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SRI LANKA: Poll Outcome Spells Return to Arms

Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Nov 20 2005 (IPS) - True to the hawkish image that propelled him to electoral victory, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, has begun his six-year-term in office by indicating readiness to review not only a Norwegian-mediated peace process with Tamil rebels but also the historic 2002 ceasefire.

True to the hawkish image that propelled him to electoral victory, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, has begun his six-year-term in office by indicating readiness to review not only a Norwegian-mediated peace process with Tamil rebels but also the historic 2002 ceasefire.

“I want to state the dedication of my government to upholding the ceasefire …I am also ready to review the ceasefire agreement,” Rajapakse said in an address to the nation, immediately after being sworn in as the embattled island nation’s fifth president, Saturday afternoon.

Dampened business confidence in the wake of Rajapakse’s victory, indicated by a seven percent fall in the Colombo stock market, was a sign that, in the near future, negotiations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will take precedence over revival of the flagging economy.

The Tamil Tigers, as the LTTE is better known, have been waging a separatist war against successive Sri Lankan governments for more than two decades, demanding a Tamil state in the north and east of the island. Major fighting, however, has been suspended since the February 2002 truce.

Despite being the longest truce in the war, that has claimed more than 65,000 lives, it has not been conducive to peace negotiations and the process has remained stalled since April 2003. The truce itself has come under intense pressure after a top Tiger military leader defected to government areas in April 2004.

‘’The voters said that the country should not be divided in any way. Our Sri Lankan identity should not be divided into political fragments,” Rajapakse said in his first presidential speech- although the 50.3 percent of the popular vote that he won was closely followed by the 48.4 percent polled by his rival and architect of the 2002 truce, Ranil Wickremasinghe.

Seen another way, 4.8 million Sri Lankan voters had given Rajapakse a slender majority of just 180,000 votes.

There are suspicions that the Tigers may have shrewdly engineered a return to hardline positions by ordering Tamil voters- who strongly favoured Wickremasinghe according to poll surveys-to stay away from the elections.

A week before polls opened on Nov. 17, the Tigers officially announced that they saw no benefit for the Tamils from the election and called for a boycott. Thousands heeded the call, especially in areas controlled by the Tigers and in the northern Jaffna Peninsula, the cultural capital of Tamils on the island.

Although the Tigers did not endorse Wickremasinghe’s candidature, the drift was clear from the fact that, during the campaign period, they constantly kept referring to Rajapakse as the ‘war candidate’.

In Jaffna, only 438 votes, out of a registered 62089, were cast. It was worse in Tiger-held Killinochchi, from where voters were expected arrive in government-controlled areas to vote. Of a registered 89,454 voters, only a single vote was received.

“In all five electoral districts in the north and east, the opposition candidate (Wickremasinghe) won, despite the low turnout. If we go by this trend, the opposition candidate, Wickremasinghe, should have won (the election), if there was no boycott,” analyst Muttukrishna Sarvananthan told IPS.

In some areas under their control, like Karadiyanaru and Vakerei in the east, armed LTTE cadres were stationed on the access roads to polling booths to prevent any voters from reaching them.

The Tigers, for their part, insist that the boycott was not forced and that Tamil voters had abstained from the poll to clearly indicate to the international community the preference of the majority Sinhalese.

“Tamils in the Tamil homeland, through their non-interference in this election, have given the opportunity to the southern people (majority Sinhalas) to elect their own head. This has provided a window to the international community to see the real face,” a Tiger statement on the poll outcome said.

The Tigers have, so far, not reacted to Rajapakse’s hardline presidential address and the official position will be made known on Nov. 27, when LTTE supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, makes his annual Heroes Day speech, according to the Tiger media office at Killinochchi in Jaffna.

Observers say Prabhakaran is likely to dig in and not climb down from his own, well-known, hardline position. International terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna told IPS that the Tiger leader would, most likely, react with threats and even suggest a return to the battlefield.

Gunaratna also felt that Rajapakse was unlikely to appear consolatory towards the Tigers. “To end the impasse with the LTTE, he must seek a new mediator,” he said.

The Tigers have repeatedly said they were not amenable to a review nor allow other international players into the process. According to the current agreement, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission consists of Scandinavian nationals.

In a message, Norwegian Minister for International Cooperation Erik Solheim said, Oslo looked forward to continuing ”close cooperation with the new President and the Government of Sri Lanka in a wide range of areas, including support for efforts to achieve lasting peace that inspires confidence in all Sri Lankans.”

Available signals from the Tigers after Rajapakse’s election were not encouraging. A statement that appeared on the LTTE Peace Secretariat website said that Rajapakse’s victory was an indication that southern voters did not support a federal power-sharing mechanism and the Tamil demand for wider self-determination.

“The election result has revealed the deepest feelings of the Sinhala people. It shows that the Sinhala people, and by implication the leaders they elect, do not have the understanding of the basic causes of the Tamil ethnic problem. The results also reveal that political maturity, magnanimity, fairness and intelligent appraisal of the situation are lacking in them.’’

“Through electing a head, who refused to accept that a just and permanent solution to one of the people’s of this island is an absolute necessity, the Sinhala nation has exposed its innermost feelings. Majoritarian chauvinism has come shining through,” the statement said.

Senior Tiger leader V Balakumaran said, over Tiger-controlled radio, that Rajapakse was acting no different from nationalist Sinhala leaders of the past who had pushed the Tamils into taking up arms soon after an election.

In Jaffna, tension was apparent among civilians after the election and many fear that the rhetoric from Colombo and Killinochchi could soon turn into real war. “Whatever the result is, it is going to affect the Tamils and they know that,” Jaffna resident, S Balan, said.