Tamil group achieves strong victory in Sri Lanka’s regional council elections

July 25, 2011|Associated Press

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka - A proxy to Sri Lanka’s now-defunct separatist Tamil Tiger rebels dominated 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 won 20 local councils out of the 25 it contested in the ethnic Tamil-majority north and east, the Elections Department said. 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 two rivals both seeing it as a confidence vote.

The resounding victory consolidates the Tamil National Alliance’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 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 tactics that killed thousands of Tamil civilians near the end of the civil war, which ended in May 2009. It also could have allowed Rajapaksa to offer a less generous power-sharing deal, which his Tamil allies would probably have accepted.

Rajapaksa has rejected a demand by the Tamil National Alliance to allow Tamil control over local police and land.