Medagama Dhammananda urges Govt. to resign

AFP: The country’s most influential Buddhist clerics joined a growing list of former allies calling for the Government’s resignation.

“The country is fast becoming a failed state,” senior monk Medagama Dhammananda told reporters in the central city of Kandy.

Dhammananda said he and fellow Buddhist leaders had jointly petitioned President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to establish an interim Government “to pull the country out of this crisis”.

Such a move would require the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa – the President’s brother and head of Sri Lanka’s powerful ruling family. Gotabaya has faced similar calls to step down, with thousands of protesters camped outside his seafront office in Colombo for more than two weeks.

Before the crisis, both men were beloved by much of the country’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority for bringing a decades-long ethnic civil war against the Tamil Tigers to a brutal end.

Monday’s rebuke from the Buddhist clergy is the latest public departure by formerly steadfast allies of the Rajapaksa clan.

Recent weeks have seen the fracturing of the Government’s ruling coalition, along with business leaders and a former Cabinet Minister urging the Rajapaksas to resign.