Mahinda Rajapaksa (born 18 November 1945) was President of Sri Lanka from 19 November 2005 to 9 January 2015 (succeeding Chandrika Kumaratunga and preceding Maithripala Sirisena) and Prime Minister from 26 October to 15 December 2018 (interrupting Ranil Wickremesinghe's terms). He was a member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.
Biography[]
Mahinda Rajapaksa was born on 18 November 1945 in Weeraketiya, Ceylon, British India (present-day Sri Lanka) to a Theravada Buddhist family. He was educated at Richmond College, Nalanda College Colombo, and Sri Lanka Law College, and became a member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. In 1977 he lost his parliamentary seat in a landslide defeat, but in 1989 he was re-elected to parliament. In 1994 he became the Minister of Labor of Sri Lanka, and held the title until 1997. From 2004 to 2005, he served as Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, succeeding Ranil Wickremanayake and preceding Ratnasiri Wickremanayake and on 17 November 2005 he was elected as President of Sri Lanka. During his presidency, he fought against the rebel Tamil Tigers (LTTE), a group of militants which wanted to form an independent state for Hindu Tamils in the north of the country. He was responsible for the massacre of 40,000 Tamil civilians and captured LTTE fighters, although it was under his tenure that the LTTE were finally defeated in 2009. In 2015, he was defeated in the presidential election by former Minister of Health Maithripala Sirisena, but Sirisena appointed him Prime Minister in 2018. Incumbent Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe rejected his dismissal as unconstitutional, leading to a constitutional crisis which ended only when Rajapaksa resigned on 15 December 2018.