Front Burner - Bonus | Nothing is Foreign: United in protest, Sri Lankans fight a political dynasty

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Economically, Sri Lanka is on fire. Residents are dealing with ballooning food costs, hours-long lineups for fuel and power blackouts that last half the day. The country is facing record inflation and unemployment, the likes of which haven't been seen in 74 years. But the crisis has united a nation that's long been divided along ethnic and religious lines — all to oust the political family they blame for the disaster. This week on Nothing is Foreign, we hear from Sri Lankans who explain how their country landed in a $51-billion debt hole and the island nation's unprecedented protests. Featuring: Aritha Wickramasinghe, lawyer and human rights activist. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here. For the last few weeks, we've been doing episode drops of our colleagues' show in this feed, Nothing is Foreign. I don't know about you, but I've been really into them. They really take me somewhere and I come back with all this stuff I didn't know before. Anyway, we've got another one for you today. I mean, it's a little bit selfish because we are taking the

long weekend, but it's like a win-win, right? This episode is about a high-stakes fight playing out in Sri Lanka. Hope you like it. Talk tomorrow. I'm 89 years old. And for the last so many 89 years, I have not gone through this misery. Every time in the night when the lights go off, I cry. Because there's nothing else for me to do in my old age. The tiny country of Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades. People from all walks of life are feeling the impacts and tens of thousands of them have taken to the streets to protest.

They're frustrated by blackouts that last for most of the day, long lines for fuel and other basic goods, rising unemployment, and record inflation. On Tuesday, the government announced that it's suspending all payments on its mountain of foreign debt because it's become impossible to pay its creditors. And while Sri Lanka is one of the many countries that's dealing with the economic fallout of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, this situation is unique. People in the country blame the family that's currently in charge and who've had a stranglehold on Sri Lankan politics for years, the Rajapaksas. Critics accuse them of economic mismanagement and want them gone. What's wrong with this country? Why has God taken away all of our blessings? Because there are such corrupt, evil, good-for-nothing people who have sucked us

like dogs. They're sucking our bones now. There's nothing left for us. Last week, in response to protests, many MPs defected from the ruling party, leaving it a minority in parliament, and the entire cabinet quit, including several Rajapaksa family members. But President Gotabayi Rajapaksa and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa have refused to do that. refused to do that. And the calls for them to resign are coming from people of all backgrounds, even those who belong to the Sinhalese Buddhist majority that once adored them. Aritha Wickramasinghe is a banking lawyer and human rights activist from Sri Lanka, and he's on the show this week. We're going to talk about what led to this crisis, why the Rajapaksas are being blamed, and what this moment of unity in a country that's long been divided along ethnic and religious lines means for Sri Lankan people.

along ethnic and religious lines means for Sri Lankan people. I'm Tamara Kandaker, and you're listening to Nothing is Foreign. Aritha, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to our show. Hi, thanks for having me. You're a lawyer and you live in a village in Gaul. And I wanted to start with your experience of this economic crisis. How have you felt its impact? I'm originally from Colombo, but when the COVID pandemic started,

I moved to a village in Gaul where my partner lives and where we have a house in. And actually, since then, we've seen sort of the beginnings of the crisis and it evolved. The first was, of course, the ban on chemical fertilizer, which happened towards the early part of last year. This was part of the president's election manifesto where he made a commitment to transform Sri Lanka into an organic agricultural country. One day in the early part of last year, there was a presidential gazette issued which banned the importation and use of chemical fertilizers and that mandated that every farmer needs to go organic. But many farmers argue the policy will hurt the industry and severely harm the country's food security.

Some farmers have carried coffins marked with a sign reading the death of farming and burnt effigies of the agriculture minister. There was no warning that this was going to happen. There was no preparation of farming communities. And you could see the immediate impact it was happening to farmers in our village. There were drops in yields. You could see there was increase in financial troubles personally for our neighbours. And a lot of Sri Lankan society are farmers, right?

