More than 50 people have been arrested and many have been injured after a night of protests which started near the suburban home of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapakse.
Among those arrested were journalists who were covering the protest which started at about 6 pm yesterday in the area of Mirihana and went on till the early hours of this morning.
Gunshots were reported to have been heard from the scene of the protest. The injured were seen being rushed to the nearby Sri Jayawardenepura hospital for treatment.
According to the testimony of people who were arrested by the Mirihana police, they were assaulted by officers of the Special Task Force (STF), an elite paramilitary unit of the Sri Lanka police. Their limbs had been broken and they had sustained head injuries. Some of those who were arrested were not a part of the protest. One female journalist said her husband was assaulted by the STF. He happened to be at the scene of the protest because she had sent him to look for her colleague who was a reporter. She described how she had been verbally abused by the police.
The government’s announcement that protestors who have been arrested will be detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) has been condemned by rights activists. The Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission said there is no provision to detain protestors under the PTA. The government is under pressure from the UN and human rights advocates to scrap the PTA, long described as a piece of draconian legislation. Following opposition to the government’s move, the police said that those who have been arrested will be charged under the Penal Code and the Public Property Act.
The protest, which started off as a peaceful one by citizens, got ugly after police sprayed tear gas and an army bus was set on fire. Visuals of the protest and posts on social media point to the violence allegedly being started by outsiders with connections to the government. A statement issued by President Rajapakse following the protest claimed that extremists were behind it.
Until the attacks started, thousands of protesters were in a stand- off with police in riot gear and shouting ‘Gota is a rogue’ and ‘Gota go home’. They were separated only by barriers and at one point the protestors appeared to have breached the divide. Reinforcements from the STF were brought in to keep the crowd in check and they were sprayed with tear gas. Locals had kept basins of water for the protestors to wash their faces and neighbours said the tear gas had even permeated their homes by the following morning.
The President was reportedly not at home at the time of the protest.
As pockets of protest flared up in other parts of the country including Anuradhapura and on the main Colombo -Kandy road in Kelaniya where protestors burnt logs across the road, an indefinite police curfew was clamped down in several areas in Colombo and its immediate suburbs. The areas in which the curfew came into immediate effect were Colombo North, Colombo South, Colombo Central, Nugegoda police division, Mt Lavinia and Kelaniya. The curfew was lifted this morning.
Yesterday’s incident was preceded by weeks of vigils and protests by citizens who are spending endless hours in queues for fuel and gas as Sri Lanka’s economy hit rock bottom.
The government has been struggling with a balance of payment deficit and declining US dollar reserves which has made it impossible to pay for fuel, gas and other essentials like milk powder and medicines. The inability to pay for diesel that is needed to operate the country’s power plants has affected the continuous supply of electricity to the island. Since February, Sri Lankans have been hit with power cuts of increasing duration of as much as 15 hours a day. The latest alert from authorities of a potential water cut will add to the multiple whammy’s that Sri Lankans are having to endure for the past months.
The government’s mismanagement of the economy stemming from cut- backs to vital tax revenue, an artificial pegging of the rupee to the US dollar, a short- sighted go-organic fertiliser policy and soaring corruption are some of the reasons that are being given for Sri Lanka’s current economic debacle.
Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse, who is the President’s brother, is expected to fly to Washington in April for talks with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But economists are sceptical. ‘The people who created the problem are the ones who are also trying to sort it out’, they point out.
The President, his brother Mahinda who is the Prime Minister and his two other brothers Chamal and Basil hold key government portfolios. His nephews Namal and Shasheendra, who are also in the government, head ministries and a state ministry. The Rajapakse family has earned a reputation for not listening to the advice of experts and governing at their whim.
