So the President of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has fled his country, after his palace was overrun by waves of Sri Lankans. It seemed to be a modern storming of the Bastille…that seminal uprising in 1789 in Paris, where a mass of French citizens invented that term (citizen) by asserting their authority over their “monarch”, and declaring the values of “Liberty, fraternity and equality” were paramount. That uprising was on July 14, while the Sri Lankans’ fury boiled over a few days earlier, on July 10. Rajapaksa probably remembered that King Louis XIV had been beheaded four years after the Bastille’s storming, so he didn’t take a chance: he commandeered a military jet and jetted off to the Maldives!!
But what Rajapaksa’s rule did demonstrate was that man’s inhumanity to his fellow man is probably so deeply imbedded in our human psyches that none of the institutions invented after 1789 to keep it in check have succeeded. Republicanism – where the people were supposed to rule, rather than monarchism – was imitated by so many countries, only to have elected leaders like Rajapaksha behaving worse that the old kings and queens. But we shouldn’t be surprised, should we?? Didn’t we throw up a Burnham who shamelessly wrote a constitution that gave him even more authority than Louis XVI??!! With his ostentatious Queen’s College French, Burnham would’ve fancied himself more like Louis XIV – epitomising the absolute ruler – when he declared ‘L’etat c’est moi’ (‘I am the state!)!
Like Guyana, Sri Lanka was a British colony that was divided ethnically – there between 75% Sinhalese and the Tamils. The latter had emigrated thousands of years before, but were joined by more recent arrivals from Indian Tamil Nadu during British colonial rule.
After independence in 1947, the Sinhalese ran roughshod over the Tamils, who finally resorted to guerrilla warfare in the 1980s to create their own independent state, led by the “Tamil Tigers”.
It was Gotabaya’s brother, Mahinda Rajapaksha, who, as President in 2009, ended the Civil War by launching a brutal near-conventional mode military campaign, with Gotabaya as Defence Secretary commanding the Sri Lankan army. Back in the day, Gotabaya had been an officer in the army, but he violated every human rights article in the book against the Tamil people to destroy the Tigers. Over 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the latter months of Gotabaya’s campaign.
But life went on, as the Rajapakshas became heroes to the Sinhalese majority – especially to the Buddhist monks who (violently!!) pushed Sinhalese nationalism – which excluded the mostly Hindu and Muslim Tamils. The Rajapakshas, however, used their popularity to create a virtual monarchy, with their corrupt relatives running the Govt.
Payback’s a bi*ch!! Especially for the Buddhists monks!!
…but why??
So, why were the Rajapakshas ousted? Sri Lanka’s a cautionary tale about giving too much slack to leaders just because they are “our own”!! They never followed up their victory with a pragmatic programme to address Tamil concerns, and assumed the Sinhalese would never turn to another party. But after they made the Government into a Rajapaksha fiefdom, they made economic decisions that made no sense – save that some siphoned off billions into their pockets.
There was the Hambantota port and the Mattala Rajapaksa Airport – constructed with loans from China at a cost of over $2 billion – that became white elephants, since they had almost zero utility. But the loans gotta be repaid. Money was printed, and inflation exploded!! Then there was the decision to ban fertilizers in an agricultural country, to make Sri Lanka into the first purely organic farming nation!! Just to please some environmental crazies!! Production of rice (domestic demand) and tea (export earner) crops collapsed, creating a food and forex crisis.
COVID was the clincher!! Ouch!!
…by scabs??
When workers go on strike, folks brought in to replace them – temporary or not – are called “scabs”. Doesn’t matter what’s the reason. So this is what they are, whom the managers etc brought in to break the Uitvlugt factory strike!!
