How the Rajapaksa Political Clan Led Sri Lanka to Catastrophe
By Philip Wen, Aug. 9, 2022, WSJ
HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka—By his last days in power, Gotabaya Rajapaksa had been sequestered in his presidential palace for weeks, say those close to him. Cloistered with a small coterie of military advisers on July 9, the president was escorted to a
nearby naval base and put on a warship for his protection, barely leaving his cabin for two days as tens of thousands of protesters occupied his residence clamoring for his resignation.
Interviews with ruling party politicians, presidential advisers and government and military officials reveal a picture of an increasingly isolated Mr. Rajapaksa, distrustful of his own military commanders and fearful of his safety in the final throes of
his presidency. A former soldier, Mr. Rajapaksa governed in a way that deepened family rivalries and led to decisions that ultimately had catastrophic consequences for Sri Lanka’s economy, former cabinet members and aides say.
He also presided over the unceremonious fall from grace of the powerful Rajapaksa clan that had dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape for decades.
“He comes from a military background, so he’s used to taking and giving orders,” said Nalaka Godahewa, a former business executive who was recruited into politics by Gotabaya Rajapaksa and served as a cabinet minister under the former president. “
Here there’s nobody to give him orders, he was at the top. And he was giving orders without consulting.”
Sri Lanka’s popular uprising has been all the more jarring considering the adulation the family previously enjoyed. Elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa was president—and Gotabaya defense secretary—when they ended a decadeslong civil war in 2009,
winning widespread acclaim among Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority but also drawing allegations of human-rights abuses against the Tamil ethnic minority from the United Nations.
Mahinda Rajapaksa was once so revered in the family’s hometown political power base of Hambantota, a sleepy district on Sri Lanka’s beach-lined southern coast, that images of the mustachioed politician—draped with his family’s trademark maroon
scarf over a crisp white shirt—would line town streets and adorn walls of homes, or be tucked into wallets and purses. Some displayed his framed portrait on an altar next to their Buddha statues.
“We brought him into our home,” said Katapoluge Premaratne, a 55-year-old villager hand-weaving a fishing net, nodding to a smudge on his front door where a sticker of Mr. Rajapaksa used to hold pride of place. “We really loved him.”
That sentiment has soured. As protests over fuel shortages and food prices intensified in May, protesters in Hambantota destroyed a pair of teardrop-shaped glass monuments built by Gotabaya Rajapaksa to honor the brothers’ late parents, toppled a
statue of their father, and set on fire a home belonging to the family.
“The people don’t see that the leadership of the country has understood their pain,” one ruling party official mused. Referring to the vandalism in the Rajapaksas’ hometown, “now they do,” he said.
An aide for Gotabaya Rajapaksa declined to comment for this article when reached by phone and text message, while an aide to Mahinda Rajapaksa didn’t respond to phone calls and messages seeking comment. A spokesman for the brothers’ Sri Lanka
Podujana Peramuna party didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.
The Rajapaksa brothers are among nine siblings born into a political family with roots in the southern district of Hambantota, which was mostly dense jungle until recent decades of development. Their uncle, Don Mathew Rajapaksa, was first elected to the
State Council in 1936, when Sri Lanka was under British colonial rule. Their father, Don Alwin Rajapaksa, served as agriculture minister and Parliament’s deputy speaker after independence.
Mahinda Rajapaksa became the country’s youngest member of Parliament in 1970 at the age of 24, representing the same local seat his father had held. He would develop into a charismatic and powerful orator, seen as the family patriarch by many Sri
Lankans. When the civil war was declared over, Mr. Rajapaksa, who was then on an overseas trip, knelt and kissed the ground of the airport tarmac upon his return.
“My country comes first, my country comes second, my country comes third,” the now 76-year-old would repeat over the years.
An army veteran who commanded a battalion during the civil war, younger brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa emigrated to the U.S. after two decades in the military. After a series of tech jobs, including as a systems administrator at Los Angeles’s Loyola
University, he returned home as Mahinda lined up his first presidential run in 2005.
The family’s youngest brother in politics, 71-year-old Basil Rajapaksa, is seen as the strategist of the family operations, and was Mahinda’s campaign manager for both his successful presidential tilts.
Basil Rajapaksa didn’t respond to several text requests for comment.
The brothers had always sought to project a united front and regularly worked out political differences over family meals. But signs of discord were already surfacing amid recriminations over Mahinda Rajapaksa’s loss in the 2015 presidential elections,
when a disaffected voting public turned away from the Rajapaksas for what they saw as rampant corruption and nepotism—criticisms the Rajapaksa family has routinely denied.