I think I heard something like one in four people would work in the agriculture sector. Yeah, one in four. So it seems like a very risky policy to take if it's going to affect that many people. And then you had the crisis evolve to gas shortages, food prices going up by 100%, 200% in a matter of few days. You could see my neighbors who are in the village who were struggling and having a difficult time not being able to find cooking gas.

Seeing the cost of my weekly vegetable and food shopping increase exponentially. No one plans for the cost of their food to go up by 100% in a matter of few days. Can you give me a sense of how dire the situation is in the rest of the country now? Who's most affected by this crisis and how? I think this is a unique crisis in the sense that every segment of society is affected from the poorest to the richest. Of course, it is the poorest who are most affected, especially the urban poor. If you're living in urban parts of the island, you don't have the space or the capacity to be cooking in firewood in your apartment block, in your terraced house. So the unavailability of cooking gas is a huge blow. Power cuts of up to 12 hours. They're slightly reduced right now because there's been some emergency fuel that has been given to us by India. But otherwise, you know, once this fuel runs out, which will happen in another month or so,

you're looking at going back to 10 to 12 hour power cuts. People have had enough of food and fuel shortages and daily power cuts. A few moments ago, the streetlights went. People are waving their phones in the air for light. The other impacts that I read about are rising unemployment, shortage of medicine. Yeah, so when you look at the gas shortage, looking at 50% to 60% of restaurants have had to shut down

because they don't have gas to cook. You know, that's unemployment. I started a small business recently, but it's very difficult to maintain it. There's no gas, there's no kerosene, and that's why people are protesting in the streets. It's severely impacted the tourism industry. It's severely impacted other industries,

manufacturing industry, which not only cannot manufacture when there's no power, but can't even find the diesel to run the emergency generators. And then the shortage of medicine. They're seeing lots of calls for help from the Ministry of Health, from the prenatal society, from several doctors, who are saying that in a matter of weeks, the country is going to be running out of essential medicines and essential equipment for surgery. And so aside from the push for organic farming, which hit the agriculture industry really hard, how did things get this bad in Sri Lanka? What caused this crisis?

Economic mismanagement. Sri Lanka has, especially from the period of 2005 to 2015, borrowed heavily. These borrowings were mainly used for white elephant infrastructure projects or they were used to fund an ever-expanding public service. Sri Lanka now has 1.5 million public servants for a country of 21 million. To put into perspective, the United Kingdom has 480,000 public servants for a country of 70 million. From 2007 or 8 onwards, we went in for international commercial borrowings. So issuing international US dollar denominated bonds at very high interest rates, huge years that were being promised. And that money was not being invested into sustainable projects that would bring returns to the country in order to be able to afford us to pay this debt back. We were preparing for these heavy debt repayments that were going to be due. However, in 2019 December, you had steep tax cuts introduced by this government

as an election gimmick. The current crisis was accelerated by deep tax cuts promised by Rajapaksha during the 2019 election campaign. The tax cuts were initiated just months before COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out parts of the... So if I can just recap what you're saying and tell me if I'm understanding correctly. So there was a period where the government was borrowing a lot of money and promising to repay that money with very high yields. And then in 2019, they decided to cut taxes and deplete the revenue that would be coming in,

knowing that they had all these debts to repay. And then, of course, COVID hit. And COVID decimated revenues, decimated foreign income from tourism, from remittances from our workers, and also cut down our exports because consumption in our main exports markets had reduced. So this and the inability of the government to respond to that situation at the time,

the refusal by the government to accept advice to go to the IMF, to increase taxes, to increase interest rates, they kept printing money, saying that money printing was not going to cause inflation and reduce interest rates to make borrowing easy and cheaper. They artificially held the exchange rate to 200 rupees to a dollar, knowing that that exchange rate could not be sustained. And they were forcing through that exchange rate by selling more of our reserves. So all of these factors together contributed to this present crisis. The island nation depends on imports for all its essentials, from food to medicines to cement and paper. But it

