Sri Lanka’s ruling coalition and an ethnic Tamil party seen as a front for the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels have won the first postwar elections, held near the island’s former battlefields.
State television said Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling coalition captured Jaffna town council, securing 13 of the 23 seats, while the pro-rebel Tamil National Alliance (TNA) came second with eight seats in the poll held on Saturday.
The pro-rebel party won the Vavuniya town council, taking five of the 11 seats, while the ruling party won two seats.
The victory in Jaffna, the heartland of the country’s ethnic minority Tamils and birthplace of militancy, will give the government a chance to claim it as an endorsement of its handling of ethnic relations, postwar rehabilitation and a rejection of separatism.
However, the results do not fully reflect public opinion in these war-battered regions, with more than 77 percent of the Jaffna voters staying away and only half of the Vavuniya voters casting ballots.
“We have undergone a lot of hardship but we have no solutions to our problems. So we are in no mood to vote. It’s not going to make any difference,” said G. Selvam, a 52-year-old Jaffna resident, explaining why he stayed away from the polls.
The two towns where ethnic Tamils are a majority lay just outside the shadow state the Tamil Tigers ran as a virtual dictatorship, and were frequently hit by violence during the civil war.
The government recaptured the territory and routed the rebels on the battlefield in May, ending a conflict that killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people.
Opposition parties accused the ruling coalition of restricting their campaigns and the government barred most media from entering the towns to cover the first local elections held since 1998.
The government was also holding an election in Uva Province to the south, where ethnic Sinhalese are the majority. It looked likely to sweep the council, boosted by the recent capture of the rebels’ new leader, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, who was trying to revive the group.
The main opposition United National Party said its lawmakers had to obtain permission to enter the cities for campaigning.
TNA lawmaker Suresh Premachandran said the elections were just a government show.
“The Tamil people do not want an election at this time when hundreds of thousands of their relatives are held in government camps,” he said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of