Wednesday Nov 06, 2024
FT
Wednesday Nov 06, 2024
Thursday, 7 March 2024 03:31 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will launch a book today giving his version of events that led to his dramatic ouster from office in July last year. The book titled ‘The conspiracy to oust me from the Presidency’ will be available in Sinhala and English in bookshops from today, the office of the former President said in a news release yesterday.
“Foreign intervention has weighed heavily on Sri Lanka since we won the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009.
From the time I was elected President in November 2019, certain foreign and local parties were intent on removing me from power,” Rajapaksa said in the news release.
He said that the entirety of his two and a half year tenure in power was spent combating the Covid-19 pandemic and that the conspiratorial forces commenced the political campaign to oust him from the Presidency at the end of March 2022 after the pandemic had been brought under control, the vaccination campaign concluded and just when the economy was beginning to recover.
“Today, foreign intervention and the manipulation of internal politics has become a fact of life in Sri Lanka in a manner never experienced in the first 60 years of independence of this country. The political campaign to oust me brought in a new element into the politics of Sri Lanka which has since independence experienced only peaceful transfers of power following elections,” he said.
Rajapaksa said that the events of 2022 are fraught with serious implications for the future of this country and what his books seeks to explain is his first-hand experience of an internationally sponsored regime change operation.
