SRI LANKA: Politicking Delaying the Peace Plan

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Nov 10 1997 (IPS) - The outlook for Sri Lanka’s economy looks bright, but its political future is gloomy as a peace plan aimed at ending a 14-year separatist war is in limbo.

This time the blame is being heaped on the opposition United National Party (UNP), which has become increasingly intransigent towards a political peace package which the government hopes to implement next year.

The UNP, whose parliamentary support is vital for the success of the peace package offered by the People’s Alliance (PA) government, says it needs more time to study the package – a luxury the government can ill-afford.

President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga told a news conference last week that world leaders she met at last month’s Commonwealth Summit in Scotland “are supportive of our efforts and they believe we have the wherewithal to carry it through.”

But the peace process may be stalled by the UNP’s apparent foot- dragging on proposed constitutional reforms, analysts say.

They say Kumaratunga’s timetable of seeing an end to the 14-year war between government troops and Tamil guerrillas seeking an independent homeland for minority Tamils, by early or mid-1998 is unlikely to be achieved.

“By all accounts, the UNP appears to be dragging the issue and seeking more time, which they say can vary from six months to a year. This would mean the proposals won’t get parliamentary sanction according to the government’s schedule,” a lecturer in political science at a Sri Lankan university said.

Both sides are on a collision course. Kumaratunga and UNP leader Ranil Wickremasinghe are at loggerheads over the peace plan with accusations and counter-charges marring a normally-peaceful relationship.

Wickremasinghe, responding to charges by the president that the UNP was not cooperating with the government, said it was Kumaratunga who had publicly rejected the need for bipartisan cooperation between the government and the UNP.

He said the president recently stated at a public meeting that she did not require the support or the assistance of the UNP to solve the ethnic conflict.

“This was followed by a series of vituperative attacks on the UNP aimed at reinforcing this opinion and to bring the process of mutual trust and bipartisan cooperation to an abrupt end,” he said in a statement.

Kumaratunga accuses the UNP of vacillating on the political package.

Last month, the government presented proposals dealing with constitutional reforms and a system of devolution to end the ethnic conflict, that has cost more than 50,000 lives, in the hope that it would be approved by parliament and implemented early next year.

But the UNP said it needed more time to study the proposals. The move surprised the government and other backers of the peace plan as the proposals had been discussed at length by a two-year- old parliamentary committee proposing constitutional reforms. The UNP is a key member of this group.

“After sitting on the committee for more than two years, the UNP still wants time to study the proposals. It smacks of delaying tactics,” another political journalist noted.

Analysts said the UNP, which is divided on whether or not to support the reforms, is reluctant to offer support fearing such a move will boost the government’s image and ensure another PA win at the next parliamentary poll three years from now.

Political analysts are not as confident as the government, that the new constitution — which hopes to set up regional councils with autonomous powers particularly in areas where the Tamils dominate the local population, and also do away with presidential rule — would become law in the next few months.

Kumaratunga appealed to the UNP to give her the two-thirds majority vote in parliament that is required to approve the constitution. But analysts say her People’s Alliance coalition, which has a slender one-vote majority in the legislature, may not get that.

The president’s other option, which she says she may use, is to seek the people’s support through a referendum which would then put the UNP in an embarrassing position of being unsupportive to legislation that has public approval.

But analysts say the UNP may not allow that to happen. It could seek a restraining order from the Supreme Court to prevent government from holding a non-binding referendum without first following the practice of testing the package in parliament.

Adding to Kumaratunga’s problems are the changing faces of restive Tamil moderate political parties which have been mostly supportive of the peace package. Divisions within the moderate Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), the president’s main Tamil backer, may compel it to reconsider support for the deal.

The same applies to the Eelam People’s Democratic Front, a former rebel group which is now the biggest Tamil group in parliament. It has also expressed reservations about the package.

Kumaratunga’s political troubles are, however, cushioned by a robust economy, a tourist industry that was little shaken by last month’s bomb blast which took place in a hotel car park, and some significant successes on the war front.

She told reporters on Thursday that the economy, despite the war, was doing well. The economy is estimated to grow six per cent in 1997, inflation halved to eight per cent this year from 16 per cent and the budget deficit cut to eight per cent from 10 percent in 1996 despite rising defence spending.

“We are well on our way to achieving economic stability,” she said a day after her deputy finance minister Professor Gamini Lakshman Peiris presented the government’s 1998 budget in parliament. Kumaratunga said that though defence spending was high, the government was giving priority to education and health.

While government troops have been slow in their efforts to secure a key highway to the north, military officials were delighted by the sinking of a rebel arms ship by airforce planes in the precision-tight operation this week.

Airforce planes blasted the 2,500 tonne vessel off Sri Lanka’s northwest Mullaitivu coast on Sunday morning as it prepared to unload tonnes of explosives and ammunition onto smaller rebel boats.