Mahinda Rajapaksa
Mahinda Rajapaksa was president of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, the man who ended the twenty-six-year war against the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 by a final offensive that trapped the Tigers and some three hundred thousand civilians on a strip of beach at Mullaitivu and killed, by the United Nations' count, as many as forty thousand of them in the last months, who was cheered through the Sinhalese south as the king who had done what no one had, and who then governed as a family, with one brother running defence, another the economy and a third the parliament, borrowed from China for a port and an airport in his home district that no ships or planes used, changed the constitution to let himself run for ever, and lost in January 2015 to his own health minister. He came back as prime minister under his brother Gotabaya in 2019 and was driven from office in May 2022 by the crowds of the economic collapse, who burned his supporters' houses. He was born in 1945 into a political family of the southern district of Hambantota, was elected to parliament at twenty-four in 1970 as its youngest member, and spent the 1990s as the Sri Lanka Freedom Party's man of the human rights protests against Premadasa, which he later found ironic. He was prime minister under Chandrika Kumaratunga from 2004 and beat Ranil Wickremesinghe for the presidency in November 2005 by two per cent, with the Tigers enforcing a boycott in the north that cost Wickremesinghe the Tamil vote and, it was later alleged, was paid for. The ceasefire of 2002 broke in 2006 and the war was fought to the end. The east was cleared in 2007, Kilinochchi taken in January 2009, the no-fire zones shelled, the hospitals hit, the journalists who reported it killed or exiled, and on 18 May 2009 Prabhakaran's body shown on television. The eighteenth amendment of 2010 removed the two-term limit and put the police, the judges and the election commission in the president's hands. The Chinese-built Hambantota port was handed to China on a ninety-nine-year lease in 2017 for the debt. He called an early election in 2015, lost it to Maithripala Sirisena, and tried that night to have the army keep him in power, which the army declined. As prime minister from 2019 he presided over the tax cuts and the fertiliser ban that bankrupted the country, and resigned on 9 May 2022 as the Galle Face protesters were attacked by his supporters and the country answered by burning the family's houses. The family lost the election of 2024 by a landslide.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
