A proxy to Sri Lanka’s now-
defunct separatist Tamil Tiger rebels swept local council elections held in areas ravaged by the country’s 25-year civil war, officials said yesterday, amid reports of intimidation and vote-buying.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) won 20 local councils out of the 25 it contested in the ethnic Tamil-majority north and east, the Sri Lankan Department of Elections said. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance coalition secured five councils in Saturday’s vote.
The election assumed unprecedented national significance, with the main two rivals both seeing it as a confidence vote.
The resounding victory consolidates the TNA’s status as an authentic representative of ethnic Tamils in negotiations with Rajapaksa’s ethnic majority Sinhalese-controlled government in sharing political power and postwar rehabilitation. The party had appealed to voters to give it a mandate to demand self-rule in the Tamil--majority areas.
Rajapaksa’s ruling party, for its part, had hoped a victory for its allies would blunt calls for an -international war crimes investigation, mostly coming from the US and other Western nations, and vindicate the harsh tactics that killed thousands of Tamil civilians in the final months of the civil war, which ended in May 2009. It could also have allowed Rajapaksa to offer a less generous power-sharing deal, which his Tamil allies would most likely have accepted.
Rajapaksa already has rejected a demand by the TNA to allow Tamil control over local police and land.
“It clearly shows the Tamil people’s stand on political and development matters,” TNA lawmaker Suresh Premachandran said of the election result.
He said the Tamils had given his party a mandate for a “dignified political settlement” and urged the government to respect the verdict.
Sri Lankan Minister of Mass Media and Information Keheliya Rambukwella said that despite failing to win control of many councils in the north, the ruling party had taken a “stride forward” by getting many members elected.
“This is part of the peace dividend and participatory democracy that has manifested,” he said of the vote.
Sri Lankan Minister of Sports Mahindananda Aluthgamage had said earlier, while campaigning in the former Tamil Tiger rebels’ northern base of Kilinochchi, that a victory for the governing party would “enable us to tell the world that we have won the confidence of the Tamil people after winning the war.”
He said it would also silence a strong expatriate Tamil community lobbying for a war crimes investigation.
Rajapaksa had backed a Tamil paramilitary-cum political party.
The results in Tamil areas were a sharp contrast to elections in ethnic Sinhalese-majority regions also held on Saturday, with the United People’s Freedom Alliance sweeping all 40 councils. That result highlights Rajapaksa’s immense popularity among Sinhalese more than two years after leading the war victory and also shows the ethnic polarization that still exists.
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