Sri Lanka’s ruling party yesterday celebrated its landslide victory in the country’s first peacetime parliamentary polls since crushing insurgent Tamil Tiger rebels last year.
Government supporters carried national flags as they paraded through the streets and lit firecrackers, despite an official weeklong ban on public celebrations.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse said he saw the overwhelming majority for his United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) as a vote for his economic policies and the defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels in a major military offensive last year.
“This outstanding victory is an endorsement of the ‘Mahinda Chintana’ [vision],” Rajapakse said in a statement on Friday night.
The UPFA secured 117 seats in the 225-member assembly with another 45 seats still to be declared. The main opposition United National Party (UNP) was reduced to 46 seats.
“This is a huge endorsement of the work of the president,” Rajapakse’s spokesman Chandrapala Liyanage said.
“The party has won parliament very comfortably,” Liyanage told reporters, predicting the UPFA would secure at least 24 of the undeclared seats, leaving it just nine seats short of claiming a two-thirds majority when final results are declared on April 19.
Rajapakse had been hoping for a two-thirds majority that would allow him to alter the Constitution, which currently limits presidents to two successive terms.
Police chief Mahinda Balasuriya appealed for calm and said victory celebrations should be peaceful.
Rajapakse called the vote ahead of schedule after his January re-election, which came in the wake of his defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels last May.
The man who led the military, former army chief Sarath Fonseka contested the election from his cell at the naval headquarters in Colombo where he is detained. He won a seat representing part of Colombo, but his party did poorly, securing only five seats.
Opposition parties were largely united behind Fonseka in his campaign for the presidency in January, but lost cohesion after his arrest and went into the parliamentary election with little hope of victory.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia