Ranil Wickremesinghe is Sri Lanka’s interim president by parliamentary vote, after an unprecedented popular protest toppled the administration of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa. But while appointing an interim president may help the country manage some of its staggering debt, it is unlikely to bring about the kind of change protesters are calling for.
Gotabaya appointed Wickremesinghe prime minister in May after his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned amid protests. Now Wickremesinghe, who served as prime minister five previous times and was also finance minister during his last term, will serve as president until the country holds a popular vote in 2024.
Wickremesinghe’s closeness to the Rajapaksa clan — Gotabaya and Mahinda, who was president from 2005 to 2015; his brother Basil, the former Minister of Finance; his brother Chamal, who has held various positions; and Mahinda’s son Namal, who served as sports minister under Gotabaya, has made him unpopular with protesters.
This with good reason; On Friday, just two days after Wickremesinghe won the presidency, police and security forces carried out a violent pre-dawn raid on the main protest camp at Galle Face, Amnesty International reported.
According to the report, the police, special forces and the army organized “a massive joint operation” at the GotaGoGama camp in the Presidential Secretariat, the office of the President of Sri Lanka. Protesters have been staying in tents there since April and were due to vacate parts of the camp on Friday; however, at around 1:00 local time, security forces descended on the camp without warning, having blocked the camp’s exits.
“At the time there were 200 to 300 protesters, I would say,” an eyewitness told Amnesty. “Suddenly [the forces] came out of [behind] the barricades and completely destroyed and torn tents. There were enough police and military to flood the area. The police and especially the army beat peaceful protesters.”
Amnesty has reported at least 50 injured and nine arrested, although activist and lawyer Swasthika Arulingam, who has been involved in protests in Colombo since March, told Vox that only eight were arrested, all of whom had were rescued as of noon EST Saturday.
“We have to reorganize the fight,” Arulingam told Vox. “People are shaken.”
Although the protesters achieved the unthinkable – ousting the Rajapaksas from the leadership despite nearly two decades in power – concerns remain over Wickremesinghe’s ties to the previous administration.
Financial stability requires political stability
Wickremesinghe is a long-time political actor who has held many positions in the Sri Lankan government. Although he is the head of the United National Party (UNP), the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) of the Rajapaksas supported him in the parliamentary elections to secure his post as interim President of Sri Lanka.
Wickremesinghe’s top priority as president is, or should be, helping the country refinance its massive and unsustainable debt and secure loans from the International Monetary Fund, as well as implementing crucial economic reforms to ensure the economy remains stable in the coming decades. “These are reforms that Sri Lanka has been talking about for decades, it has not been able to implement them, but now they will have to be implemented,” said Constantino Xavier, the Center’s Foreign and Security Policy Fellow for the Social and Economic Progress of New Delhi. and a non-resident fellow at the India Project at the Brookings Institution said on the Brookings podcast The Current on Friday. “Reforms regarding the labor sector, regarding public sector companies that still have monopolies in various sectors, from energy [to] the port sector of Sri Lanka”.
Wickremesinghe, Xavier said, is “the only individual who has emerged as satisfying different actors,” including the IMF and Sri Lanka’s western creditors, who are instrumental in helping Sri Lanka refinance its debt. “In general, Ranil Wickremesinghe is seen as quite a popular technocrat, especially among the Western countries who play an influential role here,” Xavier said, although he acknowledged that Wickremesinghe is deeply unpopular with the protesters.
Despite his unpopularity, however, Sri Lanka needs some political stability to continue negotiations with the IMF, the previous session of which concluded at the end of June while Gotabaya was still at the helm. “I think getting a president means restarting the process immediately; I think it will be top of the list,” Tamanna Salikuddin, director of South Asia programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told Vox last week.
On Monday, before being elected interim president and just after declaring a state of emergency, Wickremesinghe announced that talks with the IMF were nearing completion and that “discussions on assistance with foreign countries were also progressing “, Reuters reported last week, citing a press. release from Wickremesinghe’s office.
