Ranil Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda that threatens to draw the country into the escalating U.S.-China conflict, writes Vijay Prashad.

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

On July 9, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore.

In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Sri Lankan naval base at Trincomalee. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of the Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn.

Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact.

Sri Lanka’s new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama).

Wickremesinghe’s ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class.

In Parliament, Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has only one seat – his own – which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless.

This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person Parliament) to back his installation in the country’s highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power – on behalf of the country’s owners – is intact.

Sujeewa Kumari, Sri Lanka, “Landscape,” 2018.

The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day.

Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments.

These crises – particularly in 1953 and 1971 – led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations.

They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or “in default” status.

Thamotharampillai Sanathanan, Sri Lanka, “Jaffna,” 1990–95.

Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt.

In addition, over the past few decades – at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot – Sri Lanka’s elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority.

The country’s 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3 percent to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46 percent) follows Israel, the world’s highest (2 percent), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the island’s northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society.

Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund.

Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF 16 times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMF’s executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises and cut energy subsidies.

Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more “reforms,” mainly along the same grain of privatisation. U.S. Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with “negotiations with the IMF.” There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown.

Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Sri Lanka, “Camouflage,” 2004.

These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the U.S.-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF.

Official data indicates that only 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47 percent is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland).

Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lanka’s debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out “debt trap diplomacy” do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic.

Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washington’s project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S. to build a military base, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washington’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant.

However, one reason that Wickremasinghe’s party was wiped out in the last election was the electorate’s deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the U.S. and China, just as the old – but raw – vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed.

Jagath Weerasinghe, Sri Lanka, “Untitled I,” 2016.

A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (1963–2021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjani’s hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem “The Dream of Peace.”

Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable
Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt
As good as new or better
Perhaps peace too can be imported – as a package deal

But can anything erase the pain wrought by war?
Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick
Human hands toiled to build that home
Sift the rubble with your curious eyes
Our children’s future went up in flames there

Can one place a value on labour lost?
Can one breathe life into lives destroyed?
Can mangled limbs be rebuilt?
Can born and unborn children’s minds be reshaped?

We died –
and dying,
We were born again
We cried
and crying,
We learned to smile again
And now –
We no longer seek the company of friends
who weep when we do.
Instead, we seek a world
in which we may find laughter together.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky,  The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article is fromTricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Consortium News

End Arbitrary Arrests, Harassment of Protesters, Activists, Journalists

(New York, August 3, 2022) – The Sri Lankan government is using emergency regulations to harass and arbitrarily detain activists seeking political reform and accountability for the country’s economic crisis, Human Rights Watch said today. Since Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as president on July 21, 2022, the police and military have sought to curtail protests through the intimidation, surveillance, and arbitrary arrests of demonstrators, civil society activists, lawyers, and journalists.

Anti-government protests in Colombo and elsewhere in the country led then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country before resigning on July 15. On July 22, President Wickremesinghe ordered security forces to disperse protesters and break up their main site in central Colombo. The police have subsequently targeted perceived protest leaders for arrest and detention.

“The Sri Lankan government’s crackdown on peaceful dissent appears to be a misguided and unlawful attempt to divert attention from the need to address the country’s urgent economic crisis,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Sri Lanka’s international partners should be clear that they need to be working with a rights-respecting administration to address Sri Lanka’s deeply rooted economic problems.”

Security forces injured more than 50 people in the July 22 early morning raid on the main janatha aragalaya (people’s struggle) site in Colombo. Security forces assaulted and beat three journalists from Xposure News – Chaturanga Pradeep Kumara, Rasika Gunawardana, and Shabeer Mohammed – and at least one other journalist, Jareen Samuel of the BBC, during the raid. Wickremesinghe berated foreign diplomats for criticizing the security forces’ use of excessive force and took no action to hold those responsible to account.

A number of Buddhist monks and Christian clergy had joined the protests. The media reported that the Colombo Magistrates’ Court on July 25 had issued a travel ban on Father Jeewantha Peiris, a Catholic priest who had been prominent in the protests, and several others. Two days later police visited Father Peiris’s church and said that they had orders to arrest him. In a July 31 statement, 1,640 members of the Catholic clergy condemned targeting the priest, saying that they had all backed the protests.

