Sri Lankans are continuing to demand President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation, with thousands rallying in the capital, Colombo, saying neither he nor members of his family could be trusted to steer the country out of its deepening economic crisis, Aljazeera reported.
At the Galle Face Green on Colombo’s waterfront on Saturday, students, teachers, lawyers, actors and architects – many of whom said they were protesting for the first time – chanted “madman Gota” and “Go home Gota”, in a reference to the president’s nickname, as they gathered under a blistering sun.
They waved the Sri Lankan flag and held up hand-written placards in Sinhalese and English that carried messages such as “No more corrupted politicians” and “Save Sri Lanka from the Rajapaksa family”.
“This is a do-or-die moment,” said 29-year-old Buddhi Karunatne, who works in advertising.
“For the first time, people of all kinds of political and social beliefs are coming together, with non-negotiable demands for the president to resign and hand over power to people who are capable of getting us out of this socioeconomic crisis.”
The display of anger marked a stunning reversal for Rajapaksa, 72, who won the presidency in 2019 by a big margin and whose party went on to secure a two-thirds majority in the parliament less than a year later. Those victories allowed Rajapaksa to appointhis brother Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister and amend the constitution to strengthen the president’s powers, according to Aljazeera.
He also went on to hand three other Rajapaksa family members key positions in his cabinet, including the finance, agriculture and sports portfolios.
At the time, many voters said they believed Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa would boost security and stabilise the country following a spate of ISIL-inspired bombings that killed at least 250 people in 2019. That is partly because the brothers had overseen the military defeat of Tamil separatists in 2009 after 26 years of bloody conflict. Mahinda was then president and Gotabaya, his younger brother, the defence secretary, Aljazeera reported.
But instead of improving things, the Rajapaksas “have proved incompetent and incapable of taking the right decisions”, said one protester at Saturday’s rally. “Gota simply can’t run a country,” said another. “He doesn’t have a brain to deal with this kind of crisis.”
