The president was cornered, his back to the sea.
Inside the dimly lit colonial mansion, he had found lonely, Gotabaya Rajapaksa watched from a hastily arranged operations room as the monthslong protests demanding his ouster as Sri Lanka’s leader reached his very doorstep.
A former defense chief accused of widespread abuses during the South Asian nation’s three-decade civil war, Rajapaksa had taken an uncharacteristically hands-off approach toward the demonstrations.
But this largely middle-class movement — lawyers, teachers, nurses, and taxi drivers incensed with an entrenched political elite that had essentially bankrupted the country — was no routine protest. It kept swelling.
And now, in the late morning of July 9, thousands of protesters were massing in front of the seaside presidential residence as hundreds of thousands of others flooded the capital, Colombo.
By early afternoon, the mansion had been breached, and Rajapaksa had slipped through a back gate, sailing away in Colombo’s waters and eventually fleeing the country. The protesters controlled the streets and seats of power — swimming in the president’s pool, lounging in his bed, frying snacks in his kitchen.
Interviews with four dozen government officials, party loyalists, opposition leaders, diplomats, activists, and protesters sketch a picture of an unprecedented civic movement that overwhelmed a leader who had crushed a rebel army but found himself ill-equipped to address the country’s economic disaster and slow to grasp his support base’s rapid turn against him.
Three years after winning the election handsomely and just two years after his family’s party had secured a whopping two-thirds majority in Parliament, Rajapaksa had become deeply resented. And the bill for his family’s years of entitlement, corruption, and mismanagement, made worse by a global economic order plunged into chaos by COVID and war, had, at last, come due.
The Rise
Before his unlikely ascent to the country’s highest office in 2019, Rajapaksa had played second fiddle to an older brother who established the family as a powerful dynasty.
Mahinda Rajapaksa rose to become president in 2005 on a promise to end the civil war. That conflict was rooted in systematic discrimination against minority Tamils by the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, the support base of the Rajapaksas.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa eschewed politics and pursued a career in the military, retiring early as a lieutenant colonel in the late 1990s. He completed a degree in information technology in Colombo and then followed his wife’s family to the United States, where he worked in information technology at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
After becoming president, Mahinda Rajapaksa put the former lieutenant colonel in charge of his generals and the war strategy.
As defense secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ruthless and cunning, demanding nothing short of “unconditional surrender” by the Tamil insurgents, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed. The United Nations estimates that as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of the civil war alone. Thousands of others disappeared, still unaccounted for. Gotabaya Rajapaksa has denied accusations of wrongdoing.
The Rajapaksas’ push to crush the insurgency came with a promise that economic prosperity would follow.
By 2009, the insurgency was over, and the island was once again open for tourism.
In the years after the war, economic growth was brisk, and the Rajapaksas turned to build — expansively. Leveraging the newfound peace, they borrowed huge sums, including from China, to build expressways, a stadium, a port, and an airport.
In addition to being defense secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was put in charge of urban development, bringing military precision and army muscle to efforts to beautify Colombo and improve town halls around the country.
Eventually, the Rajapaksas’ heavy hand and dynastic aims would fall out of favor. In 2015, Mahinda Rajapaksa was defeated in his bid for a third term. But as the governing coalition soon descended into chaos and bickering, the Rajapaksas slowly began their return to public life.
It was ultimately a grievous security breach on Easter Sunday in 2019 that opened the door for the Rajapaksas to return to power. Suicide bombers targeted churches and hotels, killing more than 250 people. Intelligence warnings had been lost in the government’s infighting.
The country was gripped with fear; tourism came to a standstill.
Desperate for security to be restored, 6.9 million Sri Lankans cast their votes for Gotabaya Rajapaksa in an overwhelming victory.
The Fall
His honeymoon would be brief.
Within months came the pandemic, which Rajapaksa answered with a familiar strategy: He deployed the army to carry out lockdowns and, eventually, vaccinations. But he was ill-prepared for the shock to an economy that had operated since independence on deficits, which had been deepened by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s reckless borrowing.
In one year, about $10 billion vanished from the economy as tourism dried up and remittances dwindled. In September 2020, some officials at Sri Lanka’s central bank suggested that the government approach the International Monetary Fund for help.
Even as the economic crisis deepened, the president’s focus was often elsewhere. In April 2021, he suddenly declared a ban on chemical fertilizers. His hope, his advisers said, was to turn Sri Lanka into “the organic garden of the world.”
Farmers, lacking organic fertilizer, saw their yields plummet.
By the spring of 2022, long lines were forming for fuel, supermarkets were running low on imported foods, and the nation’s supply of cooking gas was almost exhausted as the government’s foreign reserves dwindled almost to zero.
The country was in free fall. And the one person who could do something about it was adrift. In meetings, the president was often distracted, scrolling through intelligence reports on his phone, according to officials who were in the room with him. To several of his close friends, he had become a prisoner of his own family.
Soon, small protests calling for the Rajapaksas to step down began popping up around the country.
The Collision
Just before noon on July 9, as protesters pressed toward the mansion, they scrambled over the first barricade, in what many later called a spontaneous action. The barrier was quickly toppled by the crush of people who followed, pushing through volleys of tear gas. Once they had brought down two more barricades, a few protesters hopped the first of two gates to the mansion and unlatched it.
As the crowd reached the second gate, the last physical barrier between them and the president, the sound of gunshots rang out. Two people fell, wounded. Security forces rushed the protesters with batons.
Inside, it was clear the president was out of time. The generals told him it was time to go.
Video footage later emerged on social media of men rushing suitcases onto a navy vessel. The president was ushered through a back gate to the navy base behind the mansion. From there, he would set off in Colombo’s waters.
As he escaped, protesters hot-wired an army truck and rammed it through the final gate. Unable to hold the line, the security forces gave way. Hundreds of people flooded the compound, cheering and chanting as they filled the grand ballroom, climbed the spiral staircase, and occupied the president’s bedroom.
In the days and weeks that followed, it became clear that the protesters’ victory was only partial.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa eventually fled the country on a military plane, first to the Maldives and then to Singapore, before arriving in Thailand on Thursday. But that did not bring a clean slate: The man who replaced him, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, is seen as a protector of the Rajapaksas’ interests. He immediately declared a state of emergency, sending the police after several protest organizers. He faces distrust as the country needs to enact difficult economic reforms.
As parliament voted to confirm Wickremesinghe as president, three Rajapaksas — Mahinda, Chamal, and Mahinda’s son Namal — were there to cast their ballots as if nothing had happened.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
