Young Protesters to Sri Lanka Government: You Messed With The Wrong Generation

MOSCOW (Sputnik) Tommy Yang - A young protester from Sri Lanka explained to Sputnik why her generation has decided to take a stand against the government during a worsening economic crisis in the country.

Nethmi Sihara Liyanapathirana was nine years old when the civil war ended in Sri Lanka in 2009. But she doesn’t remember life being as difficult as it is today.

“I was nine when the civil war ended here. So the first ten years of my life, the civil war was going on. During that period, there were power outages and a lack of essentials. My life wasn’t really affected as much because I was from the middle class. But now it has come to a point where everyone in the middle class has been affected by the current crisis and your economic status is constantly dropping,” Liyanapathirana, a 22-year-old social worker from Colombo, the commercial capital and the largest city in Sri Lanka, told Sputnik.

Facing mounting pressure from the repayment of foreign debts of approximately $8.6 billion this year, Sri Lanka approached a tipping point in the economic crisis this year. Skyrocketing fuel costs, rapid depreciation of the rupee, and massive power outages have caused deep discontent among Sri Lankans, especially the younger generation.

When the nationwide power cuts reached more than 10 hours a day in late March, mass protests broke out in a number of regions in Sri Lanka, where angry demonstrators called for the resignation of the country’s president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

“People weren’t paying attention to the debt crisis in Sri Lanka, because they just watched the news about angry politicians yelling and screaming at each other. Even the rising fuel costs wasn’t as big of an issue as we had similar problems before. But when the electricity crisis started, the power outages started with five hours a day. At one point, we didn’t have power for 16 hours a day. I guess that pushed people over the edge. It's not that we weren't already crumbling in our economy. It's just that people hadn't noticed until now. And now, people have noticed it,” Liyanapathirana said.

Must Take a Stand

As part of the younger generation in Sri Lanka that has been the driving force of the protests, Liyanapathirana became angrier still when the government introduced curfews, and she decided to join the demonstrations herself.

“I was pretty skeptical at first, but when they announced the curfew on Saturday evening, I would say that was when I was really pushed over the edge. It came to a point where I felt like it didn’t matter where we were, because they were trying so hard to shut down the people's voices,” she said.

The young social worker explained why she wanted to take a stand.

“It felt like one of the biggest injustices I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. So yeah, I thought ‘Okay, I have to do what I have to do,’ and I no longer felt afraid. So I thought, ‘Okay, I need to get myself out there,’ because if my friends and I don't take a stand, nobody else will,'” she recalled.

Political analysts in Sri Lanka pointed out that the protests were very similar to other grassroots protests in neighbouring Asian countries where the younger generation started a movement without clear leaders.

“The nice thing about this is this is not done by any political party. This is the people, especially the younger generation. There's a very popular slogan among these protesters:’ you messed with the wrong generation,’” Chamara Sumanapala, an independent political observer based in Colombo, told Sputnik.

The leaderless nature of the protests could have made Sri Lankan politicians more concerned because they had no control over the movement, Sumanapala suggested.

“What has happened is politicians, overall, have gotten a little bit scared, even for the opposition. To my knowledge, there were three instances when the opposition politicians tried to join the protests. The protesters just chased them away. Those politicians were not government people. They were opposition politicians,” he said.

Brain Drain

For the younger generation in Sri Lanka like Liyanapathirana, they have had to experience sharp inflation and a lack of basic necessities for the first time in their lives.

“I'm working from a coffee shop because I don't have power at home. And in this coffee shop close to my house, the coffee used to cost me around 250 to 180 rupees. But today, it costs me 430 rupees. And prices have almost doubled for most of the essentials. That’s most of the things that we need to survive. That's where people are really annoyed and pissed off because of things like fuel and electricity. Those are basic necessities,” Liyanapathirana said.

The young social worker worried that the dire situation in the country would lead to a brain drain in Sri Lanka, as it did during the civil war.

“There was a brain drain in Sri Lanka over the last 10-15 years. It was instigated by the civil war. But once people started to experience what life was like in the Western countries, those who had the means and the ability to migrate, they migrated because they realized that it's a better standard of living there. People, who initially didn't want to migrate, the people I know, friends of mine colleagues, are all thinking about it, because the status the country is in right now,” she said.

Liyanapathirana’s older brother is already pursuing a Master’s degree in Sydney, and her older sister tried to save money to migrate to Canada before the crash of the rupee forced her to have to gather more funds.

The exchange rate of the Sri Lankan Rupee jumped from 200 rupees for each US dollar before the crisis to as much as 300 rupees.

Time For Compromise

In face of the mass protests and public outcry, Sri Lanka president Gotabaya Rajapaksa defied the protesters’ call for his resignation and vowed to hold onto power.

Sumanapala, the political analyst, called on the president to face reality and try to find a solution to the crisis.

“What the protesters are saying is that the President is not acknowledging that there is a problem here. So unless he acknowledges there is a problem, you can't really solve it. If the President is not acknowledging there's a problem, you can’t find a solution in this,” he said.

The expert explained what would happen if Rajapaksa agreed to resign.

“If he resigns, there is a constitutional provision to select a new president, who has to be selected from within the parliament. There are 225 members in the parliament. So a new president will be elected by the parliament, and then he [the newly elected president] will continue the rest of the duration of the presidency,” Sumanapala said.

The analyst expressed the hope that the Sri Lanka president will begin to acknowledge the genuine discontent among the younger generation and offer some compromises to resolve the crisis.

According to Sumanapala, more protests and general strikes are expected to take place in the next few days, as the young protesters have shown no sign of backing down from their demands, while more people from other walks of life, such as lawyers, teachers and farmers, are expected to join the demonstrations.