Showdown at the Mansion Gates: How Sri Lankans Rose Up to Dethrone a Dynasty

Inside the dimly lit colonial mansion he had found lonely, Gotabaya Rajapaksa watched from a hastily arranged operations room as the monthslong protests demanding his ouster as Sri Lanka’s leader reached his very doorstep.

A former defense chief accused of widespread abuses during the South Asian nation’s three-decade civil war, Mr. Rajapaksa had taken an uncharacteristically hands-off approach toward the demonstrations. The message: He could withstand dissent.

But this largely middle-class movement — lawyers, teachers, nurses and taxi drivers incensed with an entrenched political elite that had essentially bankrupted the country — was no routine protest. It kept swelling.

As demonstrators had marched toward the mansion, tear gas rained down, disorienting Dulini Sumanasekara, 17, who had camped for three months with her parents, a preschool teacher and an insurance salesman, and other protesters along the scenic Galle Face in Colombo. After returning to the campsite to receive first aid, she and her family rejoined the protest.

Before his unlikely ascent to the country’s highest office in 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa had played second fiddle to an older brother who established the family as a powerful dynasty.

Mahinda Rajapaksa rose to become president in 2005 on a promise to end the civil war. That conflict was rooted in systematic discrimination against minority Tamils by the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, the support base of the Rajapaksas.

Gotabaya eschewed politics and pursued a career in the military, retiring early as a lieutenant colonel in the late 1990s. He completed a degree in information technology in Colombo, and then followed his wife’s family to the United States, where he worked in I.T. at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

After becoming president, Mahinda put the former lieutenant colonel in charge of his generals and the war strategy.

As defense secretary, Gotabaya was ruthless and cunning, demanding nothing short of “unconditional surrender” by the Tamil insurgents, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed. The United Nations estimates that as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of the civil war alone. Thousands of others disappeared, still unaccounted for. Gotabaya Rajapaksa has denied accusations of wrongdoing.

The Rajapaksas’ push to crush the insurgency came with a promise that economic prosperity would follow.

Ms. de Silva used savings to build a guesthouse and married a Sri Lankan who had also recently returned from working in Europe to open a restaurant and natural foods store.

By the time their son, Stefan, was born in 2011, both businesses were thriving. “I thought he would have a really good life,” Ms. de Silva said.

The family’s fortunes grew alongside the country’s. In the years after the war, economic growth was brisk, and the Rajapaksas turned to building — expansively. Leveraging the newfound peace, they borrowed huge sums, including from China, to build expressways, a stadium, a port and an airport.

Mr. Rajapaksa was spending most of his time at home in Colombo. Travel abroad brought the risk of prosecution. During a visit to his old home in California, lawyers had tracked him down in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and handed him a notice of a tort claim by a person alleging torture.

It was ultimately a grievous security breach on Easter Sunday in 2019 that opened the door for the Rajapaksas to return to power. Suicide bombers targeted churches and hotels, killing more than 250 people. Intelligence warnings had been lost in the government’s infighting.

The country was gripped with fear; tourism came to a standstill. Entrepreneurs like Ms. de Silva worried that they could lose everything.

Desperate for security to be restored, Ms. de Silva and her husband were among the 6.9 million Sri Lankans who cast their votes for Gotabaya Rajapaksa in an overwhelming victory.

His honeymoon would be brief.

Within months came the pandemic, which Mr. Rajapaksa answered with a familiar strategy: He deployed the army to carry out lockdowns and, eventually, vaccinations. But he was ill-prepared for the shock to an economy that had operated since independence on deficits, which had been deepened by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s reckless borrowing.

In one year, about $10 billion vanished from the economy as tourism dried up and remittances dwindled. In September 2020, some officials at Sri Lanka’s central bank suggested that the government approach the International Monetary Fund for help.

The president’s cabinet was divided, with party officials insisting that the country could avoid a bailout and the strings that would be attached, while Mr. Rajapaksa couldn’t decide.

