Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said that a country’s internal enemies and traitors are far more dangerous than its external ones, in an official Facebook post published after the SLPP’s public rally in Anuradhapura, Hiru News reported.
Those who betray their country for personal gain, and those who justify such betrayals, are “extremely dangerous,” he wrote.
Rajapaksa described the ‘Janasatana’ rally held on September 12 as the start of a “people’s struggle to secure the self-respect of the motherland,” commencing from what he called the historical sacred land of Anuradhapura.
Securing the motherland with public support, and rebuilding an era in which people live safely and happily, is the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna’s primary objective, he said.
He thanked those who travelled to Anuradhapura despite extreme heat, the Maha Sangha who attended, his old political allies, and what he called a new group of young politicians.
The context he does not name
The post identifies no one. It does not say who the internal enemies are, and it names no party, official or institution.
It arrives at a pointed moment for his family and party. The rally came days after the CID moved to name his son Namal Rajapaksa as a suspect in the Airbus bribery file; Namal has been in remand custody since early September and addressed the Anuradhapura rally by written message from prison.
It also lands against a government rally series running in the same district. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told two Anuradhapura District rallies the following day that his government would place no limits on corruption investigations, that “a small, primitive group of people” was arguing thieves should not be jailed, and that the era of dynastic politics was over.
Read against that, the post’s framing of betrayal “for personal gain” and of those who “justify such betrayals” reads as an answer to the prosecutions rather than a statement about foreign threats — but Rajapaksa does not say so, and the reference is left open.
A single-source report
Hiru News is the only verified newsroom carrying the post. Searches across Ada Derana, the Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, the Island, Daily FT, Colombo Gazette, News.lk and Daily News returned coverage of the rally itself — including the Daily Mirror’s report that Rajapaksa joined it — but no report of this Facebook post.
That is consistent with a pattern this site has noted before: outlets cover the rally, and cover individual speeches selectively, with social-media statements by party figures picked up unevenly.
Not reported
Hiru News does not quote the post in full or give its exact wording in Sinhala, and does not say when it was published or how much engagement it drew. It does not report any response from the government or from the NPP, and gives no attendance figure for the rally.
It does not name the “new group of young politicians” Rajapaksa thanked, nor which old political allies attended — a question with some weight, given how many SLPP figures left the party after 2022.
