News
July 13, 2022 – 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm (ET)
CBS News – July 13, 2022 (05:45)
Sri Lanka’s president fled the country Wednesday, plunging a nation already reeling from economic chaos into more political turmoil. Protesters demanding a change in leadership then trained their ire on the prime minister and stormed his office.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his wife left aboard an air force plane bound for the Maldives, and he made his prime minister the acting president in his absence. That appeared to only further roil passions in the island nation, which has been gripped for months by an economic meltdown that has triggered severe shortages of food and fuel.
Thousands of protesters who wanted Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to go had anticipated that he would be put in charge. They rallied outside his office compound, and some scaled the walls. The crowd roared its support for the people charging in and tossed water bottles to them.
Dozens could later be seen inside the office or standing on a rooftop terrace waving Sri Lanka’s flag — the latest in a series of takeovers of government buildings by demonstrators seeking a new government.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the first meeting in weeks between Russia and Ukraine took “a critical step” forward Wednesday to ensuring the export of desperately needed grain from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports to help ease the global food crisis.
Turkey’s defense minister said agreements would be signed when negotiators meet again in Istanbul next week.
The U.N. chief cautioned that “more technical work will now be needed” to reach an agreement, “but the momentum is clear … I’m encouraged. I’m optimistic, but it’s not yet fully done.”
With the war in Ukraine in its fifth month and much of the world seeing food prices soar and millions in developing countries facing hunger and possible starvation, getting grain and fertilizer shipments moving again from two of the world’s major exporters is crucial.
They were once seen as heroes of the nation, the almost mythical warrior-king leaders who defeated the separatists in a bloody civil war.
Yet the final days of Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa dynasty tell a very different tale.
In the early hours of Wednesday, embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa made a hurried exit from the South Asian nation, days after thousands of angry protesters broke into his official residence, swam in his pool, and demanded he finally go.
He had been expected to resign later that day, but Gotabaya Rajapaksa didn’t wait around to make it official. Instead, before dawn, he boarded a military plane leaving Colombo, the commercial capital of the crisis-hit country, and fled to the Maldives.
His departure is a historic moment for the island nation of 22 million, which the Rajapaksas had ruled with an iron fist for much of the past two decades before losing the faith of their once adoring citizens.
July 13, 2022 – 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm (ET)
