March 31, 2004

Sri Lanka elections

A vote that could prove dangerous

Eric Ellis

Colombo, Sri Lanka

It's often said that Sri Lankans are obsessed by three things; cricket, war and politics. In recent years, the tiny Indian Ocean island's 19 million people have had abundant opportunity to exercise their seemingly limitless capacity for all three.

The national cricket team is playing Australia, which displaced Sri Lanka as world champions in 1999. Sri Lanka's Sinhalese and Tamil communities have been in a state of civil war for all but two of the last 21 years.

And on April 2, Sri Lankans will go to the polls to elect a prime minister and Parliament — the island's third election in four years and, for many, the least welcome of the recent polls.

The Sri Lankans, many of whom have never known anything but a conflict that has killed 60,000 since 1983, were gradually adjusting to peace after a February 2002 ceasefire agreement brokered by Norway between the government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his United National Party and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — the notorious ''Tamil Tiger'' separatists.

That meant a life without roadblocks and the threat of random terror, be it from the Tamil Tigers or the hard-line Sinhalese factions that emerged in response. Sri Lanka's battered economy was at last enjoying a modest boom as foreign tourists and investors returned to the island.

Welcome or otherwise, the April 2 poll is effectively a referendum on Wickremesinghe's now-stalled peace efforts. It will be the first poll since the peace initiative began, the most promising in decades, which saw the Tigers drop their demands for an independent northeast.

Wickremesinghe's United National Party won the last parliamentary poll, in December 2001, promising an end to conflict. That promise has been largely delivered. So with the economy booming and Sri Lankans enjoying the benefits of peace, conventional wisdom would suggest that Wickremesinghe will be re-elected and a durable peace treaty will at last be signed, with the Tigers administering an autonomous Tamil homeland within a federal Sri Lanka.

If only Sri Lankan politics were so simple. Like France, Sri Lanka draws its government from Parliament but also has a separately elected presidency with considerable powers.

The president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, is a graduate of the Sorbonne and the matriarch of Sri Lanka's Gandhi-esque Bandaranaike dynasty. Both of Kumaratunga's parents were prime ministers — her father, Solomon Bandaranaike, was assassinated in 1959 by an anti-Tamil monk, to be succeeded by his widow Srimavo, the first woman in the world to hold the office of prime minister.

President Kumaratunga's left-leaning Peoples' Alliance is the official parliamentary opposition to Wickremisinghe's UNP government.

As for the Tigers, they have never directly participated in national elections, but they are close to harder-line elements within the Tamil National Alliance, a bloc of ethnic parties. With no one Sinhalese party expected to attain an absolute majority, the Tamil parties have emerged as potential kingmakers.

Here the politics get even more complicated. The upcoming elections are the consequence of a half-hearted presidential coup by President Kumaratunga last November, a day after the Tigers revealed a peace manifesto that the UNP welcomed as workable. Railing at the ''biased'' Scandinavian cease-fire monitors and claiming that a unitary Sri Lanka was threatened by the UNP's peace plans (which she had endorsed as head of state), Kumaratunga seized the media and crucial ministries, notably defense.

In the meantime, Tigers have been going through their own turmoil. The group's eastern command, led by Colonel Karuna, broke away from the northern leadership last month, raising concerns of a possible ''civil war within a civil war.''

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe has admitted that the Tamil Tiger split poses a greater challenge to the peace process than Kumaratunga's extra-electoral grabs at power. His followers also fear that, if the Peoples' Alliance loses the upcoming poll, Kumaratunga could again seize power.

Kumaratunga is the crucial figure that overshadows the polls. It was Kumaratunga's parents playing the politics of ethnicity that many Sri Lankans blame for Tamil disenfranchisement and, ultimately, civil war. She is constitutionally bound to step down as president in 2005 but has pledged to abolish the presidency should the PA win power on April 2. That would allow her to assume the prime ministry, with no term limits.

Kumaratunga has eschewed attempts at a bipartisan government of national unity with Wickremesinghe and instead has joined forces with the Sinhalese Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front, which oppose the peace process with the Tamil Tigers.

In the meantime war looms again and crucial foreign investment — and as much as $5 billion in foreign aid — waits in the wings, unwilling and unable to be injected into a Sri Lanka that seems hooked on turmoil.

Perhaps that's another obsession of this tragic land.