On 9 April, people from across Sri Lanka converged on Galle Face, a 12-acre seafront stretch of green in front of the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo. They set up a tented protest site called GotaGoGama, or Gota Go Village. The protesters called for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and for a wider system change in Sri Lanka – an end to the culture of impunity, nepotism, racism and injustice. They did so in a remarkably peaceful and creative way, for three long months, and successfully toppled one of Asia’s most powerful strongmen.
The protests were driven by an unprecedented economic crisis caused by a perfect storm of economic mismanagement, corruption and the impact of both the Ukraine war and the global pandemic. When Sri Lanka reneged on its foreign exchange debt of $51 billion, the crisis assumed devastating proportions: daily power cuts, businesses and schools closed, inflation at 60 per cent, food inflation at 90 per cent. People died of heat exhaustion while queuing for fuel, or quietly at home, in the absence of essential drugs.
Opposition to the government grew, especially to the president and his clan. The Rajapaksa family had dominated politics in Sri Lanka for 20 years and the people decided they’d had enough. GotaGoGama became the epicentre of the resistance, an imaginative expression of a growing hope for constructive and meaningful change.
The village drew thousands of people: medics and lawyers, students and teachers, journalists and artists, trade unionists and Indigenous people of the forest, bus drivers and businessmen, environmentalists and engineers, Catholic nuns and Buddhist clergy. Under the gusts of monsoon rain, the village not only provided food, water, medical and legal aid, with the support of 50 organisations, it also hosted lectures and musical performances, street theatre and art shows, under banners that called in loud letters to the president, “Gota Go Home” and “Give Our Stolen Money Back”.
Then on 9 May, the site was broken into by government-backed thugs. Tear gas and water cannon added to the force of an attack that injured over 100 protesters. In retaliation for that evening, dozens of houses belonging to MPs were burned down across the island, including the ancestral home of the Rajapaksas. Although the arsonists may have acted in support of GotaGoGama, no direct link has been made between the fires and the protest village. Indeed, some of the protesters left the GotaGoGama village as a result. Soon afterwards, the prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, who allegedly instigated the attack on the village, resigned.
Although diminished, the GotaGoGama protests carried on, ebbing and swelling in waves, until 9 July when they rose dramatically. State buildings were occupied by hundreds of protesters and members of the public. The president fled to the Maldives and on to Singapore where he resigned. The photos of ordinary people swimming in the president’s pool or taking selfies on his bed made headlines around the world. The protesters had achieved one of their main objectives: Gota was gone.
Yet there was little time for celebration. Later that month, a new president and prime minister were installed – both linked to the political old guard – and a state of emergency declared. It would be easy to conclude that the protests had failed. But the GotaGoGama village achieved what no government had ever done. It united the country, crossing barriers of ethnicity and religion, culture and class.
I first visited the village in April when it was, in the words of the Indian journalist Rohini Mohan, “a carnival of hope”, and went there regularly till late May. My hotel room directly overlooked the site. I have decided to write of the village as I found it, in the present tense, to call back a time that needs to be remembered if the values the protesters stood for – unity, democracy, justice and human rights – are ever to take hold in Sri Lanka.
A carnival of hope
In the midst of a row of large tents by the bustling thoroughfare, I find a white tent covered with signs that call for justice in three tongues. It is occupied by the Families for the Disappeared. Inside, Jennifer Weerasinghe sits quietly with her husband and a friend. Jennifer has taken her case to the press many times to no avail. But here, in GotaGoGama, she feels she has finally been heard. Above the din of electricity generators, she tells me it is the first time she has been able to talk about the abduction of her son in such a large public space.
“I have been lucky, I know what happened to my son,” she says. He disappeared, she tells me, after attending a farewell party for a friend who was heading to study medicine in the UK. She thinks she knows the identity of one of the people responsible for kidnapping her son and his five friends; the students’ vehicle was later found with false numberplates in the possession of a former Navy captain. The abduction appears to have been part of a series of kidnaps carried out by Navy personnel, a case known as the “Navy 11”. While it happened during the civil war, the motive seems to have been purely the extraction of money from the families.
Tens of thousands of people were disappeared during the civil war in Sri Lanka between the state and the separatist Tamil Tigers. It lasted almost 30 years, ending brutally in May 2009 after the intensification of military conflict led by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was then defence secretary. After the war ended, the families of the disappeared urgently needed answers. Gotabaya’s reponse was cruel and dismissive. He simply told them that their missing loved ones were “actually dead”.
Yet Jennifer’s quest for justice continues, emboldened by GotaGoGama. “There are many people who are scared to speak out,” she says. “I used to feel afraid but I am without fear now because of the strength of the youth. We speak out, letting our blood boil, while our throats turn dry. The government has to listen.”
The village is a communal space of mixed voices – punctuated by the blare of music, the drill of generators and the sound of electronically amplified calls and chants. Stepping from the tent, I come across Andi Schubert, a language lecturer, and Harinda, founder of a social enterprise focused on community service, speaking animatedly in English. They tell me that the site has generated new conversations across communities and class.
