With his populist, nationalist style making him a favourite with the Sinhalese masses, he seemed set for a very long run in power. Mahinda Rajapaksa was the President who directed those battles, in which Tamils trying to surrender were often killed, and he emerged from the war as a national hero. Up to 100,000 people died in the war, which ended with an orgy of killing (40,000) in the final five months of battles in 2009. It did so, starting in 1987, in a guerrilla and terrorist war that sought an independent Tamil state in the north and east of the island. Buddhist intolerance towards non-Buddhist minorities is not unique to Sri Lanka, as the Rohingya minority in Burma can readily attest, but in Sri Lanka, the Tamil minority was big enough to fight back. There was revenge-taking after independence, when Buddhist-dominated Governments removed the official status of the Tamil language and imposed restrictions on higher education for Tamils. The Tamils did well under British colonial rule, when most Buddhist Sinhalese refused to collaborate with their new political masters. Tamils have been in Sri Lanka for at least 2,000 years, but the Buddhist majority tends to see them as alien and even as newcomers. A minority several million strong, concentrated in the north and east, speak Tamil and are mostly Hindu in religion (with a significant Christian minority). Most of Sri Lanka’s people speak the Sinhalese language and identify with the Buddhist religion. Sri Lanka is only 10 years away from the end of a brutal civil war that lasted for a quarter-century, and the ‘despot’ is the man who won it by being more brutal than anybody else.
It’s an engaging tale, and the basic outlines are true, but in the real world, the historical and social context that surrounds the events changes the tone of everything. At this point, the despot resigns and the President grudgingly ‘re-appoints’ the legitimate Prime Minister. But most of the MPs turn down the political bribes on offer, and Parliament twice votes to reject his claims.įinally, after 50 days of chaos, the judges of the Supreme Court say that the President has acted illegally and the ex-despot can’t claim that he is the Prime Minister. If enough accept, he would have a majority in the Parliament and could claim to be sort of legitimate. The despot, now claiming to be the real Prime Minister, tries to strengthen his position by offering Members of Parliament jobs as Ministers in his new Government. It would involve a conniving President, who abruptly and illegally dismisses the elected Prime Minister, and replaces him with a corrupt and blood-soaked former despot who was the President’s old boss. You could write a heart-warming fairy tale about the turbulent events in the island nation of Sri Lanka in the past two months. The fairy tale will be preferred whenever possible
One could write a heart-warming fairy tale about the turbulent events in the island nation in the past two months.
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