Former Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe on recent election loss, Easter bombing investigations, and prosecution of the Rajapaksa family

Former Sri Lankan President and six-time Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe denied shielding ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa from prosecution, during an interview for Al Jazeera English’s ‘Head to Head’ that aired today. He also rebuffed renewed accusations that his own administration failed to credibly investigate alleged government links to deadly terrorist attacks that rocked Sri Lanka in 2019.

Wickremesinghe, who was voted out of office in 2024, threatened to leave 8 minutes into the hour-long interview with Mehdi Hasan, but ultimately remained seated for a heated debate that also covered the government’s handling of war crimes investigations following the country’s civil war, and allegations of torture committed under his watch in the late 1980s. 

“In my country, it's the attorney general, who is not a political figure, who decides on prosecution - We can only send the evidence before him,”  Wickremesinghe said when asked if he’d covered for ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the country in 2022 following mass protests. 

Both Gotabaya and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, a former Prime Minister and President, have been widely accused of corruption and war crimes and driving the country into a major financial crisis. 
 
On letting Gotabaya Rajapaksa back into the country without arrest after Wickremesinghe took over the presidency in 2022, the latter said: “He could come [back] in. There's no charge against him. How could I? Am I a dictator?”

Hasan also pressed Wickremesinghe on renewed accusations by the Catholic Church that his own government had protected “other forces” involved in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings carried out by an ISIS-affiliate.

In response, Wickremesinghe called the allegations “all nonsense” and an example of “the politics of the Catholic Church.”

“The head of the Catholic Church [in Sri Lanka] is talking nonsense?” Hasan clarified. “Yes,” Wickremesinghe said. 

Wickremesinghe, who was Prime Minister in 2019, was responding to public statements by local Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, as well as exclusive comments the Cardinal had made to Al Jazeera’s Head to Head team before the TV recording. In a phone call with Al Jazeera, Ranjith said Wickremesinghe had failed to heed the Church’s request for a truly independent investigation and called an earlier inquiry and report during Wickremesinghe’s presidency "not worth the paper it was written on". 

Turning to truth and reconciliation for Sri Lanka’s civil war with the LTTE (also known as the Tamil Tigers), Hasan asked if justice had been served to the thousands of victims of the conflict that ended in 2009. Wickremesinghe conceded: “No. Justice has not been served to any of the communities.” 

He accepted that aid had been blocked to war victims and some hospitals had been bombed but denied that such bombings were systematic. 

“There had been occasions where the Air Force had bombed [hospitals] and action was taken against some of them. But on a large-scale, this thing? I wouldn't say that.”

“According to a U.N. panel […], Sri Lankan government forces blocked the delivery of aid to victims of the war,” Hasan prompted.

 “I admit that took place,” Wickremesinghe conceded, who was the opposition leader at the time of the final phase of the war.
 
Pressed on why, as President, he reappointed General Shavendra Silva – whom the US State Department accuses of war crimes – to head Sri Lanka’s armed forces, Wickremesinghe said, “It's a practice not to replace military commanders during [an] election.” He added, “When I took over, I checked on it and I was satisfied that General Silva was not involved in it.”

Wickremesinghe went on to deny allegations made by a government commission that he knew of illegal detention, torture and killings happening at Batalanda, a housing complex he was living in as a minister in the late 1980s.

“I deny all those allegations,” he said when confronted with a government inquiry that named him as a "main architect" of securing the housing complex and alleged he, “to say the least, knew” about the violations taking place there. 

Wickremesinghe first denied the existence of the report, of which Al Jazeera had obtained a copy, and later questioned its validity, saying it had never been discussed in parliament. “That was not tabled in Parliament and there is nothing to be found against me.”

Wickremesinghe, who was appointed president by parliament in 2022 amidst one of the biggest political and financial crises in Sri Lankan history, defended his own presidency and 2024 election loss: 
“In two years, I put the economy back on track. And that means disinflation, compression. It's very, very difficult. Will you survive that? No, I can't see that,” he said about last year’s election in which he finished third. 

”I'm quite happy. I did the job,” he said, referring, in part, to a landmark IMF deal he brokered as president. “There would have been a political and economic collapse of the country” (if he hadn’t taken over the Presidency). 

Hasan and Wickremesinghe were joined by a panel of experts:

Former BBC Sri Lanka correspondent and author of ‘Still Counting the Dead’, Frances Harrison; Former UK MP and envoy to Mr Wickremesinghe during his presidency, Nirj Deva; and Madura Rasaratnam, Executive Director of human rights organization PEARL and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at City, University of London.  

You can watch the full show here: [LINK]
 
Head to Head with Ranil Wickremesinghe airs Thursday, March 6 at 1200 GMT and repeats on March 8 at 0100 GMT, March 10 at 1200 GMT and March 12 at 0100 GMT.