Andi has just given a talk on ethnic identity at the People’s University that his friends set up on the site. The People’s University is “a great place”, he says, for “rethinking what a university can be at a time when the university itself is becoming a more repressive and conservative space – not just in Sri Lanka but globally”. Harinda describes a scene of open contestation where those from a lower socio-economic background felt free to challenge those higher up. It was a scene, he says, “that melted my heart”.
When I return to the site after the government’s attack on 9 May, the mood has changed and conversations are more focused. Plainclothes police are moving through the crowds to collect witness reports. Some protesters are not sure if they should assist with this. People are climbing the steps to a platform where lawyers dispense advice on their rights.
Close by, I find Priyantha Vishvajith, a filmmaker, who sports the flowing locks and beard common to many of the young men here. “We are in an economic, social and political crisis which is creating a struggle for all communities, so we want unity to fight the government to create a new society,” he tells me. “Even newborn babies are bearing the burden of the country’s debt . . . We are like refugees in our native country. We are suffering like them.”
Like so many of the protesters, Priyantha tells me he has no party-political line and no personal grudges, but simply wants a country free from corruption. “They are robbing us and filling up their stomachs,” he says. “One or two families are doing this, including eight members of the Rajapaksa family.” As we talk, someone comes up and embraces him. It is only now that he tells me that he was one of those assaulted by government-backed thugs in the attack on 9 May. They beat him over the head and back, and dragged him through the streets. He was carrying his phone and managed to film the assault. The film went viral and was picked up globally. “How are you now?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, just lifts his white T-shirt and shows me the wounds that still blotch his body six days later. No action has been taken against those who assaulted him.
Later, I meet a painter, Malinda Bulathsinhala, working on a five-foot-high canvas depicting the Buddha seated in a grove surrounded by a circle of saffron-robed monks: a wash of sunset colours. He tells me it is a satirical take on a scene depicted in a mural at the Kelaniya temple.
“My painting depicts extremist monks who divide people up. Those who are corrupt and have worked with politicians,” he says. “Politics corrupts Buddhism as politicians are only interested in power and money and use Buddhism for their own gain.” He emphasises that the protest is non-violent and began “through art and music”.
Nevertheless, the protesters were confronted with state violence. I meet Rakshida, a 17-year-old who was being trained in first aid when the tear gas came rolling in on 9 May. “Mobs came and broke all of the tents but did not touch the Red Cross tent, which is clearly marked,” she tells me. “If I saw what was happening outside, I would have been scared. I was too busy. One of the victims had a dislocated jaw and cried a lot. Another person had his head cracked open into two pieces.”
She recalls that they helped a pregnant Rajapaksa supporter who had come with the mob and been injured. “The nurse who treated her said if she wasn’t pregnant, she would have slapped her,” she laughs. “We gave help to all the people who came in.”
The 9 May attack was only the first wave of violence against the protesters at GotaGoGama. Within 24 hours of the appointment of the new president on 21 July, masked military came under cover of darkness. Protesters were beaten, phones and film confiscated, several journalists attacked. And the site that had drawn so many for over 100 days was dismantled, leaving a smattering of tents behind.
Transforming Sri Lanka
Today, there is no physical trace of the protest village at Galle Face. Meanwhile, the ousted president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has returned to Sri Lanka. Protesters are being abducted in broad daylight; more than 4,000 have been arrested to date. Unidentified bodies wash up on the beach. The struggle is being criminalised. Protesters are “fascists”, according to the president, “terrorists” according to the prime minister, and “drug addicts” according to the chief whip. And some commentators who once praised the protesters have started to echo this line.
Yet it is hard to imagine that the energy unleashed by the protest will simply disappear. All popular protests are underscored by idealism. GotaGoGama enacted its vision of Sri Lanka as a united community of equals. This quest to change society has a particular urgency now.
Sri Lanka today is a country where survival is at risk: survival of body and being, of democracy and rights, as the economic crisis deepens with no end in sight. Without the foreign exchange for essential imports, food costs have spiralled and a third of the population is now food insecure. Medicine continues to be restricted to the point where life-saving drugs are scarce; pregnant women and children are most at risk. And while International Monetary Fund aid may be brought in, the anticipated fiscal reforms and the likely terms of debt restructuring, combined with the ongoing crackdown on dissent, mean a deepening of divisions that will likely fracture the nation along new lines.
Sri Lanka’s peaceful protests invented a new space of unity: a utopian site born out of “the pure urge for survival”, in the words of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. They drew attention to the precarity that lies at the heart of human rights, in the injunction to protect “life, liberty and security of person” and the intimate connection between survival, bodily integrity and social values. The significance of the protests lies in both the way they embodied their political objectives and the way they exposed this link between political and human needs.
The village also matters, not only because of what protesters fought for, but because it marks a place and time when once-terrorised people lost their fear. The physical site may now be gone, but the dream village where people dared to unite and build a community of care – a village of diverse voices arguing, debating, interjecting and calling out – cannot be dismantled as easily. The myth of the invincibility of the government has been shattered in Sri Lanka. The dream village, meanwhile, remains – marking the potentiality of a people’s power.
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
