The vagueness remains, Sunday, July 10, in Sri Lanka where President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to resign next week, after being forced to flee his residence invaded by the crowd. Sri Lankan opposition political parties are due to meet on Sunday to agree on a new government.
The United States urged the country’s future new leaders to “work quickly” solutions to restore economic stability and address popular discontent over deteriorating economic conditions, “including shortages of electricity, food and fuel”a State Department spokesman said.
Cascading resignations
In the wake of monster protests in Colombo sparked by the economic crisis hitting the country, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe tried to pave the way for a government of national unity, by urgently convening a government crisis meeting on Saturday. with the opposition parties to which he offered his resignation. But that was not enough to calm the anger of the demonstrators who in the evening besieged his residence, in his absence, and set fire to it, without causing any injuries.
An opposition deputy, Mathiaparanan Abraham Sumanthiran, was optimistic about the possibility for the opposition to manage to gather the 113 members necessary to obtain the majority in Parliament and to demand the resignation of the president as of this Sunday. His departure had already been announced on Saturday by the Speaker of Parliament, Mahinda Abeywardana, explaining that “to ensure a peaceful transition, the president said he would step down on July 13”.
If the President and the Prime Minister resign, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena, will assume the temporary presidency, in accordance with the Constitution.
Two relatives of the president resigned without delay: the head of the press service, Sudewa Hettiarachchi, and the media minister, Bandula Gunawardana, who also left his post at the head of the presidential party.
The president “escorted to safety”
Earlier, President Rajapaksa, in the hot seat for months, had fled before several hundred demonstrators entered the presidential palace, a symbolic building normally reserved for receptions but where he had moved in April after the assault on his private home.
“The president was escorted to a safe place”, a defense source told Agence France-Presse. Soldiers guarding the official residence fired in the air to deter protesters from approaching the palace until it was evacuated. According to this source, the president boarded a military ship heading for the territorial waters in the south of the island.
Local TV stations showed footage of hundreds of people climbing the gates of his palace. Protesters then streamed live videos on social media of the crowds marching inside, some enjoying themselves in the presidential pool or in the bedrooms.
The protesters also took over the offices of the presidency nearby, in front of which demonstrators had been camping for three months.
Inside President’s House.
#SriLanka #SriLankaProtests https://t.co/e49jeDIldv
An unprecedented crisis
Demonstrations to demand the resignation of Mr. Rajapaksa gathered hundreds of thousands of people on Saturday, demonstrators having even forced the railway authorities to transport them by train, while the country has almost no more gasoline. Three people were wounded by bullets when the police tried to disperse the crowd massed in the administrative district of the capital, with a lot of tear gas. According to the authorities, some 20,000 soldiers and police had been dispatched to Colombo to protect the president.
Once a middle-income country with a standard of living envied by India, Sri Lanka has been devastated by the loss of tourism revenue following a jihadist attack in 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The crisis, unprecedented since independence in 1948 of this island of 22 million inhabitants, has been aggravated, according to economists, by a series of bad political decisions. The presidential clan, in power since 2005, is held responsible for this situation by the population.
Galloping inflation, shortages, Sri Lanka lacks everything: gasoline, electricity, food, medicine. The country is negotiating a rescue plan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), likely to impose tax increases. The United Nations estimates that around 80% of the population cannot afford three meals a day.