Sri Lanka was braced for more unrest after newly appointed president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, vowed to crack down on the protests that toppled his predecessor, condemning them as “against the law”.

Speaking after MPs picked him as successor to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Wickremesinghe made it clear he would not tolerate those he perceived to be stirring up violence.

“If you try to topple the government, occupy the president’s office and the prime minister’s office, that is not democracy; it is against the law,” he said.

“We will deal with them firmly according to the law. We will not allow a minority of protesters to suppress the aspirations of the silent majority clamouring for a change in the political system.”

Wickremesinghe, 73, was sworn in as the eighth president of Sri Lanka at a small ceremony on Thursday morning. He took his oath of office before chief justice Jayantha Jayasuriya at the tightly guarded parliament complex in Colombo, a statement from his office said.

Sri Lanka’s police chief and top military brass stood behind the new president as the oath was administered in the presence of parliamentary speaker Mahinda Abeywardana. Among the MPs who gathered afterwards to congratulate him was the former president and prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is the older brother of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Wickremesinghe was expected to name the leader of the parliament and old schoolmate Dinesh Gunawardena as prime minister. Gunawardena is known as a strong Rajapaksa loyalist, and served as a cabinet minister when Mahinda Rajapaksa was president, and then again when Gotabaya Rajapaksa was president.

In recent days, Wickremesinghe, who declared a state of emergency this week, had made statements calling protesters “fascists” and indicating he would not be afraid to crack down on the demonstrations.

Less than an hour after he was declared president on Wednesday, a court order was issued prohibiting anyone from congregating within a 50-metre radius of a statue that stands at Galle Face in Colombo, where protesters spurred by the country’s economic collapse have been camped out for months.

However, people defied the order and dozens gathered on the steps of the president’s offices, which are still occupied by the protest movement, to shout rallying cries of “deal Ranil” – a reference to Wickremesinghe’s reputation as a scheming politician – as well as “Ranil bank robber”, referring to a bank bond scam he was implicated in. Hundreds of police and military stood on the periphery but did not interfere in the rally.

After being selected by MPs as president, Wickremesinghe called on the opposition parties for an “end to division” and said he wanted to “bring everyone together so that a national consensus is formed as to the way forward”.

But questions remain over whether Wickremesinghe would be able to put together a cross-party unity government acceptable to the people, after the major opposition parties had pledged their support for the presidential candidate he defeated.

Wickremesinghe has been prime minister six times and is close to the Rajapaksa family. Protesters fear that he will protect the Rajapaksas from being held accountable, as he has been accused of doing in the past, and would not instigate the constitutional change being demanded by the protest movement, including an end to the system of executive presidency.

Wickremesinghe is due to serve for the rest of Rajapaksa’s term, until November 2024.

“Ranil will be chased away, he is a crook and he doesn’t have a mandate,” said Anura Goonaratna, 53, a toy exporter. “This protest movement is going to get worse. There has to be an end to this and the only ending we will accept is throwing Ranil out, whatever it takes.”

With recriminations swirling in Sri Lanka about the country’s implosion, the head of the CIA weighed into the debate on Wednesday by blaming “dumb bets” on high-debt Chinese investment.

Speaking at the Aspen security forum in Colorado, America’s spy chief Bill Burns said: “The Chinese have a lot of weight to throw around and they can make a very appealing case for their investments.”

But he said nations should look at “a place like Sri Lanka today – heavily indebted to China – which has made some really dumb bets about their economic future and are suffering pretty catastrophic, both economic and political, consequences as a result.

“That, I think, ought to be an object lesson to a lot of other players – not just in the Middle East or South Asia, but around the world – about having your eyes wide open about those kinds of dealings.”

China has invested heavily in Sri Lanka – strategically located in the Indian Ocean and off India, often seen as a rival of Beijing – and worked closely with former president Rajapaksa.

However, analysts have disputed the China debt-trap narrative in Sri Lanka. China only accounts for 10% of Sri Lanka’s debts, most of which were concessionary loans and the repayments only accounted for less than 5% of the country’s annual foreign debt servicing.

