Despite the heavy police and military presence and imposed island-wide curfew, pro-Rajapaksa mobs still assaulted protesters “agitating peacefully” outside the president’s office and the prime minister’s residence. For the past several months, however, shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food items and medicines, coupled with staggering double-digit inflation, has prompted the people to protest peacefully against the government. This reality is largely a result of the autocratic and corrupt Rajapaksa family who has ruled the strategically located island in the Indian Ocean-except for a brief period from January 2015 to November 2019-for almost two decades.

The so-called “perfect tropical paradise” that is shaped like a teardrop falling from the southern tip of India has indeed now become an island of tears.

President Rajapaksa fled the city and promised to resign as protesters have peacefully been demanding for months. Massive protests in the capital city of Colombo erupted on July 9 with the ransacking of the presidential secretariat and the newly appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe’s official residence, followed by his private home being set ablaze. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka officially declared on Jthat the national economy had “completely collapsed.” A month earlier, the increasingly debt-laden island nation of 22 million people defaulted on its US$50 billion foreign debt to China and other international creditors, bringing the entire country to a grinding economic standstill. The views expressed in this analysis do not represent the official positions of his current or past affiliations nor governments. He is a former commissioner to UNESCO and the secretariat director of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the US Department of State. Mendis served as a distinguished visiting professor of Sino-American relations at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing. A non-resident senior fellow of the Synergia Foundation in Bangalore, India and the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei, Prof. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor in the NATO and Indo-Pacific Commands of the US Department of Defense, is a distinguished visiting professor of transatlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland as well as a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Will China Subdue the United States without a Fight to Dominate the Indian Ocean?ĭr.

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