There was internal disagreement over which brother to put forward in 2019 following newly introduced term limits that made it impossible for Mahinda to run again. Around that time, a series of Islamist bomb attacks on churches and luxury hotels in the
capital Colombo swung momentum behind Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The former soldier projected himself as the leader who could keep the country’s painfully secured peace, a former presidential adviser said. The family rallied behind Mr. Rajapaksa, who gave up
his U.S. citizenship to secure the top office and promised in his election manifesto to be guided by the more experienced family patriarch, Mahinda.
Once in power, Gotabaya Rajapaksa installed Mahinda as prime minister and Basil as finance minister. Over time, Gotabaya began making decisions without consulting ministers or experienced technocrats as his inner circle shrank, political aides and
government members said, and Mahinda’s sway over his brother appeared to lessen.
“After GR became president they hardly had sit-down meetings,” said the adviser, referring to the brothers by their initials, a common practice in Sri Lankan political circles. “From the very first moment he came into power the GR side started to
sideline MR.”
A former energy minister who was expelled from the cabinet in March, meanwhile, pointed to then-Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa as a rival power center calling many of the shots, in part because lawmakers of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, the new
political party Basil Rajapaksa used to engineer the family’s comeback, were loyal to him.
“Basil was the de facto leader,” said Udaya Gammanpila, who attributed the delay in accepting the gravity of the economic crisis to Basil Rajapaksa. Still, said Mr. Gammanpila, there were times when the president made solitary decisions—and couldn
t be persuaded to change his mind.
Sweeping tax cuts introduced by Gotabaya soon after taking office decimated government revenue and heaped pressure on Sri Lanka’s ability to service its external debt, which had snowballed from infrastructure spending—and borrowing from China and
other lenders—in previous years. In the search to cut import costs, Gotabaya in 2021 announced an abrupt ban on chemical fertilizers, despite protests from Mahinda who worried about the reaction of farmers, a key voter base. The overnight change
resulted in disastrous crop yields.
The pandemic also hurt the country’s vital tourism sector, and credit-rating companies marked down Sri Lanka’s sovereign rating, harming its ability to roll over debts. Instead of immediately seeking a financial bailout from the International
Monetary Fund, the Rajapaksa government kept drawing down foreign reserves until they could no longer afford to pay for essential imports of fuel, cooking gas and medicines. The acute shortages would ultimately lose them the public’s support, and their
jobs.
Basil Rajapaksa resigned in April, while Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down in May, the month the country defaulted. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the last holdout.
Rather than resign immediately on July 9, Mr. Rajapaksa stalled for days as he sought safe passage out of the country. In the early hours of July 13, he boarded a military aircraft bound for Maldives with his wife and two bodyguards. After traveling
onward to Singapore on a commercial flight the following day, he resigned over email.
Sri Lanka’s demonstrations first turned violent on March 31 when hundreds of protesters attempted to storm Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s private residence in the upscale Colombo suburb of Mirihana. Government ministers and party officials say the president’
s reluctance to use greater force to quell protests at the time emboldened demonstrators.
“He was too lenient, according to many people,” said Mr. Godahewa, the former cabinet member, who lost his house to a wave of arson attacks by protesters on May 9. He was at the president’s official residence for meetings that day, and ended up
locked down there. The president, increasingly agitated, screamed over the phone demanding that the army chief send troops to stop the violence, Mr. Godahewa said. But his orders appeared to fall on deaf ears.
“It continued for more than 24 hours…for the president to realize that the army was not getting orders from their bosses,” he said.
There were signs that morale was sapped among ground troops, many of them from rural families who were among the hardest hit by the country’s economic crisis. On July 9, when he issued orders to use “required force,” security forces put up minimal
resistance before being overrun, and the president was forced to flee, a military source said.
It may be too soon to discount the Rajapaksas’ sway on Sri Lanka. With the backing of the Rajapaksas’ majority coalition, the country’s Parliament on July 20 elected as the new president Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been appointed prime minister
by Gotabaya Rajapaksa after Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down. SLPP staff say a Rajapaksa could still lead the ticket for the next presidential election cycle in 2024, possibly Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son Namal.
But any revival of political fortunes would depend on the once all-conquering brothers mending their bridges.
“The gap between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa led to their downfall,” the adviser to Gotabaya said. “Once the castle is down, it’s easy to checkmate the king.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-rajapaksa-political-clan-led-sri-lanka-to-catastrophe-11660044711
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