Sri Lanka: Pres. Rajapaksa to resign after palace stormed

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Sorry to hear about the extent of cost-of-living issues in the UK. Things are getting more expensive around the world, but I remember reading about them in the UK even before the war in Ukraine started. I swear, Russia's invasion saved Boris Johnson from having to resign even earlier than he did.

Careful what you wish for with revolutions though: you may end up with singing in the Baltics – or the French Reign of Terror. Hopefully things don't become even more chaotic in Sri Lanka.

I know people who belong to this community here in Melbourne and they are very fond of taking the kids back to see the motherland. I assume the son is half Canadian though.

No.. he's 100% Canadian and holds no other citizenship from any other country. His mother, my first cousin, was born here - 3rd generation I believe. His father, who immigrated from Sri Lanka, is Also a Canadian citizen I'm 99.99999% sure. I don't think he's still stuck on Permanent Resident status - pretty sure he got his full citizenship many years ago.

My cousin, who passed away a couple years ago now in a car accident, did take a trip to Sri Lanka with her then husband and got to visit his family, see some beautiful temples and government buildings, visited an elephant reserve etc - cool photos and stories.

Sri Lanka isn't on my must-see list, but if life/work took me there I'm sure I'd make the most of it - or if it were a stop on the way to somewhere else I was heading.. like I'd love to see The Maldives someday.

With the sun beating down from directly overhead, I was literally drenched with sweat within ten minutes of leaving my hotel. I did make it as far as the National Museum, which was a mixed bag. .

Some fantastic artefacts, such as traditional theatre masks and ancient noodle presses. But also an anthropology exhibit straight out of the books of "scientific racists" c 1900.

To be fair, Sri Lanka's coastal climate is much the same as the rest of coastal and central India. It's only when you get to the far north of India where the land is more elevated and the humidity drops and the temp is cooler. When the British occupied the island they built retreats in the highlands in central Ceylon (as they used to call it) where it is cool all year around and where Sri Lanka is famous for it's tea plantation.



What anthropology exhibit are you referring to? BTW the island's history is much older than what western historians are willing to give credit for, Read Thor Heyerdahl's adventures in Sri Lanka and Maldvies in the 1960s.

On Saturday 9 July, tens of thousands of ordinary Sri Lankans overcame transport chaos to descend on the capital, Colombo. Police barricades were swept aside like matchsticks, and the masses stood before the steps of the president’s official residence. And then, they surged forward. The masses, in the floodtide of their ‘aragalaya’ (struggle) suddenly overflowed the safe channels that the ruling class had erected to keep them out of politics. Within minutes, thousands of people had taken over the presidential residence. Within hours, the president-in-hiding was forced to name the date of his resignation.

Three months after spontaneous protests erupted demanding the downfall of the president, and exactly two months to the day after the masses ousted his brother, the former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the struggle is on the cusp of achieving its main stated aim: ousting the hated president Gota Rajapaksa.

This is a tremendous victory that has shown the masses their immense power - not just in Sri Lanka, but over the whole globe. Now, the ruling class are scrambling to put in place a government of ‘national unity’ to replace the Rajapaksa dynasty. Its aim will be to use smiling faces to deceive the masses and to rob them of their victory.

The question will quickly be posed: with Gota gone, where next for the aragalaya?

Months of struggle
Over recent months, Sri Lanka has seen a frightful economic collapse. The combination of the crisis of capitalism that erupted with the pandemic, and the stupid mismanagement of the arrogant Rajapaksa clique has plunged the nation into chaos.

The country’s foreign currency reserves have all but evaporated. Without hard cash to import basic goods, Sri Lanka has run out of fuel to run generators, in addition to cooking oil, baby milk, and even basic medicines and paper. In the hot summer weather, long blackouts became the norm. Inflation is officially over 50 percent, but for the most basic goods it is far, far higher.

The unbearable suffering of the masses was what led to the spontaneous eruption of anger in late March demanding the removal of Gota and the entire Rajapaksa dynasty. In April, the struggle escalated to the permanent occupation of Galle Face Green, opposite the president’s office and official residence. For a full month, the people peacefully occupied the green outside the presidential residence, without achieving their aims. And then, on 9 May, a month into the struggle with tiredness setting in, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa attempted to use lumpen gangs to drive the people off the street. But the whip of the counter-revolution only spurred the revolution on. On that day, the people took the first scalp of a Rajapaksa as Mahinda was forced to resign.

But if Gota thought that sacrificing his brother would settle the situation, he was gravely mistaken. Two months have passed since Ranil Wickremesinghe took the top cabinet position in place of Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the situation of the masses has only become more dire.

In mid-May, the government announced that it would default on its debt. Despite one price hike after another, in June, the government announced that the country was essentially out of fuel. Fuel sales for all but emergency vehicles were banned. To eat, people must work. But how can people work without being able to drive to their jobs? For many, the ban was a demand that they starve.

The slightest rumour that fuel was to be delivered at a petrol station led to kilometre-long queues forming. Queuing for a day or even for several days became the norm. These queues have become the regular sites of spontaneous outbursts of anger and of clashes between the army and the people over the past month.

