40 - Putin-like Compatriots, VI: the Rapacious Rajapaksas
Sri Lankans of many backgrounds and social classes went on strike yesterday, continuing today. The front story is that the Serendipitous Isle (as it was once called) has run out of foreign exchange and, in so many respects, is virtually bankrupt. That means that Sri Lanka cannot import food or anything very much else. Most, and particularly poorer, Sri Lankans are going hungry and becoming jobless. That is reason enough for a massive general strike, capping weeks of incessant protesting against the autocratic government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his brother Mahinda, the prime minister, and yet another brother, Basil, who served as finance minister until the entire ministerial cabinet resigned on April 4. The brothers have long run a repressive, corrupt, regime that has now driven their island nation into penury. President Rajapaksa today said that he would summon an all-parties new government, responding to the protests.
Most of Sri Lanka’s 22 million people in a country the size of the American state of Georgia today cannot readily find imported essentials such as fuel for cars, paraffin for cooking, milk, foodstuffs, and life-saving medicines. The availability of generated electric power is haphazard, and weakening. Every one, except possibly the ruling political class, is doing without, frustrated, and hungry. Hence, yesterday’s massive strike, with outraged, frustrated, and hungry Sri Lankans in their tens of thousands taking to the streets of Colombo, Kandy, and Batticaloa yesterday, continuing into today. Sri Lanka’s government today said that it would double its VAT sales tax, potentially worsening the economic crisis.
As The Washington Post reported: “Business districts in the capital, Colombo, were closed, and bankers, teachers and other professionals held parades and joined the main protest site opposite the president’s office where demonstrators have gathered for weeks. Doctors and nurses have said they will support the strike with demonstrations during their lunch break.” Sri Lanka owes and cannot repay $7 billion for borrowings by the Rajapaksas to support ambitious pre-Covid 19 national expansion projects, plus decisions to switch entirely to organic farming. The banning of chemical fertilizer imports and crop failures have added to the consequent disappearance of domestically grown food. And Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cut off Sri Lanka (and dozens of other developing world countries) from customary grain suppliers.
That front story is of immediate concern to all Sri Lankans. But there is an equally cogent backstory that helps to explain why strikers and protestors chant “Gotabya Go” and voice enmity against the family cabal that has controlled the country since 2005. Last year the UN’s Human Rights Council, for instance, critiqued Sri Lanka’s many abuses under the reigns of the brothers Rajapaksa.
The Rajapaksas tightly control a Buddhist-majority country that has become more and more repressed since Mahinda Gojapaksa became the nation’s president in 2005, promising to end corruption, improve living conditions, and end a radical and dangerous ethnic insurgency by Tamil-speaking fighters who had paralyzed much of the nation since the 1980s and made about a third of the nation’s cities and towns unsafe. Sri Lanka then and now is demographically dominated by a Sinhalese-speaking community, living mostly in southern and western Sri Lanka, that comprises 75 percent of the nation’s citizens. Thirteen percent are Tamils, historically resident in north and closely related to the citizens of Tamil Nadu state in nearby southern India. Another 7 percent are Muslims, predominantly Sinhalese-speaking, and resident largely in the east.
Political and religious freedoms have been highly constrained by the Rajapaksas’ rule. Despite a long, if tumultuous, democratic past after a century of British colonial rule (ending in 1948) of what was then Ceylon, Sri Lanka was noted before the reign of the Rajapaksas for its corruption, but for otherwise enjoying an open parliamentary democracy for the majority of its citizens. There was little ethnic controversy under the British, but that era of peace eroded within the first decade of Sri Lanka’s independence under Sinhala-speaking leaders.
Because it was a relatively prosperous and peaceful multi-ethnic nation beginning its post-colonial era with rather more political equipoise than nearby India and Pakistan, the new Sri Lanka was considered a model state. But its 1948 constitution, written by Sinhalese without much input from Tamils, lacked formal protection for minorities. Soon, the majority government deprived some of the more recently arrived Tamils from India of citizenship and the right to vote. Then, in a deeper blow, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, seeking votes from Sinhalese, in 1956 declared Sinhala the nation’s official language (in place of English), thus immediately marginalizing the Tamil-speaking minority. After Bandaraike’s assassination in 1959, these anti-Tamil initiatives were pursued even more ruthlessly, and for electoral purposes, by Srimavo Bandaranaike, his wife and successor. Tamils lost positions in the civil service and, subsequently, their ability freely to attend Sri Lanka’s leading universities. Just as South Africa was establishing an apartheid state, so Sri Lanka was pursuing similar policies regarding the Tamil minority.
But only in 1976 were there widespread calls for a Tamil autonomous state within the country. Two years later, a very young Velupillai Prabhakaran established the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – a Tamil guerilla movement that, especially after 1983 and for the next twenty-six years created havoc in (mostly) northern and eastern Sri Lanka as it pursued a violent and increasingly vicious war for independence. Although its hard-core militants numbered no more than 10,000 at the movement’s peak, and although middle-class Tamils largely criticized its tactics and the ruthless control that Prabhakaran exercised over the insurgency, the LTTE was a formidable fighting force with total hegemony across the Jaffna peninsula that juts north from the island toward India. More than 90,000 Sri Lankans lost their lives during the long years of combat. Many others died as a result of LTTE hit and run bombings in Colombo, the distant capital, and in other prominent Sinhalese cities.
No Sinhalese army could conquer the LTTE until Mahinda Rajapaksa became president in 2005. His brother Gotabaya (now president) became minister of defense. Their mutual willingness to bomb and strafe the LTTE, and an equal determination to take few prisoners and to end the insurgent threat, accomplished what previous military campaigns against the rebels had failed to do. In 2009, their soldiers took the last Tamil fortified towns in the north. Most Sri Lankans cheered in relief, and so did the rest of the world.
But both Rajapaksas approved atrocities against Tamils suspected of loyalties to LTTE, punished even Sinhalese critics, and increasingly built an effective autocracy. Mahinda remained president for two terms until 2015. Then he, and other several other family members, returned to power in 2019, after a major bomb-fueled massacre in eastern Sri Lanka turned voters back in fear to the Rajapaksa clan.
Until Covid-19 struck the world, Sri Lanka’s exports of tea and reliance on tourism seemed to bring reliable incomes to the island. But Gotabaya Rajapaksa cut some strange deals with China, giving up control of a major harbor in the process, and plunged Sri Lanka into debt to international lenders. His lofty notion to turn all farming organic was poorly planned and executed, too.
Whether the protesters will force the ruling clan from office, and whether Sri Lanka can recover from its economic debacle via IMF loans and support from India, is uncertain. But what is certain is that autocrats rely too much, like Putin, on their own instincts and predilections. Trouble follows, sometimes even their removal and demise.
Sri Lanka, like Russia, deserves better.
Until Monday….