Rajapaksa on Thursday announced that Ranil Wickremesinghe, a 73-year-old opposition politician, would succeed Rajapaksa’s brother Mahinda, the former prime minister who resigned abruptly this week after his supporters attacked protesters, triggering days of mob violence, looting and arson.
Wickremesinghe was seen as a relatively safe replacement. He had previously served as Sri Lankan prime minister five times. But even before he was sworn in for a sixth term, the news was met by an outpouring of criticism from protesters, opposition politicians and even the country’s religious leaders, foreshadowing more political infighting, and potentially more unrest, for a country that can afford neither.
“Ranil is the quintessence of the professional politician with connections to allegedly corrupt people who protesters are mad about, and this is exactly the kind of insider back-scratching deal that they’re protesting in the streets over,” said Alan Keenan, a consultant at the International Crisis Group consultancy who specializes in Sri Lankan politics.
Speaking to reporters after his swearing in, Wickremesinghe brushed aside criticism that he did not have a popular mandate, comparing himself to Winston Churchill during the Second World War. “How did he become prime minister? Because of the crisis. I’ve done the same,” Wickremesinghe said. “Do you not want food, medicine, fuel and electricity? I will provide that.”
This island nation of 22 million people is entering a crucial period that could determine whether it slips into a humanitarian crisis. Following years of mismanagement and debt-fueled spending, officials announced this month that the country had nearly exhausted its foreign currency, leading to increasingly severe fuel and power shortages, and even difficulty importing medicine.
The country cannot make progress negotiating with foreign lenders to restructure its debt and secure a bailout if the government is in disarray, officials and analysts say.
Wickremesinghe may spark frustration at home, but the political veteran is viewed as a reliable technocrat abroad. The former prime minister, who began his first term in 1993 and served his last stint between 2015 and 2019, is seen as having good relations with India, Japan and the United States, three countries that the Sri Lankan government hopes will offer economic aid.
On Thursday, a prominent Buddhist monk and the Catholic cardinal both criticized the elevation of Wickremesinghe as “unconstitutional.” Several opposition parties called the appointment of a man who was, until recently, seen as Rajapaksa’s rival an unsavory deal to keep the president in power.
“We have a president who has lost the legitimacy of the people and now a prime minister who never had the legitimacy of the people,” said M.A. Sumanthiran, the spokesman of the Tamil National Alliance. “We understand that the country is in dire economic straits and wouldn’t do anything to hamper its revival, but you can’t suppress democracy in the guise of revival.”
Outside the presidential offices, protesters expressed similar frustrations, and held fast to their top demand that Rajapaksa step down.
Shervin Ranatunga, a volunteer at a tent that was handing out free lunches of rice and curry to a long line of protesters and passersby, pointed to all the organizations that had descended on the protest site in recent weeks and set up stations, giving it a festival-like atmosphere. There were Red Cross vans set up for injured demonstrators, a tent for discussing constitutional issues, booths set up by artists and photographers, and a truck manned by young lawyers who offered advice for those in trouble with the authorities.
Even though Colombo was under curfew, the waterfront boulevard was still thronged with people, united in their grievances against the government. A row of Catholic nuns fanned themselves next to robed Buddhist monks. A coalition of labor unions set up a tent next to a group representing the deaf. Across the street were the communists, the disabled veterans and the students.
Dhananjaga Thalawaththa, an engineering student, recalled coming out nearly every day since April 3, when protests began. Like many, he had defied curfew a day prior, despite a public warning from the defense ministry that troops had orders to shoot anyone caught looting or endangering others.
Thalawaththa said he would protest peacefully as long as Rajapaksa remained in office. The elevation of Wickremesinghe “seems like another attempt to stay in power,” he said. “The entire system is not working.”
How one powerful family wrecked a country
by Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post, May 11, 2022
The first part of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s years in power were defined by his ruthless defeat of the long-running Tamil Tiger insurgency; in the latter years, the populist quasi-autocrat, who seemed at times to style himself as an uncrowned warrior king, leaned heavily into majoritarian nationalist politics aimed at courting the votes of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority. A defeat in presidential elections in 2015 seemed to signal a political ebb for the Rajapaksa family, but they came roaring back to power in the wake of the deadly Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in 2019, campaigning on their supposed national security bona fides.
Following weeks of mass protests against his government, as well as deadly violence in the streets on Monday, Rajapaksa was compelled to resign his post as prime minister. His capitulation made him the fourth member of his family to give up a high-powered role in the space of a month — following his brothers Basil and Chamal (now former ministers of finance and irrigation, respectively) and his son Namal (former minister of sports and youth affairs). The attention falls on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the biggest link in a long nepotistic chain.
For days across the country, the largely peaceful demonstrations have pulled in irate Sri Lankans from all walks of life. In Colombo, they gathered at a popular waterfront promenade known as Galle Face and turned it into a kind of Tahrir Square on the Indian Ocean, a carnival of activism replete with tent encampments, makeshift public libraries, and health and food facilities. Their message was clear: They would go only after the Rajapaksas did.
The mood in the country is uneasy: Gotabaya is struggling to hold on politically, urging an interim unity government that few members of the opposition wish to now join as long as he remains in power. All the while, Sri Lankan negotiators are scheduled to begin talks with the International Monetary Fund this week. The country defaulted on its debts last month — a victim, to a certain extent, of the global disruptions sparked by both the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Analysts say the uncertainty around the country’s leadership is clouding any possibility of economic recovery. “The political situation has to be resolved before anything can happen,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, told my colleagues. “You need a credible government. The presidency right now is a poisoned chalice.”
Rajapaksa’s critics would argue that much of that poisoning is his family’s fault. That includes widespread and documented allegations of human rights abuses and war crimes that accompanied the Sri Lankan military’s 2009 offensive against Tamil rebels, where thousands of civilians were killed in the final stages of the war; years of violence toward and intimidation and harassment of journalists and civil society groups; and the stoking of ethno-religious tensions, including the tacit cultivation of orders of extremist militant Buddhist monks, who have launched attacks on the country’s minorities.
The roots of the current crisis, critics argue, predated both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. “No serious observer believed the country was going to be able to pay back the $29 billion in debts it owed over the next five years, or the nearly $7 billion in debt it owed this year,” wrote Amita Arudpragasam in Foreign Policy. “But Sri Lanka’s government, filled with Rajapaksa family members and loyalists, was buttressed by Sinhalese Buddhist supremacists, crony capitalists, the state-owned media, and some influential private media houses. It continued to gaslight its people.”
The vehemence and endurance of the protest movement seems to suggest that gaslighting is no longer working. “The organic growth of the protest and its scale showed that the Rajapaksas were no longer the popular political family that they once were,” wrote Sri Lankan journalist Dilrukshi Handunnetti for the Wire, an Indian online publication. “In addition to calls for collective resignations were demands for forensic audits, recovery of stolen assets and legal action against Rajapaksas. People faulted the family for the island’s state of bankruptcy.”
But she described the protests as a source of hope and solidarity. “This is what a democratic mobilization can look like. … It’s people demanding accountability for corruption, demanding basic rights to dignity,” she said. “This is something that has been very nourishing at a really bad time.”