Nationwide strike cripples Sri Lanka
MILLIONS of workers staged a crippling strike in Sri Lanka yesterday, adding to pressure on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his ruling family to quit over the country’s worst economic crisis. The island nation of 22 million people has been hit by months of acute shortages of food, fuel and medicines, prompting widespread protests.
But yesterday’s nationwide strike was the first time the entire country had been brought to a standstill since the demonstrations began, with both state and private sector employees taking part. Public transport was stopped and teachers quit school while shops and offices closed, police and regional officials said.
Rajapaksa invited leaders of his party to discuss the crisis today, but former coalition partner the Sri Lanka Freedom Party said they would not attend and told him to step down.
Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya’s elder brother and a former two-term president, has said he is confident he will not be fired over the crisis.
In Colombo’s main commercial area of Pettah, wholesale trading shops were shut and workers joined a march.
More than 100 trade unions, some even affiliated with the Rajapaksas’ ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, joined the general strike, demanding the president, prime minister and other senior officials resign.
“Today is like a public holiday,” a police official said. “Hospitals are treating only emergency cases.”
Across the nation, vegetable markets were closed, while tea plantations, a main export earner, were also shut, residents and local media said.
Tens of thousands of workers in the country’s free trade zones came out of their factories and staged protests demanding the Rajapaksa family step down. Most banks were closed while a few provided reduced hours of service.
The main international airport operated without interruption, officials said. By afternoon, shops across the country had closed in solidarity with the trade unions.
Union leader Ravi Kumudesh issued a one-week deadline to Rajapaksa to step down or face a continuous strike.
The country’s economic crisis took hold after Covid-19 hammered income from tourism and remittances from Sri Lankans abroad. Protesters also blame the Rajapaksa clan for years of mismanagement. The government has defaulted on its $51 billion external debt and is in talks with the International Monetary Fund for an emergency bailout. Unable to pay for fuel imports, utilities have imposed daily blackouts to ration electricity.