By the spring of 2022, long lines were forming for fuel, supermarkets were running low on imported foods, and the nation’s supply of cooking gas was almost exhausted as the government’s foreign reserves dwindled almost to zero.

The country was in free fall. And the one person who could do something about it was adrift. In meetings, the president was often distracted, scrolling through intelligence reports on his phone, according to officials who were in the room with him. To several of his close friends, he had become a prisoner of his own family.

The Backlash

Soon, small protests calling for the Rajapaksas to step down began popping up around the country. Eventually, Colombo’s Galle Face became a focal point.

Dulini Sumanasekara, the 17-year-old who began camping there with her family in April, toggled between volunteer service in the camp’s kitchen and online classes at home.

While she hoped to study medicine, Dulini, like all other students in Sri Lanka, had been kept out of the classroom — first by Covid and then by a government policy to go online to save fuel costs.

As fuel became scarce, Mangla Srinath, a 31-year-old taxi driver, kept 20 liters of fuel in his bathroom, siphoned from his tank after he had managed to fill it.

His wife, Wasana, had breast cancer. He wanted to ensure that he had enough fuel for an emergency run to the hospital.

The protest site had grown into a civic space, a safe zone for the country’s religious, ethnic and sexual diversity. Some saw it as the long-delayed beginning of a conversation on reconciliation after the Rajapaksas’ postwar Sinhalese Buddhist triumphalism.

“People now openly talk about equality,” said Weerasingham Velusamy, a protester and a Tamil activist who works as a gender equality consultant. “People talk about justice for the disappeared.”

During a remembrance ceremony for the brutal pogroms against Tamils in 1983, Saku Richardson, a musician and a grandmother, leaned against her bicycle, holding a handwritten yellow sign that simply read “Sorry.”

“For 30 years, we didn’t do anything,” she said. “We didn’t protest.”

Ms. Richardson, who comes from a mixed Sinhalese and Tamil family, said a realization had set in among her friends that the country’s woes were a result of the impunity and entitlement of the military and political leaders after the brutal war.

The Collision

On the evening of July 8, the scene in the presidential mansion was frenetic, with lawmakers going in and out. The president, who didn’t sit down for a dinner of rice noodles and curry until close to midnight, was expecting, based on intelligence reports, a crowd of 10,000 protesters to gather the next morning.

Now, on the morning of July 9, it was becoming clear that the number of protesters was much larger than expected.

Just before noon, as protesters pressed toward the mansion, they scrambled over the first barricade, in what many later called a spontaneous action. The barrier was quickly toppled by the crush of people who followed, pushing through volleys of tear gas. Once they had brought down two more barricades, a few protesters hopped the first of two gates to the mansion and unlatched it.

As the crowd reached the second gate, the last physical barrier between them and the president, the sound of gunshots rang out. Two people fell, wounded. Security forces rushed the protesters with batons.

Video footage later emerged on social media of men rushing suitcases onto a navy vessel. The president was ushered through a back gate to the navy base behind the mansion. From there, he would set off in Colombo’s waters.

As he escaped, protesters hot-wired an army truck and rammed it through the final gate. Unable to hold the line, the security forces gave way. Hundreds of people flooded the compound, cheering and chanting as they filled the grand ballroom, climbed the spiral staircase, and occupied the president’s bedroom.

Among them was Ms. Muthukumarana, who felt a tinge of envy as she admired the expensive wardrobe of the president’s wife. That feeling quickly turned to anger, “realizing how much we had suffered to sustain their habits,” she said.

Mr. Srinath, the taxi driver, picked up his wife on his motorbike headed toward the mansion.

“The army guy told me, don’t worry, we will watch your bike,” he said.

Husband and wife posed for a selfie on the stairway, Wasana still wearing her helmet.

Hours after the takeover, protesters put the word out that the mansion was now open to the public. Families waited in a line wrapping around the block to enter what had effectively become a free museum. Once inside, they studied the paintings and chandeliers, swam in the pool, sat around a long teak dining table and had picnics in the garden.

“The band continues to play,” said Mr. Srinath, the taxi driver, “when the ship is sinking.”