The people arrive in their thousands
Although the permanently established protests had shrunk, it was inevitable that the simmering anger in society would boil over at some point. The people simply cannot go on as before. On 9 July, a boiling point was reached with the monster march in Colombo.

Tens of thousands of people ignored Gota’s latest curfew to descend on the capital. They overcame severe transport difficulties to come to Colombo by any means necessary: by bicycle; on the back of fuel trucks; or clinging to the outside of trains (an increasingly common sight as public transport is overwhelmed in the absence of fuel). There were jubilant scenes as trains passed each other, each laden with thousands of men and women, waving flags, all heading to Colombo.

Thousands more who were unable to make the trip to Colombo protested in cities across the country, from Kandy and Kotagala in the Central Province, to Kurunegala in North Western Province, to Jaffna in the Tamil-majority North.

Whilst the protests were met with tear gas, water cannon and vicious attacks from the security forces - particularly the hated STF who carried out a brutal attack against a group of journalists - elsewhere it was clear that the mood of anger had even infected some sections of the police and army. In one location, a police officer was recorded throwing off his helmet and joining the chanting marchers, whilst elsewhere a group of soldiers were seen marching through a jubilant crowd with flags flying overhead.

Dramatic events
These scenes were the prelude to dramatic events as the masses stormed the presidential residence on Saturday afternoon. In every revolution, there arrives a point when the masses lose their fear. Having braved humiliation, and the bullets, batons and tear gas of the regime, they now stood at the threshold of the building that they were forbidden from entering. In a mighty surge, they stormed the presidential residence.

After a period of jubilation and chanting, the masses looked around and found themselves in the lap of luxury. One apparently on-duty police officer sat at the president’s piano to play a tune. In the open courtyard, dozens of protesters cooled off in the president’s private swimming pool.

Others took turns jumping on the four-poster bed that the president had presumably slept in until very recently. In the garage, the people found a whole fleet of luxury cars - all of course, with tanks filled with the petrol that the masses were banned from buying even at extortionate prices. In one room, the people even found stacks of several tens of million rupees, which Gota had presumably left behind as he hastily took flight from the people!

Meanwhile, dozens of ordinary citizens took turns to get their picture taken in Gota’s seat. Gota himself was nowhere to be seen, although rumours circulated of his attempted flight from the country.

Up the road, another large crowd stormed the official Temple Trees residence of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, whilst his own private residence was burned down under strange circumstances a few hours later.

In a state of panic, the leaders of all the parties - from the governing SLPP to the opposition parties including the SJB - came together to resolve the crisis. At their behest, the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe offered to tender his resignation in favour of an ‘All-Party Government’. By evening, Gota himself had promised to resign by Wednesday 13 July.

That night, outside the occupied Temple Trees building, the masses sang ‘Bella Ciao’ - the song of the Italian anti-fascist partisan movement of the 1940s, which is today being revived as a song of revolt all over the world.

‘National unity’
This is clearly a massive victory for the masses in struggle. But if Gota does indeed resign tomorrow as he has promised, this only poses new questions for the aragalaya: the first of which is, who or what will replace him? Discussions are now underway between politicians over just that question. The name of the speaker of the house has been mooted as an interim President, as has that of the leader of the official opposition, the SJB’s Sajith Premadasa.

Some from within the movement, such as the lawyers’ Bar Association, have attempted to sow illusions in a “national unity” government to bridge the crisis: to reform the constitution; to negotiate an IMF bailout; and to prepare new elections.

But whomever parliament chooses, on the basis of the capitalist system to which all the parties in parliament are intimately tied, the crisis in Sri Lanka will only deepen. The masses have shown a healthy scepticism to all the parties from the very beginning of the aragalaya. From the beginning, the slogan “Go Home 225” has been raised - i.e. go home all 225 MPs in the parliament, who are seen by the majority as just as rotten as the ruling clique.

The crisis that Sri Lanka is traversing is at bottom a capitalist crisis. And far from easing off, it is only becoming deeper. Two years after the most severe crisis in capitalism’s history, the world is once more heading towards a deep recession. Combined with spiralling inflation, which is deepening the debt burden of poor and so-called ‘emerging’ economies, a new collapse of exports will only further aggravate the depletion of foreign currency reserves. And this will take place not in one or two countries, but across entire swathes of the globe.

As an analyst at the Financial Times explained:

“Sri Lanka right now is shaping up to be the canary in the coal mine for what could become a global crisis of large numbers of developing countries saddled by a lot of debt, unable to pay this debt…”

Countries as far removed as Argentina and El Salvador, Egypt and Ghana, Pakistan and Laos are facing potential bankruptcy.

Bloomberg has warned that a “historic cascade of defaults is coming for emerging markets”, and has named 19 countries where yields on government bonds are in excess of 10 percent, an indication that those countries are in deep debt distress.

