Colombo, Sri Lanka – A court in the Sri Lankan capital has extended the custody of the wife of Sri Lanka’s powerful former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was arrested last week over allegations that her charity misused donations collected for a children’s hospital. The October 7 arrest of Shiranthi Rajapaksa, 73, dealt a huge blow to the once powerful family that ruled Sri Lanka for nearly two decades until they were overthrown in a youth-led uprising in 2022. A month before Shiranthi’s arrest, her 40-year-old parliamentarian son Namal Rajapaksa, who is also the national organiser of the Rajapaksa-controlled Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, was arrested over bribery charges.
The family, based in the stronghold of Hambantota district in southern Sri Lanka, counts Mahinda, 80, as its charismatic patriarch. Elected prime minister in 2004 and president the next year, Mahinda is adored by many among the country’s majority ethnic Sinhala Buddhists for crushing the Tamil separatist rebels who waged a 26-year-long civil war that ended in 2009. In the campaign against the now-defunct Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels demanding a separate state in northern Sri Lanka, Mahinda’s younger brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa served as his defence secretary.
According to estimates by the United Nations, nearly 40,000 civilians were killed in the final weeks of the civil war, triggering an international inquiry into the alleged atrocities. After the war, Mahinda was criticised for not doing enough to mend relations with the Tamils, who have been banned from commemorating their war dead. During Mahinda’s rule, Sri Lanka, a country of 22 million people, also borrowed nearly $7bn from China for infrastructure projects, many of which were mired in corruption.
Despite changing a law that allowed him a third presidential term, Mahinda lost the 2015 election to former political ally, Maithripala Sirisena. After the deadly 2019 Easter Sunday bombings in churches and hotels blamed on an ISIL (ISIS) offshoot, Gotabaya, who until then was a political novice, used anti-Muslim rhetoric to win the presidential election – the second in the family to hold the post. Gotabaya appointed Mahinda as the prime minister, and gave influential ministerial posts to his other brothers – Chamal and Basil – as well as Mahinda’s son, Namal Rajapaksa.
As the family tightened its control over the island struck first by the 2019 bombings and later the coronavirus pandemic, they were also accused of mismanaging the economy and widespread corruption. The economic crisis ignited historic street protests in the summer of 2022, which forced Gotabaya to flee the country. A caretaker government ruled the country until elections in 2024 saw Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a 57-year-old Marxist, winning the presidency on an anti-corruption platform and promising to act against the Rajapaksa family and previous administrations.
The ongoing arrests and legal cases against members of the Rajapaksa family are seen as a part of the same promise. The former First Lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa was arrested last week by the government’s Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC). The Siriliya Saviya foundation, a charity she leads, is accused of misusing donations of nearly 100m rupees ($30,000) intended to buy equipment for a children’s hospital in capital Colombo.
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