Three brothers of President
Gotabaya Rajapaksa now hold top posts in his government. Two of his nephews
have official positions, too.]
By Mujib Mashal
In 2018, former President Mahinda
Rajapaksa was sworn
in as prime minister, even though the man he was supposedly replacing said
he still held the job. Mr. Rajapaksa eventually backed down, though not
before chairs were smashed and chili powder and
fists were thrown in Parliament.
But a year later, his
brother Gotabaya was elected president. Since then, the Rajapaksas have
stamped their name so thoroughly on Sri Lanka’s government that it feels like a
family enterprise — albeit a struggling one, with the economy in tatters and
discontent rising.
On Thursday, another brother,
Basil, was sworn in as finance minister, a move that one analyst, Bhavani
Fonseka, said “consolidated the Rajapaksa family rule.”
“We now have four brothers and
several other members of the family holding key positions in government,” said
Ms. Fonseka, a senior researcher with the Center for Policy Alternatives, a
research institute based in Colombo, the capital. “In the face of a weak
opposition and no real checks and balances on the executive, prospects for Sri
Lanka’s constitutional democracy are deeply troubling.”
Gotabaya
Rajpaksa, 72, gave himself the additional post of defense minister shortly
after becoming president. He soon made Mahinda, 75, the prime minister, also
putting him in charge of the Ministries of Religious Affairs and Urban
Development. (He was the finance minister, too, before Basil got the job.) The
eldest brother, Chamal Rajapaksa, 78, was named the minister of irrigation, as
well as the state minister of home affairs and of national security and
disaster management.
Then came the second generation.
Namal Rajapaksa, 35, Mahinda’s son and a former captain of the national rugby
team, was named minister of youth and sports. He is also the state minister of
digital technology and enterprise development. Chamal’s son Shasheendra
Rajapaksa got a portfolio too long to fit on a business card: He is
the minister of state for “paddy and cereals, organic food, vegetables, fruits,
chilies, onions and potatoes, seed production and high-tech agriculture.”
The family has been in power for
much of the past two decades. During his 10 years as president, Mahinda
Rajapaksa ended Sri Lanka’s decades-long
civil war in 2009, crushing the rebels known as the Tamil Tigers. His
brothers held key posts then, too: Gotabaya led the Defense Ministry, where he
was accused of human rights abuses in the final stretch of the war, while
Chamal was the speaker of Parliament and Basil was a minister in the cabinet.
But in the 2015 election, Mahinda
Rajapaksa was denied
a third term as president, after having pushed through a constitutional
amendment to allow himself to pursue one.
The coalition government that
replaced him brought hopes of reform and a promise to put the war-ravaged
country on a
path to reconciliation, in which war crimes would be investigated and the
grievances of minorities, which the rebels had made their rallying cry, would
be addressed.
But the new government was so
bogged down by bickering
and dysfunction that many voters apparently yearned for the order the
Rajapaksas had imposed. The bombings on Easter in 2019 — in which,
despite repeated
warnings from India’s intelligence service, militants launched simultaneous
attacks that killed more than 250 people — helped Gotabya Rajapaksa to handily
win the presidential election months later, campaigning as a strongman.
Since then, the coronavirus
pandemic and the government’s response to it, which has included putting strict
restrictions on movement and essentially closing the border to tourists, has
added to the economic woes in Sri Lanka, which had already been caught in
a cycle
of debt.
Basil Rajapaksa, the new finance
minister, played important roles in both of his brothers’ presidential
campaigns and is seen as a pragmatic strategist within the family. Some
analysts and opposition politicians saw his appointment as an acknowledgment by
his brothers that urgent action was needed to address the economy and the
discontent.
But others wondered why a
non-Rajapaksa could not be found to do the job.
“I don’t think we have faced such a
serious crisis in our balance of payment in the last several decades. This
means professional, technical input to solve this situation and get this country
out of it,” said Harsha De Silva, an opposition lawmaker and an economist. “The
Rajapaksas believe that expertise lies only among their family — that if one
brother can’t do, the next brother will try, and if that fails, a third brother
will do.”
“You need discussions, you need
ideas thrown around in a crisis,” Mr. De Silva added. “This family — they all
think alike, and we have seen that because they have been in office since 2005,
except for a few years.”
In recent months, Sri Lanka has
seen repeated demonstrations by thousands of people with a variety of demands,
including justice for those who disappeared during the war and better
compensation for health care workers. The government has cracked down on the
protests on the grounds that they flouted Covid restrictions; some called
that a pretext, noting that the guidelines allowed spas, restaurants and
stores to open.
Human rights activists have
expressed concern about Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s centralization of power and his
distribution of key posts to family members. They also say he has reversed the
progress Sri Lanka had made toward some degree of accountability for crimes
committed during the war.
Rights groups say Mr. Rajapaksa has
used the police and judiciary to harass dissidents and has obstructed
investigations into war crimes, which he characterized as “political
victimization” of security officers. He has also pardoned military officers who
were accused of grave abuses.
Last year, Mr. Rajapaksa pushed through constitutional amendments that
strengthened the powers of his office. Sri Lanka’s Bar Association has warned
that the amendments allow the president to act with legal impunity and have
removed much-needed checks and balances from the country’s system of government.
The amendments also eliminated a
clause that prohibited dual citizens from holding key government positions.
That made it possible for Basil Rajapaksa, who holds American citizenship, to
become finance minister.
A final hurdle was that Basil Rajapaksa
was not a member of Parliament, where cabinet ministers come from. That
obstacle was surmounted when a lawmaker from the governing party resigned, and
Basil was presented as his replacement through a party list.
“They don’t see this as anything to
apologize for — and their constituencies don’t either, so long as they deliver
tangible and symbolic benefits for them,” said Alan Keenan, the senior
consultant for Sri Lanka at the International Crisis Group. “But that is the
problem — they aren’t delivering. By increasingly shutting down avenues for
political critique and protest, they risk serious conflict.”