does not have enough foreign exchange reserves to make these purchases. It started even before COVID and then COVID made things worse. Right now, the nature of the crisis sounds kind of similar to places like Pakistan and Peru, where we're also seeing food and fuel prices rising as a result of the war in Ukraine, right? Like how have the last couple of months, the war in Ukraine, in Ukraine, right? How have the last couple of months, the war in Ukraine, how has that played into the crisis? I mean, the war in Ukraine has led to increasing oil and gas prices. We've seen fuel prices double because we've been hit by not just prices, but of course, the rapid devaluation of the rupee. There have been mass protests on the streets of Sri Lanka for the last few weeks. And I know you've been working with other lawyers and providing pro bono legal assistance to some

of these protesters. Can you tell me about what the protests look like and what people are demanding? The protest movements have been really, really vibrant. And one thing that has, you know, really brings, you know, very emotional and brings tears to my eyes is to see this level of unity among Sri Lankan people. You know, we're in the month of Ramadan now, and we've seen, you know, protesters put down their placards during prayer times so that Muslim Sri Lankans can pray on their placards. We're seeing, you know, Muslim imams, Christian leaders, Buddhist monks, Hindu priests come together,

holding hands together, walking this protest march. And this is so important because our country has a history of disunity, especially post-independence. During the first period, we saw attacks against our Tamil brothers and sisters, you know, politically motivated narratives and discourse led by the majority community, Sinhalese political leaders, to isolate and disenfranchise minorities of this country, to portray them as enemies. And this particular government did that same thing which we did to the Tamil people, but this time against the Muslim people, portraying them as the enemy, creating a fear, psychosis around Muslim people, spreading false rumors saying that Muslims were putting infertility pills in people's food and that Muslim doctors were trying to make Sinhalese women infertile.

There was this narrative, this toxic narrative of racism, which is what helped elect this government. In the aftermath of the Easter bombing. In the aftermath of the Easter bombing. In the aftermath of the Easter bombings. Good evening from Sri Lanka, where the authorities are blaming a local Islamist group for the Easter Sunday attacks, which have left 290 people dead and 500 others injured. I think there's one key demand, and that is for the president to go and resign. The key slogan of the demand is Go Home Gota.

So we are here on behalf of Sri Lanka, the entire nation. So we are facing so many crises. We have no money. People are struggling. So this has to stop. Something has to change in this country, so we are here to make that change. And we will fight until this thing changes. Godharm has to go home. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing.

In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. The fact that so much of Sri Lankan society is now turning on the Rajapaksa family is a big deal. Three years ago, when this government first swept into power, this was unthinkable. Paike Sothi Saravanamuthu is the executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a think tank in Sri Lanka. He's a public policy expert and frequent commentator on Sri Lankan politics, and I reached him at his home in Colombo. Well, the Rajapaks family is a prominent family from

down south, who started off with the president's father, who joined with Mr. S.W. Adibandanaka, the prime minister in 1956. Now in government at the present moment is the former president, in 1956. Now in government at the present moment is the former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is currently the prime minister. And of course, Gotabia Rajapaksa, who is the president. Up until recently, their brothers, Chamal and Basil, were the ministers of irrigation and finance, respectively, while Mahinda Rajapaksa's son, Namal, was in charge of the sports portfolio. Last week, they all resigned, along with the rest of cabinet. And there are a sorted number of relations who are deputy ministers, junior ministers, and also in the government. Wow. And the Rajapaksas have been at the forefront

of Sri Lankan politics for a really long time. Why do they have so much power and influence in the country? Well, President Rajapaksa, Mahindra Rajapaksa came into office in 2005, and his great claim to fame is that he defeated the LTTE militarily in the war. And his brother, the current president, was the defense secretary. The civil war that the Rajapaksas are credited with winning ended in 2009. In the capital, Colombo, celebrations erupted on the streets as the government made its announcement that the Tigers had been defeated. The memories of this brutal conflict are still fresh in the minds of people on the island. are still fresh in the minds of people on the island.