These countries are home to 900 million people and owe a combined total of $237 billion to foreign bondholders, or almost a fifth of emerging market debt denominated in dollars, euros or yen. This is a stick of dynamite in debt markets that is set to go off just as the world slides towards recession.

The deepening crisis all over the world will force the masses to take the road of revolution in one country after another. The Sri Lankan masses have set an example in terms of how to struggle. Their example will be replicated in one country after another in the coming period. But whilst Gota is gone, the Sri Lankan ruling class remains in the saddle.

A government of ‘national unity’ will rule in their interests. It will work hand-in-glove with the IMF in an attempt to restore economic equilibrium at the expense of the working and middle classes. From this government, all of the parties and institutions of Sri Lankan capitalism will emerge utterly discredited. The masses will be forced to take their aragalaya onto the streets once more. In the course of their struggle, through their partial conquests and setbacks, broader and broader layers will begin to draw the conclusion that their suffering can only be ended by overthrowing capitalism itself.

But to achieve this, the mass of workers in Sri Lanka need their own political voice, their own party that can explain that what is required is a socialist revolution. The wealth of the rich must be taken over for the benefit of the working people. The masses who took over the luxurious palace of the president have seen that the wealth is there. The problem is that it is in the wrong hands.

I'd been in Maharashtra, which isn't exactly a cool place, but there's big shady plane trees and fig trees lining the streets, and that makes a lot of diffence.

The anthropology exhibit was about ancient hominids, and repeated the long-discredited idea that different modern races are descended from different hominid species.

I'm guessing the Chinese government won't be wiping off the debts owed by Sri Lanka to the CCP?

A lot of spurious and extravagant spending borrowing money from the Chinese to buy weapons and then build sky scrapers, trains, roads and highways, A lot of the contracts with China involved huge sums of money pocketed by the Rajapakse family into offshore accounts.

A three-way contest between Acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Dullas Alahapperuma, a rebel leader of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) who is backed by the Opposition, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the Leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) will see Sri Lanka’s Parliament elect a new President Wednesday to replace Gotabaya Rajapaksa who fled the country and resigned after public anger over the country’s worst economic crisis exploded on the streets 10 days ago.

On the eve of the vote, Opposition leader and Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) candidate Sajith Premadasa decided to withdraw from the Presidential race and support Alahapperuma.

Premadasa, son of President Ranasinghe Premadasa who was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber in 1993, said his decision was made for the “greater good” of the country.

In a Twitter post, Premadasa said, “For the greater good of my country that I love and the people I cherish I hereby withdraw my candidacy for the position of President. @sjbsrilanka and our alliance and our opposition partners will work hard towards making @DullasOfficialvictorious.”

He also reached out to India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “Irrespective of who becomes the President of Sri Lanka tomorrow it is my humble and earnest request to Hon. PM Shri @narendramodi, to all the political parties of India and to the people of India to keep helping mother Lanka and its people to come out of this disaster.”

Alahapperuma, who belongs to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s party SLPP and was information minister for mass media, has emerged as the Opposition’s candidate.

Dissanayake belongs to JVP, one of the smaller parties in the Opposition fold. His party has supported the protest movement as well.

Wickremesinghe, who has been Prime Minister six times now, is the ruling SLPP candidate. It has the numbers to pull it off unless Alahapperuma is able to substantially split the party’s votes.

SLPP chairman G L Peiris, former Foreign Minister, said the party will vote for Alahapperuma and the appointment of Sajith Premadasa as Prime Minister.

The nominations were accepted by Parliament Tuesday. Lawmakers will vote through a secret ballot Wednesday morning, and the results are expected by late afternoon.

In the House of 225 seats, 113 seats in favour of a candidate will decide the elections. All eyes are on the split within the ruling SLPP which may tilt the scales in favour of Alahapperuma. But Dissanayake may be the spoiler.

Wickremesinghe will also be looking to split votes in the Opposition camp, especially in the Premadasa-led SJB.

The SLPP youth wing has announced that it will support the decision by the SLPP faction led by Dinesh Gunawardena to elect Wickremesinghe as President.

One interesting aspect to watch out for will be whether former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and his son Namal, who have been in hiding, also show up in Parliament for voting Wednesday.

At the Aragalaya protest site at Galle Face green, the mood was sombre. Opposed to Wickremesinghe’s candidature, many protesters said if he wins the elections, they will intensify their protests.

“We want change in the system, and don’t want Ranil as President,” said protester Lasantha, a 27-year-old wearing a ‘Go Ranil Go’ hair band.

What I heard was that the local people welcomed borrowing from China at the beginning. But there was a riot when the leased port was implemented.

I am not aware of any riots over the leasing of a port? Are you talking about Trincomalee harbor?

The chinese support for the Sinhalese government was strange since the Tamil Tiger separatists were labelled communists.

I assume SW was talking about Hambantota Port, most of which was leased out in 2017 for 99 years to China Merchants Ports (which is primarily state-owned) for US$1.1 billion. This unsurprisingly led to protests from locals – and counterprotests, too.

More information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepar ... dc4abe13dd