Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa regime had the “failings of abusive political leaders around the world” wrote The Observer in its editorial this week, as it highlighted the island’s “long road to recovery”.
Read the full text of the editorial here.
See extracts below.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his brother Mahinda, who preceded him as president, and another brother, Basil, who was appointed finance minister, consolidated their power over a pyre of dead bodies – the thousands of mostly Tamil victims of the long-running civil war they brought to an atrocious conclusion in 2009. War crimes committed during that dreadful time remain unpunished.
Like unscrupulous populists and nationalists everywhere, the Rajapaksas exploited divisions stemming from economic insecurity, prejudice and plain ignorance, setting the Sinhalese Buddhist majority against the mostly Hindu Tamil and Muslim minorities. Rather than heal the wounds caused by the separatist war, they played upon them. After the Easter Sunday Islamist extremist attacks in 2019, they repeated the exercise.
Brutality, cupidity, stupidity, iniquity: the too common failings of abusive political leaders around the world, and the Rajapaksas had them all. Sri Lanka was heading for economic meltdown. By early 2022, the country owed $51bn in foreign debt and was running out of dollars. In May, it defaulted. Fuel, basic foodstuffs and medicines grew desperately scarce. Hence the uprising on the streets.