Sri Lankan protesters stormed the prime minister's office in Colombo (Image: AAP/EPA/Chamila Karunnarathne)

The sudden collapse of the near 20-year rule of the Rajapaksa family regime in Sri Lanka is a demonstration of the inherent fragility of states built around corruption and patronage. They trundle on — until they don’t. 

 It’s a warning, too, to countries like Australia: you can’t rely on collaboration with corrupt regimes to, say, “stop the boats”. 

Since 2013, Australia has adopted a low profile on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka and shrugged off concerns about corruption to keep the regime on-side with the seizure and return of asylum seekers arriving by boat.

Just last month, while thousands of Sri Lankans were protesting on Colombo’s Galle Face demanding the resignation of the country’s government, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil was sitting down at a roundtable with Sri Lankan Foreign Affairs Minister Gamini Peiris and pledging ongoing cooperation and confirming a continued shared commitment to counter people smuggling and transnational crime.

Australia’s government is in a tough spot. Corrupt authoritarian regimes weaponise asylum seeker flows to wedge developed democracies. There’s a nose-holding price for those democracies to pay: the soft price of the public embrace of odious regimes that lends credibility. And the harder price of dollars in the hand.

In announcing needed funding to meet the demands of Sri Lanka’s current crisis last month, Australia tried to thread the needle: $50 million, but almost all of it to be channeled through UN agencies like the World Food Program. 

This week, following on from the country’s economic collapse, the Rajapaksa government has finally fallen with the demonstrators storming the official residence of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on the weekend, triggering his resignation and flight to the Maldives. 

It’s long been less a democratic government than a family business: other than a brief interregnum, one Rajapaksa brother or other has been either president or prime minister since 2004. Gotabaya was the powerful defence secretary when his brother Mahinda was president from 2005 to 2015, masterminding the bloody defeat of the Tamil Tigers in the country’s north and running the security services that intimidated independent media and civil society.

After Gotabaya’s landslide victory as president in 2019, the brothers have held both posts, with Mahinda as PM. Other brothers and family members have been sprinkled through the government. 

While the country’s economic collapse has been “a textbook currency crisis”, as economist blogger Noah Smith wrote, it’s been corruption and nepotism that has driven the people’s movement, including (snap!) a demand for an independent anti-corruption body. 

Occupy-style “Gota Go Home Villages” have sprung up in the 15 major Sinhala centres that not so long ago were the heart of Rajapaksa support. Coming from outside the political establishment of the country’s major parties, the protestors have grown organically, organising across social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. 

Sri Lanka’s crisis is directly attributable to the majority Sinhala nationalist authoritarianism of the Rajapaksa rule. It’s come about gradually, and now all at once. The gradual causes: widening balance of payments deficit, entrenched human rights abuses against national minorities, and eroding democracy alongside the sort of deepening corruption that, unchecked, lead to what are recognised as “mafia states”. 

The current account has buckled under loans from China, largely to develop the family’s Hambantota hometown. Jobs-for-the-boys patronage has driven government waste. Corruption has sapped confidence and a sceptical diaspora has turned to informal routes for remittances to family (critical to the country’s capital flows) that bypass government controls.

The more immediate causes were direct policy blunders: tax cuts to shore up political support, an attempt to cut costs with an inexplicable overnight switch to “organic” farming with bans on fertiliser imports and subsidies and, at the end, an attempt to hold on to the value of the rupee by running down dollar reserves.

(In a distraction, the US right, like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, have enlisted the catastrophic switch to “organic” into their war on climate change, blaming the Rajapaksas’ decision on demands from green climate change globalists.)

What happens next? It’s an historic opening for the country — “a second chance at independence” as the country’s leading citizen journalism site, Groundviews, wrote this week. But if there’s one defining characteristic of Sri Lanka’s political elite it’s that they have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

For asylum seeker-nervous countries like Australia, it’s a risk. But more, it’s an opportunity to discard the pandering to corrupt elites and back the movement for regional reform.