A much greater drain on the country’s foreign exchange reserves were international sovereign bonds, much of which are from the US, which were borrowed by the country at high interest rates. It was these bond repayments – which were due to total over $1.5bn in 2022 – that drained Sri Lanka’s reserves and ultimately forced them to default in May, as the country was virtually bankrupt.

Rajapaksa fled the country and resigned last week in the face of mass protests over dire economic conditions, with the island nearly exhausting its supply of food and fuel as it no longer has foreign currency to pay for crucial imports.

TheGuardian

Under cover of darkness, even as protestors had informed authorities that they would leave contested locations today, and the removal of banners lay as signals of their departure, the repressive arms of the state chose to brutally attack the Gota Go Gama (GGG) at Galle Face. Journalists were attacked, a lawyer has been arrested and many peaceful protestors have been injured and arrested. This is a dark day for democracy that will stand out in the history of this country.

As the national trade union representing university academics, which has stood firmly with the people’s struggle for democracy, the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations (FUTA) strongly condemns these brutal attacks by the armed forces on GGG and the senselessness violence meted out on GGG protestors. This violence is an attack on all the people of Sri Lanka who have been demanding democratic system change. The new President, Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe has now clearly demonstrated the type of rule that we can expect from him. This attack on Galle Face has been sanctioned by Emergency regulations providing greater powers to the military to maintain “public order”. In short, this is President Wickremesinghe’s first onslaught on our democracy under his direct rule and will remain a blot on his legacy. He cannot and will not be permitted to continue this outrage on the rights of citizens, nor to irrevocably destroy basic democratic norms and decency through the arbitrary use of military force.

The attacks on GGG require a reckoning of how this moment came to be. Mr. Ranil Wickramasinghe gained the opportunity to become president because of a people’s movement that condemned the very type of rule that he has now espoused. Rather than acknowledging the role this movement unwittingly played in his ascendancy, Mr. Wickremesinghe’s deployment of the military in this manner fails even to acknowledge the pain and suffering that led to the protests throughout the country and to the creation of the GGG sites. Instead of listening to the voices and sentiments of the people, this violence is designed to simply silence and threaten them by brute force. Social media and eyewitness accounts of attacks on journalists, whose job it is to keep the public informed, and lawyers, who were attempting to engage with the security forces, suggest that the space for any form of dialogue between the State and the people is rapidly disappearing.

In addition to being a gross violation of the basic right to dissent, attacks of this nature undermine the political and economic stability based on democratic values that people want. An artificial stability enforced through military power and attacks on dissenters has dangers of shifting the protest movement underground with catastrophic consequences as we have learned from our history.

FUTA stands with the protestors who have been attacked today and on the side of democracy. We renew our pledge to work with all trade unions and people’s movements to mobilise support that will take forward further struggles to protect the democratic rights and freedoms of all the people in this country.

New Cabinet of Ministers is to be sworn in today with Dinesh Gunawardena tipped to be the new Prime Minister.

Dinesh Chandra Rupasinghe Gunawardena (born 2 March 1949) is a leading veteran politician, Member of Parliament, Cabinet Minister, and Leader of the house in the Sri Lankan Parliament.

He is the current leader of the Mahahajana Eksath Peramuna(MEP). He was appointed as the Minister of Home Affairs on the 18th of April 2022 by President Gotabaya Rajapksa .

He is the son of firebrand politician with left wing ideology and Formr Agriculture Minister of SWRD Bandaranaike regime Philip Gunawardena and Kusumasiri Gunawardena who was also a member of parliament.

He was educated at Royal Primary School, Colombo and Royal College Colombo,a classmate of President Ranil Wickremasinghe.

After school he studied at the Netherlands School of Business (Nyenrode Business University) graduating with a diploma in business management.

He then joined the University of Oregon graduating with a BBA degree in international business. Whilst in the USA he became involved in student activism , taking part in Anti-Vietnam War protests.

The new Cabinet comprising previous ministers with few changes will take oaths before President Ranil Wickremesinghe this morning .

The President’s Media Division (PMD) said the Cabinet will take oaths at 9.00 a.m. today.

A new cabinet will be appointed soon after the forming of an all party government in accordance with the pledge given by President Ranila Wickremasinghe to the people recently .