a military offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for an independent Tamil state in the north-east. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils, including me, were trapped, while the Sri Lankan army unleashed bullets, bombs and abuses that to this day remain unaccounted for. Medicines and food were embargoed and more than 140,000 people were killed in what is now being recognised as a genocide. Many of my friends and family did not survive the carnage.
The events have formed the basis of several UN reports and resolutions, all of which have called for accountability and justice for the crimes that Rajapaksa spearheaded. But it was this military conquest the strongman used to sell his Sinhala nationalism to the masses in the south and propel himself to the presidency in 2019. He pledged to rule based on a “Buddhist philosophy” and build a “disciplined, virtuous, and lawful society”.
For the Tamils who overwhelmingly voted against him, we sensed things would be bleak. In the north-east, I have seen first-hand how the economic disaster has us resorting to measures that we were forced to take during 30 years of war. A lack of cooking gas for stoves, for instance, means that homes now collect firewood or coconut husks. These are struggles that we are used to, but in the Sinhala south, they were new. And as pressure from the crisis grew, a population that once lauded him as a hero, erupted.
But many fear the ousting of Rajapaksa will simply be a changing of the façade, with cycles of violence and instability doomed to repeat themselves. At the protest in Colombo last week, I spoke to a Muslim man. We were surrounded by protesters, the vast majority of whom were Sinhalese and many of whom would have voted for Rajapaksa in the past. It was his economics, not his politics, that had irked them. Many failed to see the connection between the two. We cautiously watched as the protesters confronted soldiers and pushed down barricades — something we would never have dared to do. He and I knew the consequences that our people had faced all too well.
He told me that his friends had chosen not to wear their distinctive Muslim caps to the protest that day. “We don’t want them to be able to easily identify us as Muslim,” he quietly said. That fear remains with Wickremesinghe in power. Sri Lanka’s economic crisis will take months, if not years, to correct. However, the political ideology at the root of it, and the repression it brings to people like me, looks set to last even longer.
