The Cabinet is trying to reconvene parliament in defiance of a two-week suspension by the president in her power struggle with the prime minister over how to resolve Sri Lanka's two-decade conflict with Tamil rebels, officials said yesterday.
Calling moves this week by President Chandrika Kumaratunga "a gross abuse of presidential power," spokesman G.L. Peiris said that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's administration was taking steps to convene the legislature, where the prime minister controls a slim majority.
Kumaratunga -- who has wide constitutional authority to dismiss the government -- sparked the country's political crisis Tuesday by taking control of three top ministries while the prime minister was on a US trip, suspending parliament for two weeks and sending troops around the capital.
On Wednesday, she ordered a 10-day state of emergency on this island of 19 million people off the southern coast of India.
Wickremesinghe returns today following his trip to Washington, where he met with US President George W. Bush and where US officials expressed support for the prime minister's efforts to find a lasting peace with Tamil rebels.
The conflict, which has left 65,000 people dead since 1983, has been under a ceasefire for 20 months, but peace talks are stalled over rebel demands for broad autonomy in the country's north. Kumaratunga says those demands endanger the country's sovereignty, and accuses Wickremesinghe of being too soft on the rebels and not doing enough to ensure they disarm.
During a meeting between Wickremesinghe's ministers on Wednesday -- the same day he met with Bush in Washington -- the Cabinet resolved to have parliament "immediately reconvened" so that a national budget can be presented as scheduled, on Wednesday.
The decision was announced yesterday.
But with president's order suspending parliament until Nov. 19, it was not immediately clear how -- or if -- this could be done.
"There is no vestige of justification for the president's actions [which were done] entirely for political reasons in the pursuit of power," Pereis said. The Cabinet "will do everything in its power to reverse the shortsighted and selfish actions."
"We have a very wide range of options but we'll act democratically," Peiris said.
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