Ousted Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has returned home weeks after fleeing the crisis-hit country, officials said. The 73-year-old former leader landed in the capital, Colombo, on a Singapore Airlines flight from Thailand early on Saturday, local media reported. Rajapaksa resigned in July after tens of thousands of protesters angered by a debilitating economic crisis stormed his office and residence. He fled to the Maldives on July 9, went to Singapore from there and spent the last few weeks in Thailand on a diplomatic visa. Al Jazeera’s Minelle Fernandez, writing from Colombo, confirmed Rajapaksa’s return. “We have confirmation that former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is back in the country,” he said. Fernandez later said the return “happened very quickly”. “Nobody expected him to come back when he literally flew out of the country on a military plane just a few weeks ago,” Fernandez said. “It remains to be seen what his options are in the coming days and months. He’s obviously stepped down, but he’s very much part of the family and the Rajapaksa family and they haven’t given up, as far as we hear, in terms of politics.”
Economic crisis
Rajapaksa was elected president in a landslide in 2019 on a promise to lift the country’s economy and strengthen national security after Islamic State-inspired bombings of churches and hotels killed 270 people on Easter Sunday that year. But policy blunders, including drastic tax cuts that reduced national income and pressured credit ratings, a ban on agrochemicals ostensibly to promote organic farming, and the release of scarce foreign currency to artificially control exchange rates led to the worst economic crisis in the history of the country. . Sri Lanka has suspended the repayment of its foreign debts, which exceed $51 billion, of which $28 billion must be repaid by 2027. The International Monetary Fund on Thursday announced a preliminary agreement to extend $2.9 billion to Sri Lanka over four years, subject to assurances from the country’s creditors to restructure loans. Months of street protests have torn apart the once powerful Rajapaksa political family. Before Rajapaksa stepped down, his older brother Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister and three other close family members resigned from cabinet posts. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who succeeded Rajapaksa, has cracked down on the protests, helping the Rajapaksa family and its supporters in hiding to return to public politics. Nuzly Hameem, one of the leaders of the protest movement, said the return of the former president should not be an issue “as long as he is accountable”. “He is a Sri Lankan citizen, so no one can stop him from coming back. But as someone who wants justice for the corrupt system, I would like to see action taken – there should be justice, they should bring cases against him and make him accountable for what he has done to the country.” “We didn’t expect him to leave. We wanted him to resign. As long as he is not involved in active politics, it will not be a problem,” Hameem said.
