Out of the picture

The fall of Gotabaya Rajapaksa offers both hope and uncertainty to a beleaguered nation - but will it lead to the structural changes that protesters want?

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen

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.