100,000 people lost their lives over 25 years of fighting between the Sri Lankan government, dominated by Sinhalese people who make up about 75% of the Sri Lankan population, and a group known as the LTTE. You may know them as the Tamil Tigers, and they were fighting for an independent state for the Tamil minority, which makes up about 11% of the population.

And so it's riding on that sort of triumph of singular nationalism that they have occupied such a central position as far as Sri Lankan politics is concerned. There were lots of allegations that the war was won by a number of human rights violations and that particularly in the last days of the war, there were war crimes, bombing of hospitals, demarcated, no-fire zones, and, you know, people were taken in when they sort of surrendered to the army

and haven't been heard of since. After the war, a UN panel of experts said both sides should be investigated for possible war crimes, including government forces shelling hospitals and Tamil tigers shooting civilians who tried to escape. The government has set up a small team of investigators to try and help find some of the 20,000 people who disappeared during the conflict. It's not so much Mahindra Rajapaksa in terms of the war crimes allegations, but more so his

brother, who was the defense secretary, and therefore who is allegedly the one who gave all the orders. And who is now president of the country. Now the president. So once he came into office in 2019, he took measures that allowed him to consolidate his family's hold on power. And how exactly did he do that? his family's hold on power. And how exactly did he do that? Yes, in particular, he brought in a constitutional amendment called the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, whereby the parliamentary checks and balances, which the previous government brought in, were abandoned. As a consequence, you don't have independent state institutions, you don't have proper oversight. You don't really have much parliament

checks and balances. Rather, you have everything consolidated in the office of the president. And as a result, he's also able to appoint and dismiss ministers at his whim, right? Absolutely. And so given the number of positions that the Rajapaksas hold in government, how would you describe their level of influence over Sri Lankan politics? Well, the Rajapaksas as a family, therefore, have dominated government and they are in control of about 75% actually of the national budget. Their control over government has been their championing of singular nationalism and singular Buddhist nationalism.

So their legitimacy, to the extent that they have any, has come from the armed forces as well as from the Sangha or the Buddhist priesthood. What has that meant for minorities in the country? Minorities have felt that they are being discriminated against, in particular the Tamil community, where you have a large proportion of the army in the country? Minorities have felt that they are being discriminated against, in particular the Tamil community where you have a large proportion of the army in the northern province, as well as the Muslim community who had to be born the brunt of attacks against them more recently. With the problems with regard to the management of COVID, for example, the government took a decision that Muslim burials were not to be allowed, that everyone had to be cremated. So they have felt extremely marginalized under the Gautam Rajapaksa regime, as they did under the Mahindra Rajapaksa regime. critics is growing larger. Opposition politicians have walked out. Sri Lankans of many different backgrounds are protesting now. What are the main criticisms of the way that they've run the country?

That they do not have the capacity, the capability to manage affairs, and that they're extremely corrupt. Because of evidence with regard to taking of commissions, vanity projects, all of that, which suggests that they have amassed money and wealth right through the family, not just the brothers, but their in-laws, their relations, all of them. I mean, for example, only very recently, a nephew of the first family, as it were, a nephew of the first family, as it were, pleaded guilty to trying to embezzle the government of Sri Lanka of some $300,000 in the United States. He pleaded guilty to that charge. So now people want them gone, but considering the stranglehold that they have on the political scene, is there any legal way to actually remove them? Well, the only legal way to remove the president

at this point is to come up with an impeachment, and the impeachment process will take time. So it is about intensifying the public pressure to try to force him or persuade him to resign. With the message coming out of the protests in Sri Lanka, what's clear is that the image of the Rajapaksas as the country's saviors is falling apart. Here's Artha again. What is happening now is a breakdown of that narrative. A realization

that people have been living in someone else's fairy tale of themselves. The whole country is together. So he has to step down. As a human being, he should. And that fairy tale is now over because reality has finally struck people.

