Sri Lanka Protesters Demand President Resign in Los Angeles, New York

Gotabaya Rajapaksa
JOHN ANGELILLO / AFP
Frances Martel

Protesters in Los Angeles, California, and Staten Island, New York, joined hundreds at home in Sri Lanka this week to demand that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, resign amid catastrophic shortages of most basic goods.

Sri Lanka has experienced a collapse in its currency and severe shortages of food, basic medical supplies, gasoline, and electricity that intensified greatly in the past month. The government has imposed daily power outages for as long as 13 hours a day, and hospitals have begun canceling surgeries due to a lack of anesthetics and other critical medications.

The Rajapaksa brothers – which include two others, former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa and former Irrigation Minister Chamal Rajapaksa – have been a decisive force in Sri Lankan politics for decades. Mahinda Rajapaksa served as president from 2005 to 2019 and presided over the end of the 26-year-old civil war in 2009, cementing the family’s dominance in politics.

Protests, some of them violent, have erupted throughout Sri Lanka demanding the government propose some solutions to the widespread shortages or resign. Last week, hundreds of protesters attempted to storm the presidential residence in Colombo, the national capital, prompting police violence and dozens of arrests and injuries.

The entire Sri Lankan cabinet, except for Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa but including the other two brothers, resigned on Sunday. Ali Sabry, appointed finance minister following the mass resignation, also resigned from his position less than 24 hours after obtaining the job.

In Los Angeles, protesters organized this week in front of the home of the president’s son, Manoj Rajapaksa, demanding the son pressure his father to resign, according to Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror. Manoj lives in the city and is reportedly an American citizen.

“The protester [sic] said that President Gotabaya had to go down and his money had to come back. The protester said that people in Los Angeles are with Sri Lankans,” the Mirror relayed.

Videos on social media showed a congregation of Sri Lankans and allies in Los Angeles on Sunday demanding an end to the crisis in the country and for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to accept responsibility for the collapse of the country.

The Daily Mirror posted images on Monday of a similar protest on Staten Island, New York, where protesters accused the current government of widespread corruption and demanded consequences for those responsible.

Staten Island is believed to boast a population of about 5,000 Sri Lankan people, one of the biggest in the country. It is home to the Sri Lankan Art and Cultural Museum.

Opposition voices in Sri Lankan politics have escalated their condemnation of the Rajapaksa family at home in light of both the shortages and the protests. In a column on Monday, Sanka Chandima Abayawardena of the government-unfriendly Colombo Telegraph lamented that “every area of social services” in Sri Lanka “has been in crisis for decades,” but that chronic mismanagement and corruption under the Rajapaksas had essentially turned the country into a failed state.

“Sri Lanka is facing a century of humiliation and shame as the Rajapaksa family is selling the island off to foreign powers to stay in power,” Abayawardena wrote. “Sri Lanka is in deep economic trouble. Sri Lanka is going down the same road as Lebanon and Ukraine have both gone before her.”

“The current debt crisis and balance of payment is just the tip of the iceberg. Every area of social services has been in crisis for decades,” the columnist observed. “Consequences of long ignored structural issues inherited from pre-independent Sri Lanka, exacerbated by decades of misguided policies compound by exploitative nature of our social structures and corruption, are causing a general collapse of the state.”

By February, the collapse of the Sri Lankan rupee had expanded the failure of government services into a daily struggle for many Sri Lankans to afford food.

“In February, essential food inflation rose by 25% and overall inflation is close to 18%, while people have been forced to queue for hours to buy fuel, amid rocketing prices,” Sky News reported last week. “Since the beginning of March, the Sri Lankan rupee has fallen by almost 45% against the US dollar and its foreign exchange reserves have fallen to crisis levels.”

Gasoline lines have become so long and the supply so unstable that local outlets have reported murders while citizens were waiting to fill their cars.

In addition to mismanagement, protesters accuse the Rajapaksa family of extreme corruption, including the theft of public money that has resulted in a lack of funds to provide for the people. Foreign currency shortages have resulted in the government not being able to purchase imported goods like food and medicine, and, as Sri Lanka is a “democratic socialist” country, no private enterprises exist that can better perform this task. Sri Lanka’s official name is the “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.”

By the end of the week, hundreds were clamoring to storm Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidential estate. The government responded with tear gas and water cannons, accusing unspecified “organized” criminal elements of staging the protest. Opposition leaders condemned the government for blaming alleged criminal and terrorist groups for the protests rather than addressing the concerns.

“This incident can be described as a result of the collapse of the current political structure,” former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who endured his own power struggle with Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2019 that culminated in members of parliament throwing chili powder in each other’s eyes, said last week. “The government has failed to solve the problems that are plaguing the citizens of Sri Lanka. The Opposition has also failed to uphold their responsibility. The government is blaming various groups for the incident, but they must present evidence to support these claims.”

Perhaps as a response to the protests, the Rajapaksa government announced this week that the daily scheduled blackouts would only last six and a half hours between April 5 and 8, as opposed to the 13-hour power cuts last week. The shortened time without electricity did not appear to have any effect on the protest movement, as college students in Colombo surrounded Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s home on Tuesday afternoon, marching and chanting anti-government slogans.

The Catholic clergy of Sri Lanka also joined the movement on Tuesday, engaging in a silent march in Colombo demanding an end to corruption. Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith participated in the event.

‘The people are calling for the President and the Parliament to resign. The people also want back the money that was stolen,” said Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini, who attended the protest, told Sri Lanka’s News 1st.

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