On July 26, the authorities arrested another prominent protester, Dhaniz Ali, from an international flight about to depart from Colombo. On July 27, unidentified men in civilian clothes abducted Veranga Pushpika, a former student activist and journalist who had also been active in the protests, from a bus in Colombo. Police did not disclose his whereabouts to lawyers or the Human Rights Commission for several hours before acknowledging his arrest.

Human rights defenders said that the police sought to obstruct defense lawyers from meeting with four protesters who had been arrested after they handed over to the police a large sum of money taken from the president’s official residence after protesters had occupied it.

Lawyers and media organizations told Human Rights Watch that they have experienced increased intimidation, including threats of violence and surveillance. In one episode, a group of men claiming to be police officers, but not wearing uniform, visited the office of an online publication, Xposure News, on July 27 and demanded that a security guard identify people shown in photographs and show them CCTV footage.

On July 31, a student protester said in a statement on Facebook that he had been detained and interrogated for three hours by security force personnel who warned him that they could plant drugs on him and arrest him. Police summoned the social media activist Rathidu Senarathna, known as “Ratta,” on August 1 and arrested him after questioning. A Colombo magistrate also issued a foreign travel ban on Senarathna and 11 others suspected of illegal assembly and causing damage to property. On August 2, the authorities seized the passport of a British national, Kayleigh Fraser, who had posted about the protests on social media.

The authorities arrested at least seven people for the July 9 arson attack on Wickremesinghe’s private residence. Activists said that at least some of those detained were known to have been bystanders. Police are investigating a hotel that allegedly provided food to protesters and have raided, sometimes without warrants, the homes or workplaces of several protesters who are in hiding.

In a statement, 175 Sri Lankan human rights defenders and civil society organizations expressed concern about “disturbing developments of abduction, arrest, intimidation, and reprisals against protesters.” Members of the Catholic clergy said the government should “stop the repression of those involved and supporting the Aragalaya and focus on listening to grievances and aspirations of people and take actions to address both immediate and long-term problems.”

Under the state of emergency that President Wickremesinghe declared on July 18, the period that a person may be detained before being brought before a magistrate has been increased from 24 to 72 hours. The authorities have been granted sweeping additional powers of search and arrest, and the military has been empowered to detain people for up to a day without disclosing their detention. These provisions increase the risk of torture and enforced disappearance.

Under international human rights law, protections against torture, the excessive use of force, and other fundamental rights must never be violated, including during a state of emergency. Provisions of the state of emergency contrary to international standards should be immediately revoked, Human Rights Watch said.

The emergency regulations also introduce extreme new sentencing rules for several offenses, including damage to property and trespassing, which can now result in a life sentence and carry a minimum term of 20 years in prison. Among the offenses subject to harsher sentencing is a provision of the penal code that has previously been used to prosecute same-sex conduct. The decree provides that bail will not be available for those accused of offenses under the emergency regulations.

The state of emergency also gives the president and the police broad powers to ban public gatherings, allows the police or military to order anyone to leave any public place or face arrest, and makes it an offense to cause “disaffection” or to spread “rumors.” These provisions are vague, overly broad, and disproportionate in violation of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, and movement. 

In a statement following the assault on protesters on July 22, the European Union noted that it “expects the new Government to work in full compliance” with its human rights commitments, made in exchange for tariff free access to the EU market under the bloc’s GSP+ program. The World Bank said in a statement that the government should address “the root structural causes that created this crisis to ensure that Sri Lanka’s future recovery and development is resilient and inclusive.” Earlier, the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated that any agreement with the International Monetary Fund “must be contingent on … strong anti-corruption measures and promotion of the rule of law.”

“The people of Sri Lanka are reeling under an economic crisis that has plunged millions into food insecurity, the closure of schools, and shortages of medicine, fuel, and other necessities,” Ganguly said. “The government needs to end its repressive policies and practices and act urgently to address people’s basic needs, win public trust, and uphold the rule of law by holding those responsible to account.”

Human Rights Watch