Sri Lanka’s former president Chandrika Kumaratunga declared that she “doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry” when looking at the state of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), in post-election comments where she praised Mahinda Rajapaksa as a “strong leader”.
Reacting to Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections last week, where Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna’s (SLPP) swept through the South and gained a two-thirds majority in parliament, Kumaratanga bemoaned the demise of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).
“It is the party that I grew up with, it is the party that fed me and its supporters brought me to power for eleven years,” she said. “I have been looking for the SLFP all over the place, but I can’t find it anywhere.”
She went on to blame former Sri Lanka president Maithripala Sirisena for “destroying the party, a process that was begun by Mahinda Rajapaksa”. “Mahinda began the rot and did it subtly but Sirisena finished it off in the most base and dirty way,” she said.
However, she also praised Rajapaksa, stating that “I don’t agree with Mahinda Rajapaksa’s policies or his way of doing things, but he is a strong leader”.
Kumaratunga also criticised the United National Party’s (UNP) failure. “Today the UNP has broken up and its pieces are lying everywhere,” she said. “It is sad that the UNP and the SLFP the two oldest and strongest parties in the country that safeguarded democracy in this country for so long have met this fate.”
She goes on to attest today’s politics have reduced the relationship the citizens have with their leaders, stating that everybody has to kneel down before those in power to beg for what is rightfully theirs.
“After they have skinned their knees and can’t kneel down anymore they will get nothing,” she claimed.
The former president also announced she will no longer actively participate in politics.
“The last time they dragged me back to build a coalition to make a change. But the two people that were put in charge to ensure that change took place destroyed that completely.”
“I will not do that ever again.”
Whilst Sri Lankan president, Kumaratunga also oversaw several atrocities committed against Tamils, including the 1995 Navaly church bombing. In 2015, she told an audience, "I have not done anything wrong… I don’t have blood on our hands”. Earlier that year, she had boasted of having won “75%” of the war during her tenure by going to war with the LTTE. And despite her tenure in office marred by the bombing of churches, schools and the massive military invasion of Jaffna, killing countless Tamil civilians.
Kumaratunga has repeatedly denied the need for an independent international investigation into war crimes. In 2017, she told a gathering in Jaffna, “We have no intention to drag the soldiers before courts and send them to gallows”.
In 2018 she was awarded France’s highest national honour, the Medal of “Commandeur de la Légion D’Honneur”.
This week, British parliamentarians named Kumaratunga as one of four Sri Lankan officials the the UK should sanction over her record of human rights abuses.
