Trade Unions Strike In Crisis-Hit Sri Lanka To Pressure President Rajapaksa To Step Down

Sri Lanka is on the verge of bankruptcy with huge foreign debts and a lack of foreign currency, causing shortages of imported essential goods like fuel and food and medicines.

Colombo: Businesses were closed, teachers were absent and the public was transportation interrupted as Sri Lankans heeded a call for a general strike on Thursday to pressure President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his family members to resign over the country’s worst-ever economic crisis. The island nation of 22 million people is on the verge of bankruptcy with huge foreign debts and a lack of foreign currency, causing shortages of imported essential goods like fuel and food and medicines.

The economic crisis has prompted widespread protests throughout the country.  Thursday’s strike, however, was the first time the entire country had been brought to a standstill since those demonstrations began, reported news agency AFP.

Public transport was stopped, school attendance dropped and shops and offices remained closed across the country, police and regional officials said. Professionals across trades held parades and joined the main protest site opposite the president’s office in the capital, Colombo, where demonstrators have gathered for weeks, and chanted: “Go home Gota. Go home Gota,” referring to the president. Doctors and nurses have said they will support the strike with demonstrations during their lunch break.

President Rajapaksa is due to meet political party leaders on Friday to discuss the crisis. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya’s elder brother and a former two-term president, reiterated his confidence on Wednesday that he would not be fired over the crisis, according to an AFP report.

More than 100 trade unions, some affiliated to the Rajapaksas’ ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, joined the general strike, whose participants are demanding that the president, prime minister and other senior officials resign.

“Today is like a public holiday in the country,” a police official monitoring the island-wide situation, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP. “Hospitals are treating only emergency cases.”

The economic crisis in Sri Lanka

Across the country, vegetable markets were closed, while the country’s tea plantations, the main export earner, were also shut down, residents and local media said. The country’s economic crisis took hold after the coronavirus pandemic hammered income from tourism as well as remittances from Sri Lankans abroad. Protesters also blame the Rajapaksa clan for years of mismanagement.

The government has defaulted on its USD 51 billion external debt and is in talks with the International Monetary Fund for an emergency bailout. Sri Lanka has foreign reserves of less than USD 1 billion, depleting available foreign currency. The resulting shortages of imported essentials like fuel, cooking gas, medicine and milk left people standing in lines for hours to buy limited stock.

Unable to pay for fuel imports, utilities have imposed lengthy daily blackouts to ration electricity, while long lines snake around service stations as people queue for diesel, petrol and kerosene.

Hospitals in the country are also short of vital medicines and the government has appealed to citizens abroad for donations. Thousands of demonstrators have been camped for weeks outside the president’s sea-front office calling for him to resign.

Government officials have blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic for the debt crisis and say they have been discussing rescue plans and loan repayment with the International Monetary Fund, Chinese officials and others.

Rajapaksa reshuffled his Cabinet and offered a unity government in an attempt to quell protests, but opposition parties refused to be part of a government headed by the Rajapaksa brothers. The weak, divided opposition has been unable to show a majority and take control of Parliament on its own.