That while people were enamored by this story, they've also been robbed right under their eyes. And the enemy was being made into the minorities and not the real thieves. In a speech in March, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said, quote, this crisis was not created by me. He said Sri Lanka wasn't the only country that found itself in this situation, that the entire world is dealing with hardships like rising costs of fuel and the shortages of certain goods caused by the pandemic. He also said COVID had caused the collapse of the tourism industry, but said tourists were starting to come back. More recently, Mahinda Rajapaksa attacked the opposition, saying that they were refusing to work with the government.

He also pleaded with protesters to end their movement, saying every minute spent on the streets deprives Sri Lanka of money that would be coming in otherwise. They're doing what they have to do to, you know, save themselves. It's remarkable that the cabinet has resigned. That is unprecedented in Sri Lankan history. And we have seen the government finally agree to go to the IMF. But this is all too late. We shouldn't have had been in this situation. You know, we are literally going to the IMF, crawling, not even on bended knees.

We are crawling to them, going as beggars in our most desperate moment, asking to be saved. So I've seen people comparing this moment in Sri Lanka, these protests to the Arab Spring. They're calling it Sri Lanka's Arab Spring, a mass uprising in a country on the brink of economic collapse. Do you think that's a fair comparison? Is Sri Lanka on the cusp of a revolution? When is Sri Lanka on the cusp of a revolution? The Arab Spring was a series of protests and uprisings against dictators and dictatorships. Sri Lanka is not a dictatorship. We have really strongly remained a democracy.

And we have to give that due credit to even the present leadership, the fact that the entire cabinet resigned very quickly after the demonstrations began, was a very good symbol of respect for democratic traditions. So it's difficult to compare it to the Arab Spring because we are not revolting against unelected dictators. We are challenging and protesting revolting against unelected dictators. We are challenging and protesting a particular leader whom we did elect overwhelmingly. We're telling him that he has now lost his mandate and he needs to go home sooner than when his term expires.

So, I mean, it is revolutionary in the sense of what's happening in Sri Lanka. We have not seen protests of this length and intensity. We're right now seeing people camping outside the president's office. There's a little sort of Occupy Colombo movement happening. There are, you know, a whole village being set up. The village is being called Gota Go village. This is a protest where they're going to do until all the Rajapaksas leave and all the ministers leave from the ruling party.

So day and night, so there are people camping here for days and night. They're going to stay here till all the Rajapaksas and the corrupt politicians leave. We've got, you know, medical tents set up, doctors' tents set up, you know, portaloos are out there. So that is unprecedented. I would call this an unprecedented protest movement. I would not call it a revolution. Right now, the Sri Lankan government and the protesters in Colombo are at an impasse.

I asked Paike Sothi where he thinks this is going. Because of the standoff, because the government, the president says he won't go, and the protesters continue their protests, there has to be a resolution of that standoff. So the danger here is of some kind of violence or mischief making leading to violence, which would create a law and order problem, which might prompt the military to intervene in ways that they have not done before. That's the great danger point. Adding to the uncertainty, the main opposition said on Wednesday that it's giving the president and the prime minister a week to resign before they move to a non-confidence motion in parliament.

But the Rajapaksas are standing their ground. Also on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa announced that he was ready to start negotiations with the protesters if they're ready to talk about their proposals. But for now, the protesters say the only way they'll leave is if the Rajapaksas do what's being asked of them and step down. All right, that's all for this week. You've been listening to Nothing is Foreign. Our producer is Joyta Sengupta. Our sound designer is Graham McDonald.

And our showrunner is Adrian Chung. Nothing is Foreign is a co-production of CBC News and CBC Podcasts. Willow Smith is our senior producer and Nick McCabe-Locos is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Joseph Chavison. If you like this episode and you want to help new listeners find the show, please take a second and rate and review us wherever you're listening. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at CBC Podcasts. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you back here next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.