The protest movement began with disastrous financial policy under the Rajapaksas, built on their rapid consolidation of power and dismantling of democratic institutions, as Xavier explained on Friday’s podcast. “They have a politically centralized power that has brought some benefits: obviously, that the country has been run with a strong, for some, authoritarian authority and a very determined governance, but at the same time also the weakening of critical institutions like the Central. Bank of Sri Lanka,” said The Current host Adrianna Pitta. “So when you spend progressively over 10 to 20 years weakening these governance structures, and I mentioned the Central Bank of Sri Lanka […] because it is really the heart of the financial crisis of the country that has contracted loans without much scrutiny on the sustainability of the refinancing mechanisms”.
While addressing the roughly $51 billion in debt that Sri Lanka owes is the first priority for its government, looking forward it is unclear how Sri Lanka can build a sustainable economy when its tourism industry is decimated by the Covid 19 and its agricultural sector due to failed policies.
“There has been one body blow after another,” Salikuddin said, referring not only to Covid-19 but also to a series of 2019 attacks on churches celebrating Easter and Russia’s war on Ukraine “Now, with the collapse, there are countries around the world issuing safety travel advisories, so I don’t see tourism coming back anytime soon, at the same rates that they expect.”
Will the Rajapaksas face justice?
Despite the turmoil that Sri Lankans have endured under Gotabaya and his family, mainly lack of medicine, basic food supplies and fuel, as well as a disastrous ban on importing chemical fertilizers, which decimated Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector Lanka, the Rajapaksas and their cronies may never be held to account.
They have so far avoided culpability for alleged human rights abuses during the tail end of the 30-year civil war between ethnic Tamil militants fighting for a homeland in northern Sri Lanka and the country’s Sinhalese majority. Mahinda was president in 2009 when the war ended, and Gotabaya was his defense minister; During his time in this role, in the final months of the war, according to a UN panel report, the Sri Lankan military was alleged to have committed atrocities such as sexual violence, enforced disappearances and killing of Tamil civilians , claims the Sri Lankan government denied at the time.
“I think it’s really interesting to think about how the Rajapaksas came to power,” Salikuddin told Vox. “They crushed—with many allegations of human rights violations and war crimes—crushed the Tamils, and that brought them to power in this wave of Sinhalese nationalism and Buddhist nationalism. So they could say to most Buddhist nationalists: “Look, we ended this 30-year civil war. We won.’ And the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists were fine looking the other way.”
However, for Tamil and other marginalized minorities, “I think the wounds still exist,” Salikuddin told Vox. “There has never been any truth and reconciliation, there never has been [addressing] of all the missing persons, or of the war crimes of the Rajapaksas”.
Gotabaya is currently in Singapore, but only temporarily. So far, he has not applied for or been granted asylum, the Straits Times reports; so it’s unclear how long he plans to stay.
Mahinda and his son Namal, the former sports minister who Bloomberg says is preparing for a future in political leadership, will not leave Sri Lanka, an unnamed aide told Al Jazeera last week. Meanwhile, Basil, the former finance minister and brother of Mahinda and Gotabaya, was turned away by officials at the airport, according to Bloomberg.
In the immediate term, while the protests have been significant, sustained and have produced some victories, “much of what we have seen in terms of protests in Colombo and the international media is actually a very urban progressive elite that is in the streets, this is asking for a fundamental reset of the country,” said Xavier, adding that “the majority of the Sri Lankan electorate, I would venture, is still behind the Rajapaksas. This is the conservative, rural and southern vote of the majority ethnic group called the Sinhalese group. So there is no solution in Sri Lanka without this popular support, especially when the very painful period of reforms will begin in a few months.”
Furthermore, the fact that the crackdown has already begun two days into Wickremesinghe’s tenure, despite the protests being largely peaceful, does not bode well for the future. When asked if he thought the Rajapaksa…