Rajapakse’s perilous victory

Nov 18th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Sri Lanka’s prime minister, Mahinda Rajapakse, has emerged as the narrow winner of the island’s presidential elections. During the campaign, Mr Rajapakse said he would renegotiate the ceasefire the government signed in 2002 with Tamil separatists. So his victory has raised questions about the future of the peace process, aimed at reaching a lasting settlement to a 22-year civil war

ANY election in Sri Lanka this year was bound to be in part a referendum on the government’s handling of two catastrophes. One was a terrible natural disaster—last December’s Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 31,000 Sri Lankans, affected two-thirds of the island’s coastline and displaced nearly half a million people. The second is the civil war between the government, dominated by the island’s majority Sinhalese population, who are mainly Buddhist, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Since 1983, the Tigers have been fighting for an independent homeland in the north and east of the island for the largely Hindu, Tamil minority, who make up about a fifth of the 20m population. The conflict has claimed around 65,000 lives. A fragile truce, watched by Norwegian-led monitors, has largely held since April 2002. But progress towards a lasting settlement is in stalemate.

On neither issue did the election deliver a clear verdict: Mahinda Rajapakse, the prime minister, won just over half the votes. Like his predecessor, Chandrika Kumaratunga, he comes from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Yet the government’s handling of the tsunami-relief effort has been widely criticised. A ban on rebuilding close to the seashore has caused particular resentment. However, the main opposition candidate, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was himself prime minister until losing parliamentary elections in April last year, did not benefit as much as hoped from the popular anger. Although he had the support of the business community, he appears not to have regained the backing he lost last year from his core middle-class supporters in the capital, Colombo. Many ordinary Sri Lankans remain suspicious both of his liberal economic policies and of his policy towards the Tamil Tigers.

Mr Wickremesinghe was also hurt by the low turnout among Tamil voters in Tiger-controlled areas—virtually nobody voted in Jaffna, in the north, for example. There were three reasons for this. The Tigers’ explanation—that the elections were of no interest to Tamil voters—had some truth. But also, there were no polling stations within Tiger-held territory, and would-be voters faced long journeys over bad roads to government-controlled areas. Third, there was, in effect, a Tiger boycott, although the group said people were free to vote if they wanted. Such is the Tigers’ record of brutality and vengeance that even a hint of disapproval may carry a chilling threat.

Mr Wickremesinghe has called for a rerun of the voting in the north and east of the island. So has the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, an independent watchdog, which concluded that free and fair elections had been impossible because of intimidation in the north, and the lack of access to transport in Tiger-controlled parts of the east. By Sri Lankan standards, however, these were fairly peaceful elections, despite a number of grenade attacks on polling stations. The Election Commissioner has rejected calls for fresh voting, and it seems Mr Wickremesinghe has accepted the outcome.

He has, however, called it a severe setback for the peace process. Although the SLFP’s Mrs Kumaratunga is in many respects its architect, he has a point. She herself and Mr Rajapakse have both been critical of the ceasefire, signed by Mr Wickremesinghe’s government when he was prime minister. And in the past 18 months, it has often appeared on the point of breaking down. A rebellion last year by a faction of the Tigers against the rule of its dictatorial leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was blamed by the Tigers on the Sri Lankan army, and has led to tit-for-tat killing ever since. This year, the two sides have squabbled bitterly over establishing a mechanism for distributing tsunami-relief funds in Tiger-controlled areas. And in August this year, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, an ethnic Tamil reviled by the Tigers as a traitor, was assassinated.

During the election campaign, Mr Rajapakse forged an alliance with two parties advocating a much tougher line towards the Tigers: a Buddhist group led by monks, and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a party that mixes Marxism with Sinhalese chauvinism. In order to bring them on board, the new president promised to renegotiate the ceasefire.

Since the Tigers are unlikely to accept this, and since, despite everything, few on either side have much of an appetite for a return to war, this seems an empty threat. However, at the very least, the election result seems likely to complicate any return to serious peace talks. In their absence, the present state of affairs—neither peace nor war—can continue for a while, as people struggle to rebuild their lives after the tsunami. The longer it lasts, however, the less it looks like peace.

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