Sri Lankan prime minister resigns after weeks of protests

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned Monday following weeks of protests demanding that he and his brother, the president, step down for dragging the country into its worst economic crisis in decades.

Rajapaksa said on Twitter that he submitted his resignation to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a move that followed a violent attack by government supporters on the protesters, prompting authorities to deploy armed troops in the capital, Colombo.

There was no immediate comment from the president's office.

For more than a month, protests have spread across the country, drawing people across ethnicities, religions and class.

For the first time middle-class Sri Lankans also took to the streets in large numbers, marking a dramatic revolt by many former Rajapaksa supporters, some of whom have spent weeks protesting outside the president's office.

The protests have sparked a political reckoning in the country, with the government facing a no-confidence motion in Parliament, and underscored a dramatic fall from favour of the Rajapaksas, Sri Lanka's most powerful political dynasty for decades.

The brothers were once hailed as heroes by many of the island's Buddhist-Sinhalese majority for ending the country's 30-year civil war, and despite accusations of war atrocities, the two were firmly entrenched at the top of Sri Lankan politics until now.

The prime minister's resignation comes as the country's economy has swiftly unravelled in recent weeks, causing extraordinary pain to Sri Lankans.

Imports of everything from milk to fuel have plunged, spawning dire food shortages and rolling power cuts. People have been forced to queue for hours to buy essentials.

Doctors have warned of a crippling shortage of life-saving drugs in hospitals, and the government has suspended payments on $7 billion in foreign debt due this year alone.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa initially blamed global factors for Sri Lanka's economic woes, like the pandemic battering its tourism industry and the Russia-Ukraine conflict pushing up global oil prices so high it became hard to replenish dwindling fuel stocks.

But both he and his brother have since admitted to mistakes they made that exacerbated the crisis, including conceding that they should have sought an International Monetary Fund bailout sooner.

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