How Sri Lanka's worsening crisis is making itself felt in New Zealand

Tuesday, 5 April 2022

Chamanthie Sinhalage-Fonseka is a Sri Lankan-Kiwi living and working in Auckland.

OPINION: Here are 10 things New Zealanders need to know about the worsening economic crisis unfolding in Sri Lanka.

1 – This past weekend, for a period of 36 hours, 16,000 Kiwis around New Zealand lost the ability to communicate with their families.

2 – This was because access to Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, and other social media and messaging platforms were blocked by the Sri Lankan government in an attempt to curtail freedom of speech on the island nation. The blackout was coupled with a military curfew.

Protests against Sri Lanka’s economic collapse have prompted some hardline measures by the government.

3 – Sri Lankans have been in New Zealand for around 140 years. Today, the 16,000 Sri Lankans in New Zealand consider themselves Kiwi as much as they consider themselves Sri Lankan. Many of us hold citizenship in both countries, but what this looks like in everyday life is that our grandmothers live in Colombo or Kandy the same way your grandmothers live in Tauranga or Timaru.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is under intense pressure to resign in the face of his country’s worst economic crisis in decades.

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4 – For weeks now, a lack of fuel supply into Sri Lanka has meant people have had to live without electricity. In the middle of an extreme heatwave, electric fans that are the mainstay of every household, are rendered useless. Stoves can't be used.

A protester tries to burn a bus outside the Sri Lankan president's private residence, during protests against worsening hardship in the country.

5 – Food supplies across the nation have dried up because of a lack of foreign currency to pay for imports, as a result of cumulative governments' financial mismanagement. The last time Sri Lanka was in a similar situation was in 1974, when food had to be rationed and people had to stand in line for rice, tea, sugar and other essentials. The critical difference is that, in 1974, Sri Lankans were able to grow their own food if necessary. In 2022, along with the foreign exchange crisis, Sri Lanka is also facing a fertiliser crisis which has left the country struggling to grow its own food.

6 – Because of the foreign reserves crisis there is also an inability to import critical medicines that are needed into the country. There is such a shortage of paper, that school examinations across the country have been put on hold.

7 – People have taken to the streets to protest in an unprecedented fashion, using social media channels to organise, which is why the Government attempted to block those platforms over the weekend and declared a state of emergency, attempting to keep everybody home.

Chamanthie Sinhalage-Fonseka is one of the 16,000 Sri Lankan Kiwis watching the crisis in Sri Lanka with mounting worry and despair.

8 – The 1.6 million-strong Sri Lankan diaspora around the world responded to the block on free speech by protesting online and on the streets to send a message to the Sri Lankan President. This resulted in his entire Cabinet resigning and the ban being lifted, though the problem is far from solved, with protests continuing to rage calling for the president to resign.

9 – In New Zealand, more than 1000 Kiwis, most of whom were of Sri Lankan heritage, took to the streets of Auckland on Sunday. There have been protests in Christchurch, and another is planned in Tauranga today. The crisis has united Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and other of Sri Lanka's ethnic groups in a country where politics have often been divided across ethnic lines.

10 – While from the distance of New Zealand it might seem like a complex problem happening in someone else’s country, there are 16,000 New Zealanders who have for months been worried and scared for their loved ones in Sri Lanka, and this doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.

There is a growing recognition that this is not a crisis that can be solved through a simple change in government, though there seems to be mass agreement that the president leaving power would seem to be a good start.

At the same time, this critical moment in Sri Lanka's reckoning with its identity and systems of power is cause for New Zealand's own introspection about our identity and nationhood.

Our 16,000 Kiwi-Sri Lankans represent a new normal, in that what used to seem faraway and foreign is now something New Zealand collectively needs to care about, because a not-insignificant number of New Zealanders are being directly affected.

Whether it's the growing number of foreign-born New Zealanders living domestically, or the nearly 20 per cent of New Zealand citizens who live overseas – with many more looking to leave with the reopening of borders – we will increasingly see that the definition of what makes someone a New Zealander is widening and, with that, so will what we need to give our attention to.

The modern Kiwi is someone with a finger firmly and sometimes equally lodged in two pies: one here and one in another country. The consequences of that are something we should all get comfortable with.