>>Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

If you have bigoted populace, it's dead easy to bait them into voting for some immediate emotional relief. Sri Lankan's wanted to have fun watching Tamils and Muslims get hurt, so it wasn't all that hard for some politician to get the people vote for him. The worse thing is they even put up with his bad decisions for the same reasons. And they did this for years.

The population is entirely responsible for this.

As it turns out they ran out of time, there's always that one point after which everything comes melting down.