Sri Lanka Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is willing to resign to make way for an all-party government, his office said in a statement on Saturday, after over 100,000 protesters stormed the president’s official residence in Colombo.
Protesters stormed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s residence, reports the New York Times, and demanded his resignation over an ongoing economic collapse and his inability to address the crippling economic crisis.
Protesters also forced their way through heavy metal gates into the Finance Ministry and the president’s seafront offices.
Needless to say, but the president left the official residence on Friday as a safety precaution ahead of the planned weekend demonstration, two defense ministry sources said, according to Reuters.
Wickremesinghe held talks with several political party leaders to decide what steps to take following the unrest. He has also been removed to a safe location, a government source told Reuters.
Sri Lanka has run out of foreign-exchange reserves for imports of essential items like fuel and medicine, and the United Nations has warned that more than a quarter of Sri Lanka’s 22 million people are at risk of food shortages.
The country’s 22 million people are suffering the country’s most serious financial turmoil in seven decades, reports Digital Journal, with severe shortages of fuel, medicines, and other essentials amid record inflation and a devaluation of its currency.
Saturday’s storming of the president’s house capped months of regular demonstrations throughout the country calling for Rajapaksa’s resignation. Rajapaksa has declared national states of emergency on multiple occasions in response while calling up the country’s Army and imposing curfews in an attempt to contain the protests.
“The president and the prime minister must resign immediately. If that does not happen political instability will worsen,” said Sri Lanka Freedom Party leader and former president Maithripala Sirisena, speaking before Wickremesinghe had offered his resignation.
However, the political instability could undermine Sri Lanka’s talks with the International Monetary Fund as it seeks a $3 billion bailout, the restructuring of some foreign debt, and fund-raising from multilateral and bilateral sources to ease the dollar shortage.
Other international organizations are helping, including the World Health Organization, which is spearheading the provision of donations in the short term (to meet the urgent gap for medicines and supplies) while in the medium term the shortage of medicines /surgical equipment will ease with the support of a credit line from India,
