From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   How the Rajapaksa Political Clan Led Sri Lanka to Catastrophe   
   By Philip Wen, Aug. 9, 2022, WSJ   
      
   HAMBANTOTA, Sri Lanka—By his last days in power, Gotabaya Rajapaksa had been   
   sequestered in his presidential palace for weeks, say those close to him.   
   Cloistered with a small coterie of military advisers on July 9, the president   
   was escorted to a    
   nearby naval base and put on a warship for his protection, barely leaving his   
   cabin for two days as tens of thousands of protesters occupied his residence   
   clamoring for his resignation.   
      
   Interviews with ruling party politicians, presidential advisers and government   
   and military officials reveal a picture of an increasingly isolated Mr.   
   Rajapaksa, distrustful of his own military commanders and fearful of his   
   safety in the final throes of    
   his presidency. A former soldier, Mr. Rajapaksa governed in a way that   
   deepened family rivalries and led to decisions that ultimately had   
   catastrophic consequences for Sri Lanka’s economy, former cabinet members   
   and aides say.   
      
   He also presided over the unceremonious fall from grace of the powerful   
   Rajapaksa clan that had dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape for   
   decades.    
      
   “He comes from a military background, so he’s used to taking and giving   
   orders,” said Nalaka Godahewa, a former business executive who was recruited   
   into politics by Gotabaya Rajapaksa and served as a cabinet minister under the   
   former president. “   
   Here there’s nobody to give him orders, he was at the top. And he was giving   
   orders without consulting.”   
      
   Sri Lanka’s popular uprising has been all the more jarring considering the   
   adulation the family previously enjoyed. Elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa was   
   president—and Gotabaya defense secretary—when they ended a decadeslong   
   civil war in 2009,    
   winning widespread acclaim among Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority but   
   also drawing allegations of human-rights abuses against the Tamil ethnic   
   minority from the United Nations.   
      
   Mahinda Rajapaksa was once so revered in the family’s hometown political   
   power base of Hambantota, a sleepy district on Sri Lanka’s beach-lined   
   southern coast, that images of the mustachioed politician—draped with his   
   family’s trademark maroon    
   scarf over a crisp white shirt—would line town streets and adorn walls of   
   homes, or be tucked into wallets and purses. Some displayed his framed   
   portrait on an altar next to their Buddha statues.    
      
   “We brought him into our home,” said Katapoluge Premaratne, a 55-year-old   
   villager hand-weaving a fishing net, nodding to a smudge on his front door   
   where a sticker of Mr. Rajapaksa used to hold pride of place. “We really   
   loved him.”     
      
   That sentiment has soured. As protests over fuel shortages and food prices   
   intensified in May, protesters in Hambantota destroyed a pair of   
   teardrop-shaped glass monuments built by Gotabaya Rajapaksa to honor the   
   brothers’ late parents, toppled a    
   statue of their father, and set on fire a home belonging to the family.    
      
   “The people don’t see that the leadership of the country has understood   
   their pain,” one ruling party official mused. Referring to the vandalism in   
   the Rajapaksas’ hometown, “now they do,” he said.    
      
   An aide for Gotabaya Rajapaksa declined to comment for this article when   
   reached by phone and text message, while an aide to Mahinda Rajapaksa didn’t   
   respond to phone calls and messages seeking comment. A spokesman for the   
   brothers’ Sri Lanka    
   Podujana Peramuna party didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.     
      
   The Rajapaksa brothers are among nine siblings born into a political family   
   with roots in the southern district of Hambantota, which was mostly dense   
   jungle until recent decades of development. Their uncle, Don Mathew Rajapaksa,   
   was first elected to the    
   State Council in 1936, when Sri Lanka was under British colonial rule. Their   
   father, Don Alwin Rajapaksa, served as agriculture minister and Parliament’s   
   deputy speaker after independence.   
      
   Mahinda Rajapaksa became the country’s youngest member of Parliament in 1970   
   at the age of 24, representing the same local seat his father had held. He   
   would develop into a charismatic and powerful orator, seen as the family   
   patriarch by many Sri    
   Lankans. When the civil war was declared over, Mr. Rajapaksa, who was then on   
   an overseas trip, knelt and kissed the ground of the airport tarmac upon his   
   return.   
      
   “My country comes first, my country comes second, my country comes third,”   
   the now 76-year-old would repeat over the years.    
      
   An army veteran who commanded a battalion during the civil war, younger   
   brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa emigrated to the U.S. after two decades in the   
   military. After a series of tech jobs, including as a systems administrator at   
   Los Angeles’s Loyola    
   University, he returned home as Mahinda lined up his first presidential run in   
   2005.   
      
   The family’s youngest brother in politics, 71-year-old Basil Rajapaksa, is   
   seen as the strategist of the family operations, and was Mahinda’s campaign   
   manager for both his successful presidential tilts.   
      
   Basil Rajapaksa didn’t respond to several text requests for comment.   
      
   The brothers had always sought to project a united front and regularly worked   
   out political differences over family meals. But signs of discord were already   
   surfacing amid recriminations over Mahinda Rajapaksa’s loss in the 2015   
   presidential elections,    
   when a disaffected voting public turned away from the Rajapaksas for what they   
   saw as rampant corruption and nepotism—criticisms the Rajapaksa family has   
   routinely denied.   
      
   There was internal disagreement over which brother to put forward in 2019   
   following newly introduced term limits that made it impossible for Mahinda to   
   run again. Around that time, a series of Islamist bomb attacks on churches and   
   luxury hotels in the    
   capital Colombo swung momentum behind Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The former soldier   
   projected himself as the leader who could keep the country’s painfully   
   secured peace, a former presidential adviser said. The family rallied behind   
   Mr. Rajapaksa, who gave up    
   his U.S. citizenship to secure the top office and promised in his election   
   manifesto to be guided by the more experienced family patriarch, Mahinda.   
      
      
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