Collective members discuss the recent people-led anti-government protests in Sri Lanka. May is Tamil Genocide Month in Sri Lanka, commemorating the Tamils killed in the vicious government repression of the Tamil Tiger uprising. However, current events have obscured that fact: In recent months, people have gathered to protest as Sri Lanka faces its worst economic crisis in post-independence history, resulting in shortages in food, fuel, and medicines, sky-high inflation and rolling power outages. Protests in Colombo have been met with severe police and military violence, a government tactic consistently used against Tamil communities in the north-east of the country, leading to numerous deaths and injuries. But these protests have also led to the resignation of the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose family has long occupied many of the main political appointments, and his replacement by former prime minister and opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. But Mahinda’s brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, continues to cling to power as President. While all these political maneuverings proceed, no improvement in Sri Lanka’s dire economic situation seems to be on the horizon and international bodies like the IMF fear that its crisis may merely be the first domino to fall in a global series of collapses. What does this crisis portend for Sri Lanka, and how are its ordinary citizens seeking to make the political changes that will be necessary to end the corruption and authoritarian majoritarian rule that has subjected the country to the civil war in which so many Tamils were killed as well as economic instability over decades?
To discuss these issues, we are joined by our guest Minoli Wijetunge, Project Manager of Watchdog, a multidisciplinary team of fact checkers, journalists, researchers and software engineers who hunt hoaxes and misinformation, investigate matters of public welfare, and build software tools that help other similar collectives.You can listen to their podcast, The Doghouse, download their app, and visit Elixir, the software built by Watchdog to help the medical crisis in Sri Lanka. You can also visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities in Sri Lanka.
Minoli Wijetunge is an academic affiliated with the University of Colombo and the University of Oxford. She is the former editor of Groundviews, a publication by the Centre for Policy Alternatives. If you miss today's live airing of our conversation with Minoli on kpfk.org, you can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public. The music on our show today is “Nam Parpome,” the Tamil rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge,” sung by Anjana and translated by Ponni and Maangai.
