SRI LANKA: The president of Sri Lanka tightened her grip on power yesterday in parliamentary elections which also saw a rebel-backed Tamil political party emerge as a third force.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga's United People's Freedom Alliance, a coalition between her party and a smaller left-wing group, won 105 seats, eight short of a parliamentary majority. She will need more coalition partners to form a government.
The election brings an end to three years of forced cohabitation between the president and the prime minister, Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe, the leader of the opposition United National Party whose seats fell from 109 to 82. His privatisation programme and negotiations with Tamil guerrillas have inflamed nationalist opinion.
Although there were allegations of vote-rigging, especially in the war-torn north and east of the country, the elections were uneventful. During the last election, in 2001, 25 people were killed on election day.
Analysts said the president's choice of political ally could end stalled peace talks with the Tamil Tigers, rebels who launched a war for independence in 1983, claiming they were being discriminated against by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority.
For the first time the rebels openly backed a political party, the Tamil National Alliance, which gained 22 seats in the 225-seat parliament. Turnout was high, with officials saying that about 75 per cent of the country's 12.8 million electorate voted.
One of Ms Kumaratunga's potential partners is a party representing the Buddhist clergy, who contested elections for the first time. They captured nine seats after tapping into a feeling that there is too much foreign influence over Sri Lankan affairs and that Tamil Tigers are being indulged.
"The Buddhist monks would be bad news for the peace process," said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, the director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. "But it is unlikely that the other parties more inclined to the process, like the Tamil National Alliance or the smaller Muslim party, would join hands with the president."
Another potential hurdle is the president's most likely choice of prime minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, an ethnic minority Tamil whose hardline stance against any compromise with the rebels led to the collapse of peace talks in 2001. Ms Kumaratunga grabbed control of three key ministries in November and put troops on the streets after claiming that Mr Wickremesinghe had conceded too much to the rebels. The 20 years of civil war saw 65,000 lives lost before a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire halted the violence in 2002.