Gotabaya Rajapaksa

Nandasena Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Sinhala: නන්දසේන ගෝඨාභය රාජපක්ෂ; Tamil: நந்தசேன கோட்டாபய ராஜபக்ஷ; born 20 June 1949) is a Sri Lankan former politician and retired military officer who served as the eighth president of Sri Lanka from 18 November 2019 until his resignation on 14 July 2022. Before his presidency, he served as Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development from 2005 to 2015 during the regime of his brother, president Mahinda Rajapaksa, playing a central role in the final phase of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Born to a political family from the Southern Province, Rajapaksa was educated at Ananda College, Colombo and joined the Ceylon Army in April 1971. Following basic training at the Army Training Centre, Diyatalawa, he was commissioned as signals officer and later transferred to several infantry regiments. He saw active service in the early stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War with the elite Gajaba Regiment, taking part in several major offensives such as the Vadamarachi Operation, Operation Strike Hard and Operation Thrividha Balaya, as well as counterinsurgency operations during the 1987–1989 JVP insurrection. As Defence Secretary, he oversaw the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009. He was a target of an assassination attempt in December 2006 by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.

After stepping down in 2015 following his brother's electoral defeat, Rajapaksa returned to politics and ran for presidency in 2019 as a candidate of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna. Campaigning on a nationalistic and security-heavy platform, he became the first Sri Lankan president with a military background and no prior elected office experience.