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As Gerald Celente has often noted, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”
And as we had forecast when the COVID War broke out over two years ago and hundreds of millions of lives and livelihoods were killed… the deeper people fell into poverty and hopelessness, the higher the spike in street demonstrations to protest lack of basic living standards, government corruption, crime and violence.
And now with the massive sanctions nations have imposed on Russia since the outbreak of the Ukraine War on 24 February, already dire socioeconomic conditions have drastically deteriorated.
Violent protests broke out last week in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, over its fuel shortages, blackouts, and a stumbling economy that was impacted during COVID-19 lockdowns.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government reacted by issuing a state of emergency while police forces fired off tear gas and water cannons. All 26 members of Sri Lanka’s cabinet resigned after protests.
Witnesses told the BBC that the protests on Thursday outside the president’s personal residence started off peacefully until police started to beat demonstrators and fire tear gas.
The Financial Times reported that 50 people were injured and more than 40 were arrested.
TOP TREND FOR 2021: “YOUTH REVOLUTION”: As we had forecast in December 2020, in 2021, the uprisings and revolutions that were sweeping the world before the COVID War will accelerate dramatically, as billions of people sink deeper into economic despair.
In response, governments will again attempt to use the COVID War as a “legal” justification to prohibit protests. Thus, we maintain our forecast that protests will escalate into civil wars, and civil wars will spread to regional wars.”
Dire Situation
Anushka Wijesinha, an economist in Colombo, told The FT that the protests were sparked by residents of the country “not having cooking gas, not able to get to work, not able to run their businesses due to lack of fuel.”
The country is experiencing an economic crisis brought on—in part—by the lack of foreign currency used to pay for these imports.
The president acted swiftly to crush the protests and ordered a 36-hour curfew that started Saturday. He also blocked social media platforms.
The protesters were accused of torching a bus and attempting to break through barricades outside Rajapaksa’s private residence. The president’s office blamed “organized extremists” for the unrest, according to CNN.
Dilum Amunugama, Sri Lanka’s minister for community police services, went further and called the protest an act of terrorism.
“I think the wrong terminology was used in the official communique. These were not extremists, they were terrorists. The government stance is that if terrorism prevails, it should be defeated,” he said.
The CNN report pointed out that Sri Lanka’s economy has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic due to its reliance on tourism.
France 24 reported that there was a brief post-pandemic recovery in late 2021, but even that was 40 percent of the country’s previous high.
“While tourism has picked up since Covid… it’s not sufficient at all,” Suramya Ameresekera, an economist at the JB Securities advisory firm in Colombo, told France 24. “The amount that comes due every month is not covered by the size of the tourism receipts. Even in Sri Lanka’s history when tourism was at its peak… we were still running a current account deficit.”
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has been highlighting its “New World Disorder” trend for more than two years.
We point out that politicians across the globe are fighting for survival against angry mobs who want to overthrow them. The COVID-19 War and the Ukraine War have been a devastating one-two combination for many economies.
Russians are some of the most frequent visitors to the island and that business has all but dried up.
Inflation in Sri Lanka reached 17.5 percent in February and its currency reserves fell 70 percent in the past two years, Reuters reported.