Colombo: Sri Lanka’s protest movement reached its 100th day last week having forced one president from office and now turning its sights on his successor as the country’s economic crisis continues. Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled his palace shortly before demonstrators invaded it last weekend and on Thursday he resigned from the presidency.
The protesters vowed to continue their struggle for a complete change of the system by abolishing the presidency. The anti-government protest began on April 9 near the presidential office and has been continuing without a break. “We will continue our fight till we achieve our goal for a complete change of the system,” Father Jeewantha Peiris, a leading activist of the movement, said. “This is a freedom struggle. We managed to send home an authoritarian President through people’s power,” Peiris said.
After Rajapaksa, acting president Wickremesinghe appears to be the next target for the protesters and the campaign to oust him has already begun. “On July 5, we issued an action plan. Foremost of that was removing Gotabaya and defeating Ranil Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksa regime,” he said.
“We press for the abolition of the presidency to make it a true realisation of our action plan," he said. “We do not fear the government,” the protesters chanted in chorus. What started as a small protest by a handful of individuals demanding basic necessities turned into a tsunami that uprooted the once-powerful Rajapaksa family in what was Sri Lanka’s ‘Arab Spring’ moment, but the road to recovery from the country’s worst economic crisis in decades looks distant and painful.
After occupying the three most important administrative buildings in capital Colombo, the protesters vacated three of them other than the presidential office. The protest had seen violence since it began mid-April. Wickremesinghe’s private house suffered an arson attack the same day when Rajapaksa fled the country. He is one of the four candidates who seek to succeed Rajapaksa in the vote in Parliament scheduled for July 20.
Wickremesinghe, who is also the PM, pledged to maintain law and order after he was sworn in as Sri Lanka's interim president. He said that the armed forces have been given the powers and the freedom to deal with any acts of violence and sabotage.
