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.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS