Desk Report
Publish: 06 Apr 2022, 11:31 am
Gotabaya Rajapaksa || Photo: Collected
Sri Lanka's
under-fire president has withdrawn a controversial state of emergency following
a day of political drama and further protests.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa
invoked the law - which allows the arrest of suspects without warrants - on 1
April after protests outside his house.
But he lifted them
on Tuesday in an apparent concession to angry citizens.
Sri Lanka is facing
its worst economic crisis since gaining independence from the UK in 1948.
The heavily
import-reliant South Asian nation no longer has enough dollar reserves to buy
essential items like food, fuel to power vehicles, or even generate electricity.
People have been
suffering power cuts of up to 13 hours, massive inflation, and a shortage of
food and basic goods.
Thousands of people
have come out onto the roads over the last few days, demanding the president
resign for what they call his mishandling of the crisis.
The strength of the
public anger has also translated into political losses for the president.
His entire cabinet
quit on Sunday apart from his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The president then
called on the opposition to help him form a national unity government but they
refused.
"What the
people want is for this president and the entire government to step down,"
opposition leader Sajith Premadasa said on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, as
parliament convened, 41 MPs left the president's ruling coalition to
"represent themselves independently". The implication of this is
still unclear.
Protests across the
country were expected to continue on Wednesday.
Public frustration
over the crisis saw peaceful demonstrations take place since January.
But the situation
has escalated in the last fortnight, with many more people taking to the
streets as power cuts stretched to 13 hours and petrol stations ran out of fuel.
"People can't
afford their daily rice, their dhal, their basic necessities. People can't get
on buses to come to work, to go to school," one protester told the BBC
this week.
While most protests
are peaceful, there have also been violent flare-ups - with attacks on
politicians' homes and clashes between protesters and police.
On Tuesday, the UN
Human Rights Council expressed its concerns about the emergency measures in a
statement issued before they were lifted.
The UN noted the
reports of police violence and said it was worried the restrictions aimed at
"preventing or discouraging people from legitimately expressing their
grievances through public protests".
It added that:
"The drift towards militarisation and the weakening of institutional
checks and balances in Sri Lanka have affected the state's ability to
effectively tackle the economic crisis."
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