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Sri Lanka's post-war local elections
Voting in the empty Tigers' lair
Aug 13th 2009 | COLOMBO
From The Economist print edition
Elections reveal a country still divided
AFTER a resounding military victory over the Tamil Tigers, Mahinda
Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, must have hoped for triumph in
the first post-war polls in the scarred north. In the event, low
turnout and the unexpected success of a pro-Tiger party jolted the
government in the elections on August 8th to the Jaffna municipal
and Vavuniya urban councils.
Turnout was 22% in Jaffna (of an unrealistically inflated register)
and 52% in Vavuniya. The ruling coalition led by the United
People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) won 13 out of 23 seats on the
Jaffna council. But the pro-Tiger Tamil National Alliance (TNA)
came second with eight. The UPFA was led by a government
minister, Douglas Devananda, whose campaign was well financed.
In Vavuniya, where nearly 300,000 people displaced by the war
still languish in government-run camps, the UPFA won just two of
11 seats. The TNA secured five, and will be able to run the council
in coalition with the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, which won one
seat.
This is not the outcome the government foresaw when it rejected calls to postpone elections to allow the
north time for physical and emotional recovery. The TNA used to be a proxy for the Tigers and took orders
from its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was killed by the army in May. The party was widely thought
defunct after the Tigers’ rout. Some see its strong performance as a sign of growing anger among
northern Tamils at the government’s failure to normalise their lives after 30 years of conflict. Initial
promises of a political package that would resolve longstanding grievances have fallen by the wayside,
having been pushed aside until after a presidential election in 2010.
Somapala Gunadheera, a retired civil servant, said the elections show that the annihilation of the Tigers
has not achieved the government’s main aim, the building of a united Sri Lanka. Indeed, in Jaffna, TNA
leaflets claimed that to vote for the ruling coalition would be to subject the peninsula to rule by Sri Lanka’s
mainly-Buddhist Sinhala majority.
But, as if to demonstrate the extent of Sri Lanka’s political and ethnic polarisation, Mr Rajapaksa’s
coalition won a massive victory in a provincial council poll held on the same day in Uva in the south-east.
The mainly Sinhala province also has a large population of Indian-origin Tamils working in plantations. In
that council, the UPFA won more than two-thirds of the seats, with 72% percent of the vote.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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