Protesters sweep away police to occupy PM’s office

From a secret location Ranil Wickremesinghe issued a televised statement that made no concessions to the protesters.

After holding off the crowd for four hours police paramilitaries stand back and protesters storm the prime minister’s office in Colombo on Wednesday. Picture: Getty Images

When the key moment came and the boys in T-shirts poured over the fence, the police guarding the Sri Lankan Prime Minister’s ­office simply gave up.

They were armed, highly trained police paramilitaries, and for four hours on Wednesday they held off the crowds of protesters who swarmed around the colonial compound in Colombo.

The crowd, mainly young men, rattled the fences and climbed up sentry boxes guarding the office. Teargas was fired. Choking and retching, the protesters hurled the canisters back.

And when they eventually pulled away a section of fence and climbed in, the police abandoned their defence.

“A lot of these police sympathise with us – they understand that we’re doing this for them as well as for ourselves,” Jeana De Zoysa, one of a small number of female protesters, said.

“Some of the police were crying. They were deliberately firing the teargas high. Some of them were even whispering to our guys, telling them the weak points in the fence.”

The police stood back, the gates were opened and within minutes more than 1000 people were romping delightedly across the lawns and through the colonnades. But the object of their fury, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was nowhere to be found.

From a secret location, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister issued a statement that made no concessions to the protesters. Named acting president, he announced a nationwide state of emergency and an immediate curfew in ­Colombo and the surrounding ­region. “Protesters have no reason to storm the Prime Minister’s office,” he said in a televised statement. “We can’t tear up our constitution. We can’t allow fascists to take over.”

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had fled Sri Lanka in the early hours on a military plane to the Maldives. Since his election in 2019, he had become a hate figure for many Sri Lankans for his mishandling of the economy, which has left the country unable to pay its debts and facing a combination of rising prices and shortages of food, fuel and medicines.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Sri Lankans overran and occupied the President’s palace, secretariat and residence. On Thursday a spokeswoman for the loosely organised protest movement known as Aragalaya, or the Struggle, said they would withdraw from the buildings.

Mr Rajapaksa’s flight into exile might have been a moment of triumph for the protesters, except for one detail. The man who takes over as acting president is his equally mistrusted long-time ally.

Parliament will convene next week to choose an interim president who will serve out the rest of Mr Rajapaksa’s term of office. However, his party, the Sri Lanka People’s Front, dominates the parliament. There is every chance its MPs will select Mr Wickremesinghe, 73, who could serve as president for two years.

He was appointed prime minister by Mr Rajapaksa, 73, in May in response to increasing protests, replacing the President’s brother, Mahinda. It was Mr Wickremesinghe’s sixth time in the job in 29 years – the argument for appointing him is that Sri Lanka needs an experienced politician to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund and rescue the country’s economy. But for many Sri Lankans, he is tainted.

“He is power-hungry and very cunning – he’s a Rajapaksa puppet,” said Nuzly Hameem, one of the leadership figures in Aragalaya.

Hence the effort to break into Mr Wickremesinghe’s office. It did not matter that he was not there, the point was to maintain the momentum that exploded so powerfully with the storming of Mr Rajapaksa’s palace and brought together a wide cross-section of society. The protesters face a struggle to maintain unity in a movement made up of disparate groups and individuals who, apart from opposing an incompetent government, might agree on little else. “When our goals are achieved,” Mr Hameem said, “we will definitely become divided.”

One priority is to dispel the impression of the protesters as thugs, vandals or anarchists. When the crowd went into Mr Rajapaksa’s private residence, they looted and partly burnt it. At the prime minister’s residence, protesters worked with the police to block the entrances to the interior to prevent looting. “We want to protect this place,” a woman named Lasanthi Silva said. “It belongs to the people, and if it’s damaged it will be repaired with our tax money.”

The security forces had, in ­effect, surrendered key government sites, which might suggest sympathy with the demonstrators. At protest sites across Colombo on Wednesday night, Mr Wickremesinghe’s curfew was not being enforced. General Shavendra Silva, Sri Lanka’s defence chief, called for calm. “We have requested political leaders to decide the way forward,” he said.

The Times