Sri Lanka: Timeline Of A Crisis

Sri Lanka has been plunged into political turmoil, with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa under pressure to resign as protests escalate over an economic crisis

Colombo, April 6 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Apr, 2022 ) :Sri Lanka has been plunged into political turmoil, with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa under pressure to resign as protests escalate over an economic crisis.

The island nation of 22 million people is experiencing acute shortages of food, fuel and other essentials -- along with record inflation and crippling power cuts -- which have inflicted widespread misery in the most painful downturn since independence from Britain in 1948.

The South Asian country, which emerged from a devastating civil war in 2009 only to be rocked by Islamist bombings in 2019, has also been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which torpedoed its vital tourism sector.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has dealt a new blow to the tourism industry as the two European countries represented Sri Lanka's first and third biggest sources of visitors in January.