NEW DELHI, July 10. /TASS/. Sri Lankan Chief of Defense Staff General Shavendra Silva has urged all the residents of this island nation to help the military and police to establish and maintain peace in the country, the local Newsfirst portal reported on Sunday.
He said that the support of society is necessary to maintain peace in his joint statement for the media together with the commanders of the three military branches.
On Saturday, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombo, demanding the resignation of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. They stormed his residence and then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s residence which they later set on fire. Some 45 people were injured in the protests. Wickremesinghe announced amid the riots that he would step down. The president intends to resign on July 13.
The protests sparked by financial and economic crises have engulfed the country since early April. As Wickremesinghe told TASS in an exclusive interview, Sri Lanka is hit hard by the worst crisis in modern history, and the island nation’s politicians cannot yet find parallels to such a crisis in this century or in the last century or the century before. According to the prime minister, the country is currently in the middle of the crisis.
Wickremesinghe pointed out that Sri Lanka was facing severe shortages of foreign currencies, fuel and petroleum products, fertilizers, food for some groups of the population, and medicines. According to his estimates, it will take three years or even more to recover from the economic crisis.