How the Sri Lankans rose up to dethrone a dynasty

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - The president has been cornered with his back to the sea.

Inside the dimly lit colonial mansion enlightened that he had found alone, Gotabaya Rajapaksa watched from a hastily staged operations room as the months-long protests demanding his ouster as Sri Lanka's leader reached his doorstep.

A former defense chief accused of abuses during the South Asian nation's three-decade civil war, Mr Rajapaksa had taken an unusually passive approach to the protests. The message: he could stand up to dissent.

But this largely bourgeois movement - lawyers, teachers, nurses and taxi drivers enraged by an entrenched political elite that had essentially put the country - was not a routine protest. It kept swelling.

And now, in the late morning of July 9, thousands of protesters were gathering outside the presidential residence by the sea, so that hundreds of thousands more flooded the capital, Colombo. Two wrought iron gates and three barricades, all well guarded, stood between the protesters and the last permanent member of the Rajapaksa political dynasty.

ImageM. Rajapaksa, a former military leader, won the 2019 presidential election. rained, disorienting 17-year-old Dulini Sumanasekara, who had camped for three months with his parents, a preschool teacher and an insurance salesman, and other protesters along the scenic Galle Face in Colombo. After returning to the campsite to receive first aid, she and her family joined the protest.

"We were more determined than ever to make sure Gotabaya was gone. the same day,” she said.

In the early afternoon, the mansion had been breached and Mr. Rajapaksa had slipped by a back door, sailing the waters of Colombo and finally fleeing the c...