Geneva, Rajapaksa Regime & Myanmar Shadows
The darkness of night is the close companion of dictators. ~ (Hafez,
Divan) (Quoted in Kim Ghattas,
Black Wave, London, 2020, p.31)
Within a period of just over one year the Rajapaksa regime, headed by two septuagenarian siblings with different professional traits – one, a military man, and the other, a crass politician, but both beholden to a Sinhala Buddhist supremacist ideology that is shredding Sri Lankan society into pieces, has driven the country into a cauldron of crises, from public health and economy to ecology and human rights and to cultural confrontations and social tensions. Of the two, it was the elder and patriarch of the clan, Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR) who, with understandable reluctance nominated the junior, Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa (NGR) as candidate for the presidency in 2019 and made him win the contest, without realizing the danger that sooner or later NGR would sideline Prime Minister MR and take control of the entire government. MR’s recent statement that he likes to work and serve the people without publicity is a tacit admission of this bitter truth by a man who loved pomp and pageant when he was the president.