The protesters have also put on educational shadow-puppet shows, sung raucous island baila (catchy tunes, often accompanied by cheeky lyrics commenting on social conditions), chanted inventive slogans, and made some of the most hilarious protest posters I’ve ever seen. They have been working to bring together people who have purposefully, and for political ends, been divided across ethnic, religious, and class divides since Sri Lanka’s independence. The protesters at the village have been consciously and strategically educating each other, through “teach-outs”, about the conditions that created this economic crisis, and the way successive leaders have used ethno-nationalism to obtain votes and power.
PICTURESQUE MOVEMENT FREE
Organisers at GotaGoGama, for example, set up a free food station that provides meals for protesters and the destitute, a medical aid tent, and a library, where anyone can come and read books or organise a “People’s University” session hosting discussions on social and political issues. Sri Lanka’s protest movement is idealistic and focused on collective care. Due to the island’s colonial past, and the fact that many Europeans – Scandinavians, Germans, Russians and Britons – regularly holiday there, other problematic attitudes that reduce the protests into one-dimensional Orientalist fantasies have also crept into the coverage. In Sri Lanka’s case, however, the reality of the protests was not only misrepresented through narratives about “clashes”. This is nothing unique to Sri Lanka – we often see similar narratives of ‘clashes’ and ‘riots’ in the international coverage of protests and police actions against them across the Global South, most infamously evident in Palestine.
Moreover, “phrasing the violence as a ‘clash between two groups’ delegitimises the protests and equates people practicing their democratic right to protests with the violence of groups dispatched by the state to intimidate and stop them”, she added. There was “little to no clarification about the violence of pro-government and pro-Rajapaksa groups, or that tear-gas and water cannon toting military provoked and assaulted protestors”. Yet German news outlets referred to chaos and ‘unruhen’, which, explained Algama, can also mean ‘riots’. When members of the Rajapaksa family and their political cronies reportedly bussed in their supporters – themselves destitute people paid a few thousand rupees and bottles of arrack – to attack the protest site and destroy the ‘village’, reports containing references to ‘mobs’, ‘rioters’ and ‘clashes’ further proliferated.Īs Dilini Algama, a PhD student of English Linguistics at Justus-Liebig-Universitat Giessen in Germany, noted in a conversation on Twitter, it was always clear who was armed, and who instigated the violence. But as the police and military moved in, deploying tear gas and water cannons, and at times, live bullets against these very same people, rather than describing the events as they are – attacks on protesters by security forces – news reports started referring to what was unfolding as ‘clashes’.
Most news sources, for example, initially referred to the people at the GotaGoGama encampment as “protesters”. Hundreds of trade unions called a general island-wide strike in support.Īs I monitored international media’s coverage of these protests, I quickly recognised some familiar discrepancies often seen in the coverage of such events in the Global South. The Inter University Students’ Federation joined the protests in massive, well-organised rallies.
They set up an encampment on the iconic Galle Face Beach in front of the Parliament, which came to be called GotaGoGama (the village demanding that ‘Gota’ - President Gotabaya Rajapaksa – resign from office).
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