For more than three months, Eshan Dias has spent every night living in a makeshift tarpaulin tent in the centre of Colombo, Sri Lanka's commercial capital. Through boiling heat, monsoon rains and shortages of food and water, he and hundreds of others refused to move from this site on Galle Face Green, which became the defiant heart of the anti-government movement demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Late last Thursday night, a crowd came roaring into his tent. They had succeeded; Rajapaksa, who had already fled the country in the dead of night the previous day, was stepping down.
"It was so emotional, I just screamed and cried," said Dias. "For more than three months, we have been living here, fighting for political change.
Bringing down Gotabaya is not the end of our struggle - we have so much more to do to change this country - but it's a huge triumph." The demise of the regime of President Rajapaksa, once seen as one of Asia's most powerful strongmen, is unprecedented in the history of Sri Lanka. He is the first president to be unseated midway through his term by a mass uprising, and the scale and scope of the protests that toppled him - spanning across religions and ethnicities are unlike anything to have previously emerged in Sri Lanka, which remains starkly divided down ethnic lines.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 22, 2022 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 22, 2022 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
'Pretendians' Controversy Over Formerly Unheard-Of First Nation
Local chiefs claim Kawartha Lakes group is part of wave of cases in which people falsely claim Indigenous identity
This Is The Emptying Of Rafah
Thousands of displaced Gazans are on the move again, packing their lives into carts and pickup trucks, as Israel's campaign against Hamas rages on
Vast Online Scam Dupes Thousands Of Shoppers
More than 800,000 people in Europe and the US appear to have been duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a vast network of fake online designer shops apparently operated from China.
Why Didn't Netflix Do More To Avoid The Baby Reindeer Furore?
What will happen next in the Baby Reindeer saga? Probably one or more bad things.
Picture this
From the galleries and squats of the 90s London art world to the riches of Covid-era New York, a tale of reunion, fame and fallout
Hit and miss Goths, glory and plenty of gimmicks
It was the most politically charged Eurovision song contest in memory-but it was won by a famously neutral nation. As the glittery dust settles from Saturday night in Malmö, Sweden, here's what we learned
Rose Boyt, daughter of the artist Lucian Freud, sat for her father three times.Now 65, she has written a remarkable memoir based on diaries she kept while being painted
ROSE BOYT'S MEMOIR, Naked Portrait, is, in the narrowest sense, her account of sitting for three paintings for her father, Lucian Freud.
A failure to reckon fully with the Troubles fuels distrust and discord
Fifty years ago, on 17 May 1974, my father, a bus conductor, was out on strike.
Believe it or not
Raffaella Spone was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and subjected to death threats. The problem? The video wasn't fake after all. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story that created headlines around the world, yet nothing was as it seemed...
'HOPELESS AND BROKEN', 'I WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE MY CHILDREN ARE INHERITING', 'I AM SCARED I DON'T SEE HOW WE CAN GET OUT OF THIS MESS'
We asked 380 climate scientists what they felt about the future.