Take over presidential palace was a high point for Wasantha, then came six months of horror

(ABC News) For months, Wasantha Mudalige helped build a protest movement that ousted a president for the first time in Sri Lanka’s history during the country’s worst economic crisis. 

He was at the forefront of the swelling crowds that took control of the bankrupt country’s once impassable government buildings in July 2022.He was there when protesters swam in the president’s pool, worked out in his gym, and lay on his bed.

That protest movement has now been largely silenced after facing a widespread crackdown. Wasantha, along with more than 500 protesters, was arrested and jailed.

Many were released on bail within a few days. But as a face of the movement pushing for systemic change in Sri Lanka, Wasantha was branded by the government as one of the country’s worst criminals and held for more than six months in prison, accused of terrorism.

The 29-year-old is the head of the Inter University Student Federation, a group of around 150,000 members that has been at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s uprising. After six months in Sri Lanka’s notorious prisons and an international human rights campaign, Wasantha has been released on bail and has told the ABC he was harassed and threatened to be killed while in jail.

“We were taken to a police station and an officer sat at a table to question me,” Wasantha said.

“He takes his pistol out and changes the bullets. While doing that, he asks if I knew what happened to [other activists] who were killed.

“He threatened us by saying the same would happen to us; ‘we will kill you’, he would say.

“From the moment I was arrested and the immediate days that followed, I feared for my life and that some danger might come to me.”

Wasantha was held in prison under Sri Lanka’s controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act, which allows a person to be held in prison for up to a year without charge on the orders of the defence minister.

Sri Lanka’s new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, holds that role and ordered Wasantha and two other students’ imprisonment under the terrorism act in August.

“I was kept in a four-by-four-metre metal cage where I couldn’t even sleep properly,” Wasantha said.

“The cage had a metal sheet, the kind that you’d see at the bottom of buses, it was on that metal sheet that I spent months on end.”

Wasantha said he needed to be hospitalised in December for breathing problems and wasn’t given adequate treatment or sanitation while in prison.

“We had to use a bidet to shower next to a toilet and even had to use it to drink water,” he said.

“We didn’t see sunlight, we weren’t allowed fresh air.”

Two other protesters who were held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act have told the ABC they were also threatened and treated in the same way as Wasantha.

Sri Lanka Police and the country’s government have not responded to repeated requests for comment on Wasantha’s arrest or any proposed repeals to the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

President Wickremesinghe has previously defended these arrests to the ABC, saying people who were jailed had broken the law.

“I am not the one who does it. It’s been left to the police, like in your country, and the police have decided to charge them. Everything has been done legally,” he said in September.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act was introduced in 1979 to counter separatist violence by militant Tamil minority groups in Sri Lanka.

It was supposed to be a temporary measure but was made permanent in 1982 as a civil war between the country’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatist groups broke out.

That war ended in 2009, but the Terrorism Act has continued to be used and has been condemned by the United Nations, the European Parliament, and numerous human rights groups.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka found that 84 per cent of people jailed under the act were tortured after arrest and have been regularly held between five and 10 years without trial.

“The law has been used particularly to target members of the Tamil and Muslim communities, and to stifle dissenting voices including journalists and human rights defenders,” a Human Rights Watch report said.

In March last year, the government introduced some reforms to the law but provisions that allow people to be detained without a warrant and to get confessions through torture are still allowed, according to legal experts.

Seven international groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, campaigned for Wasantha Mudalige’s release. He said the attention on his case, along with pressure from Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission, meant officers did not follow through with the threats and he was never physically attacked.

“The police officers would often sit at tables in front of us and show us their guns, taunting us, saying how much they would like to shoot us, but they couldn’t because of the current situation,” he said.

“They would take us down secret roads to a lake near a temple at night, they would call a higher officer and ask them … what should be done next.

“It was clear they tried to oppress and threaten us in every way possible.”

The 2022 protests were sparked by an economic crisis in Sri Lanka that has stripped people of basic supplies like power, food, and petrol.

The crisis is ongoing.

The island nation imports many basic goods such as fuel and fertiliser, but for the past year, has had no money to do so after borrowing enormous sums for bad investments that saw little return.

Daily protests led to the ousting of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa after his residence was stormed in July. His successor, Wickremesinghe, has made progress on securing a $US2.9 billion ($4.19 billion) bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but it requires Sri Lanka’s lenders like China and India to reduce their debts.

India has agreed to restructure Sri Lanka’s debts but China, the country’s largest donor, has been stalling on satisfying the IMF criteria.

Wickremesinghe is pressuring the IMF to follow through on the bailout, saying the country could spiral further without help and says his government is in talks with China.

Last week, just days after the government was accused of spending too much money on Independence Day celebrations, Wickremesinghe said he wants the country to be out of bankruptcy in three years and single digit inflation by the end of 2023.

“We are now moving from a negative economy towards a positive one. By the end of 2023, we can achieve economic growth,” he told parliament.

“We should take action to rectify tax divergence. If we endure hardship for another five [to] six months, we can reach a solution.”

Sri Lanka’s inflation is sitting stubbornly high at 54 per cent, but Wickremesinghe said foreign reserves have increased to $500 million after falling to zero. While the government continues to promote this progress, protesters like Wasantha Mudalige say Wickremesinghe is struggling to lead Sri Lanka and a new system of governance should take over.

“We have simple asks like allowing our children to learn, solving our farming, petrol and electricity issues and the governments which can’t solve those problems should go home,” he said.

“We need to have a complete and total intervention; we demand that the president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, resigns willingly or is removed from his position.”